https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/17/new-york-big-oil-fueling-climate-disasters
https://stallman.org/glossary.html#global%20heating
New York State prosecutors propose to charge big oil companies with reckless endangerment for knowingly taking a big risk of fueling devastating hurricanes, rains and fires. I wonder what the penalty would be if they are convicted. What sort of penalty could be imposed that would help end global heating?
New York officials call for big oil to be prosecuted for fueling climate disasters
Oil majors’ conduct can constitute reckless endangerment due to fossil fuels’ effect on global heating, advocates claimDharna Noor (The Guardian)
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NEW STORY // Pacific Northwest's Largest Highway Project Ever Is in Deep Denial
via @urbanistorg // 🔗 https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/10/22/pacific-northwests-largest-highway-project-ever-is-in-deep-denial/?feed_id=4394&_unique_id=6717b0640af4b
Pacific Northwest’s Largest Highway Project Ever Is in Deep Denial - The Urbanist
# Proponents of a $7.5 billion project to widen I-5 and replace the Columbia River bridge are ignoring induced demand, creating faulty traffic models that obscure its real environmental impact.Ryan Packer (The Urbanist)
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Not so long ago our uni decided to build a football stadium right next to the observatory (insane, I know!)... but it turns out the light pollution is only one of the many dangers. A few nights ago with no warning they set off a *huge* smoke bomb. We were observing with both telescopes at the time.
If you didn't just gasp in horror, let me tell you about smoke and optical surfaces, it's bad #Astrodon #Astronomy #optics #telescopes #observatory #yorkuniversity #smoke #observer #science
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trickle down economic
trickle down economi
trickle down econom
trickle down econo
trickle down econ
trickle down eco
trickle down ec
trickle down e
trickle down
trickle dow
trickle do
trickle d
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trickl
trick
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Cheap desalination without a power hookup, without even batteries, produces drinkable water.
A "shipping container" sized unit, again with no power, no batteries....
"On average, it desalinated around 5,000 liters of water per day—enough for a community of roughly 2,000 people."
"Cheap as tap water"
This is good news. Very good news.
Desalination system adjusts itself to work with renewable power
Instead of needing constant power, new system adjusts to use whatever’s available.Jacek Krywko (Ars Technica)
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@bob
No, desalination is not about pollution or carbon use, though problems intersect.
You're right to insist on solving climate, on building the new energy, on ending carbon fuels as fast as humanly possible, immediately. On getting carbon fuel ended, directly.
Cheap desalination is just a good thing. We need a bunch of good things.
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I ordered steel brake lines for my CBR650R back in April, and only now did I have the energy to look into it. After calling The Moto Connection and not getting anyone, I called HEL Performance directly. They said that their business with The Moto Connection was terminated shortly after I'd placed my order, and said that I'd have to either go through The Moto Connection or #PayPal to resolve it. Thankfully, they did sell me the same part directly for the amount I'd originally paid, even though the part is more expensive now. :)
I filed a dispute with PayPal, but they denied it because it had been too long since the transaction. Then I called The Moto Connection and left a message about wanting to cancel my order. I'll keep calling throughout the week, but if they don't get back to me by Friday, I think my only recourse is a chargeback through my credit card. :(
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TIL that the song "Baby Shark" is considered a traditional song and is in the public domain
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/thursday-january-24-2019-steffi-didomenicantonio-johnny-only-and-more-1.4989911/the-long-complicated-history-of-baby-shark-and-the-artist-fighting-for-credit-1.4989936
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1g8z1v8/til_that_the_song_baby_shark_is_considered_a/
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TIL The US Army has an Esports team
https://recruiting.army.mil/army_esports/
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1g8r7mz/til_the_us_army_has_an_esports_team/
Army Esports Team
The official website for the Army Recruiting Command (USAREC)U.S. ARMY RECRUITING COMMAND
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Translation:
“To cut down on shoplifting, we do not allow more than one group of four people in store at one time.”
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I'm going to talk about viewer feedback when publishing your creative works, but within the context of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere). It's a concept I'd only heard about within the last month or so. The site indieweb.org provides some info, though it's taking me a while to digest it (and I haven't found any straightforward solutions yet). But it's a starting point:
That's for pushing your creations out; how does feedback come back in?
🧵⤵️
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🧵2/?
Corporate social networks make interaction between creator and viewers a total non-issue, but holy jeez, the costs... basically you're giving free labour to a private entity that makes money off your work. They will do everything they can to keep your work and viewers inside of their network. Sharing across platforms is made as much of a chore as possible, and you'll spread yourself thin to keep up with all of them.
And then one of them dies or changes and takes all your stuff with them
🧵3/?
So the POSSE idea is very big on maintaining ownership of your work, and having a reliable canonical home for it all, but the social networks are popular for a reason: creating in a vacuum isn't fun (nor often sustainable). Feedback—and sales, and professional connections, etc.—are really damned important.
So here I am thinking out loud about how that should be happening. I have a bunch of anecdotal experience to build off of, as I'm trying to make it work with my own website...
🧵3½/?
(And yes I recognize the irony that this very thread violates the POSSE concept, I said I'm working on it)
🧵4/?
So I've got my own personal site: https://bigraccoon.ca (and selection of a domain name is a whole other topic worth a thread or three).
My biggest focus there is the image gallery of all the stuff I've drawn. If I want to show someone my work, or someone wants to see it: *boom*, they get the URL. No hunting for my socials, or wading through random other pictures and retoots. They get the whole dang thing up front.
If someone wants to see your work, make it easy for them to do so!
bigraccoon.ca - Works by JS Staedtler
Drawings, articles, and social media linksbigraccoon.ca - Works by JS Staedtler
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🧵5/?
But that brings me to the part that sucks: there's no built-in feedback mechanism. I can barely tell that people are *looking* (or that they're mostly bots and web crawlers), thanks to visitor statistics.
Do just I want that dopamine hit from getting a response from viewers? Well shit, yeah, but not *just* that.
In 2023 I had stumbled upon a detailed blog post on the significance of English accents in the Xenoblade Chronicles games 1 and 2: https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/08/dialect-dissection-diverse-dialects-of.html?m=0
Dialect Dissection: The Diverse Dialects of Xenoblade Chronicles
Explore the linguistic world of the game Xenoblade Chronicles, with Welsh, Scottish, and Australian accents galore!www.acelinguist.com
🧵6/?
The article had been written nearly 3 years prior, and at this time I had been playing through the newly-released Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I found that I wanted to both thank the author for the unique trove of info they had shared, and to ask if they would be doing the same for the third¹ game.
Happily, they replied 2 days later to say they were still playing through it, and there was a chance they would cover it as well!
¹ Remember, Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn't count
🧵7/?
So right there, *I* wanted to reach out to a creator to thank them and maybe get further info, so I have to consider that others may want to do the same toward me.
Ultimately: if a viewer wants to give you (friendly, reasonable) feedback, make it easy for them to do so!
I thought a lot on what I should do for my site. I was using the Piwigo application to host an image gallery, and it had a comments feature built in. I had reservations: what if I only got negative comments from trolls?
🧵8/?
I enabled it anyway; I just had to know if I would receive any feedback. Aaaaaand... all I got was spam. Just auto-generated junk from bots. I tried some mitigation methods, but I think not enough real people were seeing my site that I had to worry about missing any genuine comments. 🙃
But I didn't want to drop the idea altogether. I switched from Piwigo to a general content management system called Pico, and by then I was thinking of how a better kind of comment system might work.
🧵9/?
This was my thought process on building a site feedback system:
* I could use a third-party service (eg. Disqus). Would be pretty simple, but I'd be relying on a corporation with private interests disparate from my own. And I didn't want people to have to register an account just to comment.
* There were ways to leverage Mastodon as a comments engine. It too requires registration, but nearly any Fediverse account could work. And it would unite my site with my active social space.
🧵10/?
* But... if a Fedi user commented on my Mastodon post, would they know their comment would be simultaneously published on some entirely different site? Some people don't care (ie. that's what "public" means vs. "unlisted"), but others do. I couldn't make it reasonably obvious that replies to my Masto posts (including individual identities) could be republished in a non-federated manner. Too nuanced and complicated.
* Self-hosting the comments system seemed the way to go.
Using AP for comments, I think it would be best to make your site an AP server rather than piggybacking via API on some Mastodon server. This would allow account names like "pageComments" and the like, and the different domain name would make it clear it's displayed somewhere beyond their instance.
You could also add boilerplate to the federated version of each post that makes it clear where replies are displayed.
Of course, at that point you've made self-hosted comments xP
🧵11/?
* A plugin was available for Pico CMS to handle viewer comments! I tweaked it to fit my own needs: users can arbitrarily identify themselves or remain anonymous; they can't spoof my identity ('cause I get a little "verified" icon); and I must approve submissions before they appear on the site. Plus, there's some sneaky spambot prevention.
* It's still missing things though: I recall how I commented on the language dialects site, then had to remember to check periodically for any reply.
🧵12/?
* If a user supplied their email address, they could get notifications of any replies to their comment.
* Another issue is how a user may delete their own comments. For truly anonymous comments, it would be impossible to request deletion... but if a commenter provided their email address, they could receive a link to use to automatically delete their comment.
* But there may be a vector for abuse there: anyone could provide any arbitrary email address alongside their comment.
🧵13/?
...And how does this all jive with POSSE, the thing that I led with at the beginning of this talk? POSSE is very much an outward distribution thing, but it leaves the question of how feedback is supposed to come back to the source. I'm doing all this work on my home platform, but most of the interaction will be on social networks where most people are going to see my work.
IndieWeb discusses this as "backfeed": https://indieweb.org/backfeed — and even that page has lots of questions.
🧵14/?
A lot hinges on either using the API of the social sites that you share to, or employing a third party service (like OG brid.gy).
I have another personal anecdote: when Cohost closed, I grabbed a few RSS feeds from users who wanted to go the indie blog route. One of them recently published stuff that I wanted to respond to... but there was no simple feedback mechanism there. Coincidentally I knew they had a Masto account, so I sent them a private message that way. Very out-of-channel.
🧵15/?
I'm actually surprised at the current state of independent interpublishing. RSS is mostly unchanged after decades, and apparently there's still no consensus on how readers can respond back. Is this just because corporate interests offer so many options, leaving the independent avenues effectively abandoned? Do we need to build tunnels between us and the people in all of those spaces, or do we need better tools for them to get to us on their own?
🧵16/16
I know I'm lucky that I can deal with all this as a side project, without having to eke out a living from it. I imagine the people most motivated to solve the issue have the least opportunity to do so.
I'll keep hacking at it while I can, if only because it just isn't sitting right with me yet. There really ought to be a dependable way for everyone to share and interact via means that they themselves own and control (without having to hack their own).
🧵17/16
Several people have brought up the idea of hosting my own ActivityPub server (eg. Mastodon) to facilitate reader comments. ActivityPub actually sounds like a great method to allow both outward publishing and inbound responses.
Heck, what if my site just *natively talked AP*? Any user on Fedi could follow my personal art/blog site, and respond back. It'd be like ultra-RSS.
And local site users could comment anonymously without an account, but those could just remain local to my site.
I know I've seen someone on Fedi in the last year-ish who had built a kind of "minimum viable" ActivityPub host. I think it was even been built using flat files (as opposed to using a database and server-side applications).
I'm going to hunt for options along those lines. I think I could hack together a PHP implementation for my own site, but yikes that sounds time-consuming, and I don't want to reinvent someone else's wheel
The source of this problem is that providing feedback channels means opening a truck-sized security hole in your website. For many websites it also means adding a layer of dynamism that is otherwise not needed to serve the content. This is why third-party comment systems are popular. There are self-hosted commenting options out there already, both AP-based and not, but for many people, providing an *actual* feedback channel is just not worth the hassle and risk.
(1/2)
My website had a home-made comment system on it. Because it was unique, it didn't get spam. But, because it was simple, it was also an even bigger security hole than usual. The amount of use it got didn't warrant keeping it.
I have since looked into many other solutions, but none have been both suitable and secure enough. The result is that I simply gave up on comments. I also don't mirror my stuff, so I get nothing. I used Disqus for a webcomic, but it too doesn't feel worth it.
Thank you for the fantastic thread! ✨
I have been wanting to start a simple blog again for a long time, and the topic of a "back channel" was the thing I did not find an easy solution for.
Keeping my fingers crossed you will find the perfect solution and share it with us! 🤞 🙂
https://nebula.tv/videos/citynerd-i-visited-the-epicenter-of-the-us-housing-crisis
CityNerd — I Visited the Epicenter of the U.S. Housing Crisis
Caltrain is now electrified, with an improved timetable — so I rode it up and down the San Francisco peninsula to check in on Silicon Valley, America's most expensive region for housing. And man do I have thoughts.Nebula
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It's kind of bittersweet to see the Peninsula cities where I lived for years making all those improvements after I moved back to SF, and to know there's not a chance in hell I could afford to live on the Peninsula now.
Also I'd love to see a City Nerd video featuring San Francisco itself! There are lots of us on Mastodon who could point out the interesting stuff to you.
I used to commute on Caltrain.
Lovely service, totally sold me on the idea that public transit with staff on the vehicle itself are amazing.
You get much the same experience if you take the ferry out to Alameda or Sausalito specially the hydrofoil one very nice.
(Voice to text is really a mess).
. @clover and I tried playing Kirby and the Amazing Mirror on GBA a while back, but the OEM Game Link Cable wasn't great at not coming unplugged and the third-party wireless equivalent we found didn't really work. :(
Today, we tried playing it on Nintendo Switch Online with two Switches set up for local multiplayer. It was so laggy! Not only was the input lag bad, but the network lag caused the game to lock up for a split second every several seconds. :/
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King County Metro ridership is sure taking a long time to recover from COVID 
Data source here, see the "Average Weekday Transit Boardings" link under the "Ridership" section
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@veethebee I’m sure there are some people who have switched to working from home instead of taking transit to work. But there are a still a lot of jobs which by their very nature cannot be done remotely.
People are less likely to take the bus to work (or anywhere else) if service on their route has been reduced or eliminated.
2024's most cancellable kink is AI Vore (people who get off on their content/works being fed into generative models)
This is not to be confused with Al Vore (people who get off on being eaten by Weird Al), which is still considered fine and normal.
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TIL that close to half of the US population is projected to have obesity by the year 2030 (article is from 2019)
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/half-of-us-to-have-obesity-by-2030/
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1g85ghe/til_that_close_to_half_of_the_us_population_is/
Close to half of U.S. population projected to have obesity by 2030
About half of the adult U.S. population will have obesity and about a quarter will have severe obesity by 2030.News
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TIL an artificial heart is only temporary, implanted to keep patients alive until they can receive a heart transplant
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230217-the-61-year-long-search-for-artificial-hearts
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1g851cs/til_an_artificial_heart_is_only_temporary/
Why science still hasn't cracked the artificial heart
Humanity's engineering achievements have been extraordinary, so why has building an artificial heart has proved to be more challenging than expected.Sian E Harding (BBC)
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The #BikeDisco folks are having a Time Travel Ride!
Nov 2nd/3rd they will be traveling through time!
Meet at 1 am at the Birthplace of #seattle Monument on Alki Beach and open the portal, ride/party till the second 1 am where we return to the monument and close the portal.
For those interested they will be meeting at 11 pm at Roxhill Park for a slightly spicy alley ride together to Alki.
I'm not affiliated, just a fan! :)
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“The (City of Sacramento Active Transportation) commission compared traffic fatalities to homicides. They found that, in all but two of the last 10 years, more fatal car crashes occurred within city limits than homicides."
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/transportation/article294133514.html
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Discord is a chat service that also scans your system for what it considers to be games, and doesn't give you any option to turn that scanning off.
It is not documentation. It is not a FAQ. It is not a wiki. It is not a forum.
It is a chat service.
Please stop using it as anything else.
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So these four things happened:
1. #Bitwarden, who always advertised being open source, introduced a non-free dependency into their client.
2. People start speculating whether this means that Bitwarden will become proprietary. https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/11611
3. After three days of speculation, founder and CTO Kyle Spearrin posts a comment saying that this is just a measure to isolate a part of the code from the GPL.
4. He then closes & locks the issue.
Looks totally not suspicious, yeah. 😬
Desktop version 2024.10.0 is no longer free software · Issue #11611 · bitwarden/clients
Pull request #10974 introduces the @bitwarden/sdk-internal dependency which is needed to build the desktop client. The dependency contains a licence statement which contains the following clause: Y...GitHub
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@meganL has a question about cycle builders who design for repairability:
Q6. I hate to give assigned reading, but in light of what this article talks about, for those who like quality steel bikes with an eye towards long life & repairability, who do you recommend? This goes for bikes, trikes, folders, e-cycles, etc.
Names I've heard but not ridden are Soma, Surly.
Related article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/101675/bike-manufacturers-are-making-bikes-less-repairable
Bike Manufacturers Are Making Bikes Less Repairable
Just like cars, tractors, computers, and seemingly every other product category, bikes—and especially e-bikes—are going all black box on us.Charlie Sorrel (iFixit)
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Cops tried to simulate insurgency and counter insurgency in US towns during the cold war. They'd send fake insurgents in to try to win over the locals and later they'd try to win them back to the government's side. The locals mostly chose insurgency. Even when the counter insurgents gave them hotdogs to try to win them over.
"Yet such civic action repeatedly failed to convince civilians to support the government. Instead, one town even hosted a potluck dinner dubbed “Guerrilla Appreciation Night.”"
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cop-cities-mock-cities/
Cop Cities Mock Cities | Los Angeles Review of Books
Stuart Schrader examines the historical origins and current ramifications of “cop city” complexes.Los Angeles Review of Books
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Any #iPhone or #iPad users found the photos app breaking the transparency of pngs you save? Do you know of other apps that will store transparent images without fucking them up?
How the fuck is this happening? Once I save an image, it shouldn’t change, right? I save it with a transparent background, I check the image in the photos app & it’s still transparent, so it has saved correctly… but then when I go back later to use the image, it’s flattened. WHY IS MY FUCKING DEVICE CHANGING MY FILES???
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"One estimate is that 360 million birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are killed on the roads in the US each year, while across Europe it may be 200 million birds and 30 million mammals."
Traffic may be as important as industrial farming for destroying wildlife - UK Health Alliance on Climate Change
UKHACC Chair, Richard Smith writes his thoughts on Traffication and the need for greater recognition of the impacts of traffic on nature, human and animal healthUK Health Alliance on Climate Change
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about 3 (pigeons) within the recent month, what I've seen by feet tha riding vehicles as guest, or driving them behind the wheel
manually to avoid collissions with dragonflies at daytime in summer or frogs at night, bees during heat, etc.
cabrio without a roof? use own feet to nordic/walk, jogging, ...than even needing fuel for energy to recharge batteries, changing tyres, having space in a trunk or using a cargobike instead, value that matters for the #environment
quixote
in reply to Richard Stallman • • •Big oil is a big part of too many giant pension portfolios, so you can't even beggar the blighters without damaging a lot of workers.
Basically, at least part of the answer is yearly fines that send money from Big Oil towards solar, wind, batteries, and grid modernization. How to balance making them pay with keeping workers whole, though? Even just theoretically? It has to be done, but it would take Biden-like sleight of hand.