Also in Europe. I’ve heard about Grenoble (France), but there seem to be more now. Check out adfreecities.org.uk too. Most don’t seem to ban 100% of all ads, but close enough for me.

Maybe people who are used to this will become less tolerant of online ads, too.

I found it interesting that key travel time was considered, often it isn’t.

A similarly interesting article: Measure and reduce keyboard input latency with QMK on the Kinesis Advantage (2021) (Basically, took an existing keyboard and replaced the controller.)

If I’m clearly not understanding a key concept in biology

Yes, you’re misunderstanding the concept of death. Death is bad only from the individual’s point of view. It’s how life renews itself, making room for change. Nothing wrong with trying to reduce suffering, of course, but immortality clearly falls into the “nefarious reasons” category. It’s what happens when you focus too much on the individual’s perspective of life. If you want to study biology you have to consider death from a different angle.

“In case of an emergency, Exits are here, here, here, here, and here.”

– Walt Disney’s original Aladdin

“I’m not going to ride on a magic carpet! I’m afraid of grounds!”<br> “You mean heights, and stop being silly!”<br> “I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you!”

– Terry Pratchet, “Sourcery”

If you are here to learn something about Javascript, read the MDN article about the “Number” type instead.

The same story told from an environmentalist perspective: https://edconway.substack.com/p/no-kerosene-did-not-save-the-sperm

So what really saved the whales? Well, the answer is first, the whaling bans. […] In the face of this enforced shortage of whale oil, lubricant manufacturers and other users of whale oil had to try to find a satisfactory substitute.

Lo and behold, in the 1970s there was a sharp rise in research and development spending on esters. Chemists worked out how to create synthetic alternatives.

(The posted article has this too, and expands on the business side of it.)

As for “why is it hard to self-host”, it is only NAT traversal.

TURN, STUN, ICE, etc. are not fun to debug. Not sure if anyone still bothers fiddling with TOS/DSCP on their router. You can build a voice server that just exposes a TCP port, but… latency. And corporate firewalls love to randomly block some UDP port ranges but not others.

Yes, I like it. It makes only one (big) mistake: a horizontal table-of-contents. Nobody does that. You can put it on the left, or above the text, but… not like that.

You don’t focus blindly on your feet and invent stuff. You watch someone else do things and you copy what they do. You are standing on a very large pyramid of hobbits. The big brain is mainly to remember what everyone else has figured out years ago.

You can have many shower thoughts, and most of them will not work out. But don’t stop having them, because eventually you will stumble upon something of value. Then you get to tell your grand-children, and they will listen and copy what you did.

Try Libera Chat if you like the free/libre software community. About 30’000 users connected right now.

If you’re running the latest Debian (or even the stable one), IRC is still a good place to go for support. And there is an electronics channel on Libera that was still big last time I checked. If you don’t know which IC to use for your project someone there will probably know. I would stick around there if I were still into electronics.

Also, IRC is just more relaxing by being text-only. No flashy avatars, pictures, reactions, and for most parts no gamification.

I may have created two accounts when I got here, and I will be baited into replying to snarky comments only from this one! I also like the low-key split-personality feeling, and experimenting with a different set of subscriptions. Anyway, so I’m no content-generation machine. But I’m doing my part to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!

I’ve read it too, and this is a perfect summary. (The book is relatively long and the topic is complex, not an easy read.)

This is great fun, but maybe solar panels are too cheap for this now?

Concerning fun, check out the solar sinter project! (vimeo.com, 6min)

About marriage between cousins: Historically, the christian church has forbidden marriage between even very distant cousins. Intended or not, this has dismantled the power of large family clans.

Over centuries this has a clear effect on psychology: more individualism, a higher willingness to trust strangers (cooperation between non-relatives) and more. Joseph Henrich (anthropologist) has a whole book about this called The WEIRDest People in the World .

I’m using ublock origin to disable JS globally and re-enable it per-site from the popup. I didn’t realize it could do that until I read the manual.

Some sites break when you disable javascript, but guardian.com instead starts working.

Reminds me of the text-based role-playing heavy MUDs, where the players did their “pose” (a short paragraph describing what their character does) and you wait for 5 minutes while the other player(s) describe their move in return, often also adding a bit environment description. Some of the better player’s logfiles were basically prose you could almost publish. (Example: SpheresMUX)

Also, you got to like the name they came up with: it’s a MUSH (multi-user shared hullicination).

Uh, so far scientific predictions about the climate from even 20 years ago have been quite accurate, or a bit too optimistic. The scary predictions are for 50 to 200 years in the future and later. It’s just a very slow process (in human terms). Put CO2 into the atmosphere for a decade, not much happens. Put more CO2 in for another decade, it gets slightly warmer. Stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere, and the CO2 stays there for many hundred years, and the effects keep getting worse.

By the time you notice the bad stuff happening around you (desertification of farmland, floods, sea-level rise in coastal settlements), it’s too late to realize that you don’t have a technology to put the CO2 out again, and even if you did it would take another decade until you notice the effect.

Since you are already on Mastodon, I would start by checking out the instances of people you have interacted with. Many topic-instances are still pretty general-purpose. Decentralize yourself! Join two or three instances. Subscribe to different topics on each. See what sticks.

On a small instance, the local feed is much more important. Local users have a larger influence on what you discover. So, check the local feed first. It may be a bit boring but should be free of spam. Check the external feed. It should not be too tacky, and have a CW where you want one. Check the moderation policy. If you want to commit to only one small instance, find out who pays the hosting and maybe donate.