I kind of hope it doesn’t reopen soon. I know its making life pretty hard for some countries, but so far it’s the only thing forcing a slight reduction in fossil fuel usage.

Otherwise I fear nothing will stop us from burning it all into the environment. It’s so important to have cheap fossil fuel to burn, that we bomb, invade other countries, and kill for it. That shit is like cocain.

I don’t think AI will take a lot of jobs. It could happen but I don’t see it.

Even before AI these things could happen. I just watched a documentary on lighthouse keepers and the disappearance of their job because of automation and LED lights. When I was a kid, well before “AI”, they were telling us that computers amd automation would take most of the jobs.

Translators would be a thing of the past! Yet, machine translation still sucks. Sure it reduced the amount of translators needed, but they’re still needed. AI translation can’t even make the difference between a common and proper noun. It’s making slop.

I work in tech support and customer support. I’ve been told many times that automation and AI would take my job, but so far computers are bad at that. I have scripted myself out of certain tasks at work much before any AI could do it, and it just freed me and my coworkers for other tasks. A big part of my work is understanding what people want and what went wrong, and AI is absolutely not there yet.

Although I can see the effect it has on the industry and job market as enthusiasts are trying to push it everywhere they can, I doubt it will replace lots of work. AI can be a good assistant and help on some tasks, but it still can’t read a piece of paper properly. It’s not even good for data entry.

All those “AI will replace a lot of jobs” claims are exaggerating. Sure, it will happen for a few people in small numbers, slowly. But not like what tech bros are predicting.

Yeah, there’s no perfect solution. Bicycles also produce microplastics and particles from tire shedding and brake pads. It’s much much less than a car, but it still happens.

There is also a particular swampy area in a park with a paved bike path, where every year, there’s a few dozen frogs flattened on the path. It’s not common to other places where I ride, mostly just there. I was wondering if the heat of the asphalt might lure the frogs to bask on the path, and to their doom. However I’ve also ridden in the night and frogs sometimes just jump in your wheels. Maybe there’s also just a bigger concentration there.

I’ve also seen terrapins lay their eggs in gravel paths. And I’ve never seen one dead, yet. In their case, asphalt might help a bit because they can’t lay in the middle of the path, only the sides.

Plus, my point of view is also guided by the climate in my region, because asphalt can be plowed easily, and it also allows a cycling network to be open year round instead of just 6 months a year here. We can’t cycle in mud or a metre of snow. Other regions might not have such extremes and can get away with well maintained dirt or gravel paths.

And I’ve never really ridden on wood chips for a long distance, only on decorative chips with soft beds. I’d be curious to try in some experimental spots. I would hope it’s easier to roll on than grass. This also reminds me about some trails where they have multiple short wooden bridges to let nature cross in other ways.

I don’t know. It depends.

Asphalt spread out on very large surfaces sure sucks. Like parking lots and street parking. It contributes to flooding and heat island effect. It’s also bad for runoff polluted water, filled with microplastics from tire shedding. Too much asphalt everywhere is bad.

But! Some major bike green ways and rail trails here have started to put asphalt on their bike paths, and they have good reasons for doing so. Those rail trails were covered with fine crushed rocks before, and the runoff was also pretty bad for the environment. The maintenance was higher because the gravel needs to be replaced. And the path couldn’t be used for some weeks in the spring and fall because of thaw cycles. This article in French has a mayor saying they had this studied and it was better for the environment to have their part in asphalt. Plus, bikes are not heavy enough to damage the asphalt so it also needs much less maintenance for cycle routes.

I’m all for having asphalt on major bike roads and rail trails. But not on rural roads mainly for cars, and not to cover parking lots.

EDIT: Asphalt for bicycles, not cars. Like this.

It does vary depending on the manufacturer. Some are pretty quiet. I can’t hear any Tesla “honking at low volume” when they pass by, but they probably just don’t comply with new regulations. I find Hyundai to be the worst.

I live in a tower at the intersection of a busy street with traffic lights and I can hear the Hyundai EVs while sitting in my couch when the windows are open. In fact, they’re open right now and I can clearly hear a Chevrolet EV decelerating before coming to a stop at the traffic light while I’m typing this. Toyota EVs are also pretty loud. Granted I can also hear loud and modified fossil fuel engines but most of them usually blend into a white noise.

When walking around the smaller streets of my neighbourhood, cars are going pretty slow and the noises of Hyundai, Chevrolet and Toyota EVs definitely stand out. It’s weird because I’m a pedestrian. I don’t have a car. I hate them. And I want them to be secure for pedestrians. But some of those warning systems are so loud and annoying that I wish they would just be quiet.

I left reddit because I was apparently too anti car for /r/fuckcars. If this community becomes like the reddit diluted sub where people were making car apology and justifying their use, I’m going to be very disappointed.

I would really love that all cars in existence be crushed into a heap. It’s a fantasy and I know it won’t happen. I can compromise. But if most could be crushed in a heap, that would be very great too.

Smaller cars will continue to kill a few billion animals yearly. They will also continue to kill around a million of humans every year, or about one human every 30 seconds.

The area covered by parking lots is mostly impervious and contributes to flooding as well as heat islands. Cars and parking lots make cities hotter and are worsening climate change. They also contribute to noise pollution. And no, electric cars are not better for noise because at highway speed they are as noisy as fossil fuel cars, and at low speed, their pedestrian warning system is also louder than fossil fuel cars.

I can be nuanced and understand that some people will always need a car, but most people in the world live in a town, a suburb, or a city, and the existence of the vast majority of those cars cannot be justified, whatever their size. Of course smaller cars are desirable. Electric cars are desirable A mix of electric and smaller would be better than status quo. But fewer cars is even more desirable.

I was expecting the price of VPS and dedicated servers to go up but unless the IP shortage suddenly got much worse, I was not expecting these to go up too. My dedicated server still costs the same as last month, as opposed to a VPS, but I paid $16 more last month just for the same amount IPs I had before.

OVH? I have a dedicated server with them that has been running for nearly a decade. I also worked at their old office in Montreal as a customer advocate and visited the datacenter in Beauharnois. It was impressive and it must have grown quite a lot in a decade. Even back then they were trying to get the government to host its data with them.

Unfortunately they also raised their prices recently.

SSH in first place. No explanation needed.

But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.

I dread the day where I will be forced to “progress” to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.

There’s one thing that would certainly stop me from cycling in Australia, and it’s the helmet laws. We don’t have those here and I’m used to decide if I wear a helmet or not. Sometimes I like to live dangerously and have the wind in my hair at 20 km/h.

If my country had laws like this I would not cycle.

In the end though, it’s not making much of a difference aside from nostalgic value. There’s a minimal maintenance to it too. My parents still have the cassettes and the Betamax VCR stored somewhere. Physical photo albums also have to be stored. We don’t want to get rid of them but they’re kind of useless now. It’s around 200 GBs of files to be kept.

It’s also a bit cringe to see yourself being a stupid kid on video. Or read what you wrote in a journal on a floppy disk in the mid 90ies. I went to watch a few minutes because we mentioned it but it’s not something any of my family members return to regularly. It’s just stuff that now sits there. Nice and nostalgic to watch every few years or decade, but not healthy to keep returning to it.

Lots. I was born in the 80ies and my parents took lots of pictures when I was a baby. My sister was born a few years later, and there was also lots of pictures. We have albums full of pictures that I ended up scanning and digitizing. My father was also somewhat of an enthusiast for video cameras and he bought a BetaCam by the end of the 80ies, and a few other ones until the beginning of the 2000s.

So I have videos of my childhood from my first years of school to being a teenager. He was filming at Christmas, at birthdays, and sometimes at random events. He often just set the camera in a corner and filmed for the length of a Beta tape.

I digitized all of the Beta cassettes into mp4s during the pandemic and now I offer USB drives to people of the family that don’t have any videos of when my grandparents were alive.

Plus, my maternal grandfather also filmed some gatherings and events. So I also have digitized videos of them in the 60ies and 70ies.

Ironically most of us never liked to be taken in photos, or filmed, but I’m kind of glad we still have them. If I compare to my friends, apparently, I have a “treasure trove” of videos and pictures.

They’re no longer gooey here. They were gooey in the 90ies and early 2000 but at some point the recipe changed now they’re grainy and dry.

This is nice but not an option for me. This won’t pass through any chicane of the cycling network and I wouldn’t be able to leave my town. I also wouldn’t have any space to store it when not in use. Plus, I’m usually doing multi day trips that amounts to more km than what an electric bike can do on a single charge in a day, and pulling a camper behind would reduce even more the possible range.

I fantasized a lot about campers like this, thinking I could leave it at my parent’s and tour my native region. But again, chicanes… chicanes everywhere.

I would have to use the roads, with cars, and be very limited in range compared to what I’m used to. So unfortunately, as nice as this seems, it’s not really an option.

EDIT: Here’s an example of a very tight chicane on a remote rail trail.

You can physically live in a car but depending where you live, this might me illegal or difficult to do legally. You don’t have an address and governments usually don’t like that. And it’s also not always possible/legal to park a car somewhere a sleep in it.

Still, motonormativity makes living in a car much easier than just roaming around with a tent. There are exceptions here called “relay villages” where people can legally park and sleep in their car or RV for the night. I love touring on my bike and some rail trails are going through those villages. And obviously you can sleep in a car there, but not pitch a tent for the night if you just have a bike. I’m so jealous of the privilege of people with RVs and cars sometimes.

The character they brought is named Londo and is from an excellent sci-fi series from the 90ies called Babylon 5.

Is it bad that in all this I see the slim possibility of a world weaning itself from oil? Maybe more and more nations will be pushed to a rapid investment in renewables and gain energetic independence from oil producing countries. It might even have a positive impact on the environment.

Most of the world will probably continue to be dependent on oil, and just pay the price in blood, but one can dream.

Also, it’s an interesting time of you like geopolitics, changing alliances and failing empires.

I’ve always been cynical so times are not especially bad. I was kind of expecting this. Times are just bad because it’s hurting the wallets of the middle class at the pump, but I’ve always been poor and frugal so to me this is just normal. I have no car with an insatiable appetite for gasoline that comes from the suffering of other humans or animals. I have no house to lose. No land. No condo. No retirement plan. Let it crash and burn.

Maybe a glimpse of hope, renew and progress can grow out of the ashes. But probably not. I’ll just be there to watch along, satisfy my curiosity, and feel smug if I’m right.

The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too.

And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine.

It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop.

I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.

I know this is a meme community but I was curious about this. It seems some birds do get burned, but not blasted. It varies a lot depending on the installation and it can also be mitigated. Also, the amount of birds dying from this is significantly lower than just the amount of birds hitting windows. For the benefit of other curious people, I’ll try to condense the relevant information from wikipedia and the sources.

In more general terms, a 2016 preliminary study assessed that the annual bird mortality per MW of installed power was similar between U.S. concentrated solar power plants and wind power plants, and higher for fossil fuel power plants.

How it was calculated for fossil fuel

Sovacool estimated avian mortality from fossil fuel power plants across the United States as a result of collision with infrastructure, electrocutions, pollution and contamination, and climate change. In addition, Sovacool estimated climate change-induced avian mortality (in terms of habitat loss and changes in migration) predicted to be the result of fossil fuel power plant operations.

A preliminary assessment of avian mortality at utility-scale solar energy facilities in the United States: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148116301422?via=ihub

Review of Avian Mortality Studies at Concentrating Solar Power Plants: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1364837