I love Boost. Being able to use it both for Lemmy and Reddit has been a big help in keeping me using Lemmy.
I’m usually a FOSS purist, but after trying a lot of different Reddit/Lemmy apps, it really is hands down my favourite. So much so that I’ve happily paid for it.
Technically not really e-waste, as it’s just the same cycling computer you were buying anyway, and presumably would have a similar lifespan.
The waste part is the non-electronic bits, i.e. when the computer needs replacing you need to bin off the attached bits of aluminium and rubber that make up the rest of the handlebars.
There is (currently) only one living version of the Mastodon code base. It could be forked in the future, but it hasn’t been.
There are other ActivityPub microblogging platforms (Friendica, Mbin, Pleroma, Threads if you count it) which users could also be running, and from the point of view of users it shouldn’t be obvious what any other given user you interact with is using, but that’s not got anything to do with Mastodon pull requests.
A plastic nob is cheaper than a touchscreen, yes. But if you’ve already got a touchscreen as part of the design anyway (for things like satnav or car maintenance data), it’s cheaper to not include any other buttons or inputs and to bundle them all up into one interface.
Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.
As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.
And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.
To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).
I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).
We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.
Well sure, but there’s no suggestion of converting “all cars” to EVs “immediately”. Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it’d still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.
A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn’t sound desperately unrealistic.
They started selling them in the UK this year, and I’ve already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).
Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They’re sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they’re reviewing well with the auto press. It’s not like there’s any magic to it. China’s a cheap manufacturing country, and they’re undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.
Slaps ocean; this baby practically desalinates itself!
I’m not sure I really understand the point of this. Even if you hate Mozilla, the Gecko engine is excellent and it would make far more sense to fork it than to start a new one from scratch.
Building and maintaining a browser engine is hard. FOSS means that everyone is of course free to pursue the projects that interest them, but this doesn’t seem like a great use of effort to me.