I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

Side note, MSR dragonflys are the shit. I love everything about them, the literal drink bottle of petrol you have to carry around, the crazy aluminium foil windshield, the pumping, the way they spray fuel everywhere as you light them, then the tower of flame that almost burns down the building as it primes. Cheap to run, indestructible, perfection.

This comment is so depressing. The comic isn’t about politics, it’s just pointing out that human nature is irrational and we’re influenced by how a message is delivered as well as the raw facts. Yet you have to find a political bias in it. Would you feel more positively about the comic if you knew that the author was on “your side”? (Which I’m guessing is the left)

That sounds like a great outcome for the original company

Why would there be load on the clutch if the handbrake is on?

Conversely, I’m so opposed to the enshitification that I’ve carefully tailored my internet usage to places that aren’t shit and have no prospect of becoming shit, like Lemmy. Since I don’t even have the motivation of not supporting an evil company, I’m more addicted that ever.

Browsers themselves are easy to make.

What makes you say this? There are only 2 fully featured browsers, Chromium and Firefox. Anything else isn’t a viable alternative even if we compare stock to stock.

Which makes the argument that heat pumps don’t work in the cold completely wrong from a user perspective.

I disagree, a lot of white collar work is simply writing bullshit.

Sure. Australia has had mandatory helmets since 1990, and there’s been endless studies and debates since then, it’s still ongoing. I could find no clear evidence that helmet mandates decreased overall harm over any timeframe.

To quote a review I read from 2007

The following general principles should have widespread support: (1) Any legislation (including helmet laws) should not be enacted unless the benefits can be shown to exceed the costs. Ideally, the benefits should be greater than from equivalent ways of spending similar amounts of money on other road safety initiatives.

And their conclusion did not find a consensus other than

A majority of brain injuries >AIS2 are caused by bike/motor vehicle collisions. Traffic calming, enforcement of drink-driving laws, cyclist and driver education, or other measures to reduce the frequency and severity of bike/motor vehicle collisions, may therefore represent more cost-effective ways of reducing serious head injuries to cyclists than helmet laws. Indeed, countries with the lowest fatality rates per cycle-km also have the lowest helmet wearing rates

Given that, helmet mandates are a bad law that takes away our liberties for no proven benefit.

Why is a electric motor overheating dangerous? Surely any electric car is going to have a system to throttle itself if overheating is an issue, and it will need that with or without gears.

The fastest accelerating electric cars are single speed, presumably because it’s not worth changing gear when you only have 2 seconds.

I can see why it might be useful in specific product categories, but when it’s not helpful for price or performance or reliability, that’s going to continue to be niche. The real problem electric cars need to solve right now is cost and a gearbox isn’t helping with that.

Discouraging people from driving is a good thing, although with the amount that’s wasted on pointless expressways some governments haven’t noticed yet.

Anyway, there’s clear evidence from countries with mandatory helmet laws that it discourages people from cycling.

Danger, clearly. We shouldn’t have encouraged them off the ebikes.

I agree and always wear a helmet, but helmets should not be mandatory. It discourages people from cycling which means they drive instead and make the roads overall more dangerous.

Can I have some of whatever supplements you’ve been taking. 48km/h is really fast. If you have a fast bike and you’re trying hard some cyclists could hit that speed briefly on the flat before they become exhausted. With a tailwind or a downhill it’s easy, but then you don’t need the help from the motor.

But I agree that we need to focus on the real danger, which is cars.

Isn’t it best practice to park in 1st? So that if the handbrake fails the engine brake slows the car a bit rather than it being a free falling projectile.

Electric motors have so much torque even at low revs that a gearbox is unnecessary for most people. If you can get enough torque for a fast start in 5th, there’s no reason for the gearbox, you might as well save the extra complexity and keep the car permanently in 5th.

Combustion cars have gearboxes because they only work well at a narrow range of revs. Bicycles have more gears than cars because humans have an even narrower range of revs where they work best at.

So a property development company is developing a property. What’s the mystery?

I think it’s useful terminology, but only very generally and in hindsight. Web 1 is a pretty clear era in the 90s and early 2000s, characterized by simple static blogs and personal websites, and email. Everyone knew this would be big, but nobody figured out how, that was the dotcom bubble. Web 2 began with the rise of big tech companies like Google and Facebook in the late 2000s, it has been characterized by social media apps, centralized platforms hosting user created content, funded by targeted advertising and data mining. Web apps became possible and smartphones took over. Every product became a subscription service.

I think we’re at the start of web 3, but it’s hard to say what that is yet. The big tech companies are crumbling and there’s increasing unrest at the old system of web 2. Fed up users are turning to platforms like this. There’s a lot of demand for crypto nonsense like NFTs. AI is changing the way we do everything.

I hope that web 3 is the age of decentralization because that would be awesome, but it’s impossible to predict the future.

Linus is negligent and well intentioned