Yeah I really don’t know how they thought that was a good explanation for them to remove the “we won’t sell your data” stuff. Absolutely bonkers.

Yeah, that is a serious problem. Thankfully, my local transit agency still offers the ability to use a card instead of an app, but you have to request it online to be sent in the mail. It took a month to get mine. Really not ideal.

On your other points: Carbon bike frames can be repaired, so even though they aren’t recyclable, they can still last a long time, so they’re not the worst. Electronic shifting feels a bit gimmicky to me, but all the mount points for the shifter and derailleur are standard and they can probably be swapped out for a standard cable shifter in the future without changing other parts on the bike.

Oh, I’m definitely upset about ebikes with motors and batteries integrated in the frames, with no replacement parts available. Often you can’t even install used parts because the firmware needs to be flashed by a dealer for your specific bike.

I own an ebike now and I’ve built one in the past. The one I built had a powerful mid-drive motor and could easily have been reverted to a normal bike (I got hit by a car before I ever got to think about that) and the ebike I have now has a basic bafang hub motor with a bolt-on battery, all of which I could easily replace if they failed.

The motor controllers on both bikes are/were also able to be reflashed or replaced without going to a specific dealer.

There is no reason that companies could not design ebikes and their components to be repairable, replaceable, and reprogrammed by users except for profit, and it’s gross as hell.

You don’t need a crazy product like this, you just need a bolt-on bike computer mount, then.

This is e-waste. This could just be a decent bike computer and a light that you could slap on to any bike, but they had to go and make a thing that forces me to replace the handlebars that I picked to match my body and riding style? An expensive electronic thing that i can’t remove from my bike? No thanks.

That is correct. The public ones get blacklisted by youtube.

to put the “youtube often breaks it” into perspective. In the last 6 months, I’ve lost access to youtube for a total of 8 days, with the longest continuous downtime being 3 days. selfhosting it works fine, for the most part.

I self-host an invidious instance and combine that with sponsorblock. I only ever see the videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I explicitly search for something.

yt-dlp is a good tool for downloading youtube, and there are several GUI frontends built around that

They do that, too. They’re on Mastodon as well. They’re just doing POSSE. These social media platforms are basically just where they advertise their articles and sometimes get tips for new stories from readers. That’s outside of how they use them for investigating stories about those platforms.

He talks on his podcast all the time about being on Bluesky

This is the first I’m hearing about it. I don’t know why anyone would be excited about this.

There are, however, also those who simply defer to the powerful — that assume that “this much money can’t be wrong,” even if said money has been wrong repeatedly to the point that there’s an entire website about it. They are the people that look at the current crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver any truly meaningful innovation in years and coo like newborn babes. Look at the coverage of Sam Altman from the last year — you know, the guy who has spent years lying about what artificial intelligence can do — and tell me why every single thought he has must be uncritically cataloged, his every decision applauded, his every claim trumpeted as certain, his brittle company’s obvious problems apologized for and readers reassured of his obvious victory.

Nowhere is this more obvious right now than in The Guardian’s nonsensical decision to abandon Twitter, decrying how “X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse” mere weeks after printing, bereft of context, Elon Musk’s ridiculous lies about his plans for cybertaxis. There is little moral quality to leaving X if your outlet continues to act as a stenographer for its leader, and this in fact suggests a lack of any real interest in change or progress, just the paper tiger of norms and values that will only end up depriving people of good journalism.

src: https://www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-future/

When I was in my early 20’s and first on dating apps, ghosting was frustrating, but as I became more aware and empathetic, and learned that I am not entitled to the attention of others, that frustration became a lot less of an issue pretty quickly. This looks like it was developed by people who haven’t realized that and it feels pretty cringe. I doubt this will go anywhere.

It does for me. And it has for over a year. I have to reset the cache every day or it slows to an unusable crawl. The web client works fine, though

Edit: github issue: https://github.com/element-hq/element-android/issues/6617

Schildichat is the only client I can use on my phone that implements both spaces and threads and doesn’t have a memory leak.

I just started using super-productivity to help with this kind of thing

Isn’t LibreCAD GPLv2?

I searched both Cory Doctorow’s post and the linked 404media article in his post for “air purifier” and found nothing. What author are you referencing?

Tarsnap charges you for the compressed, deduplicated storage used, so if you’re mostly backing up documents and working files, the amount of storage used is way lower than the raw uncompressed storage. This includes deduplication at a block level.

If you use Backblaze B2 with Restic, you can get the same functionality at a much lower price, but requires more setup.