Ok, I know this is crazy, but I’ve had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn’t breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as “no thanks”, and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

Although I don’t believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It’s probably one of the few things I’ve remembered verbatim for so long, and it’s completely useless :D

For me, the problem is not all screen time, but big tech proprietary software companies. I don’t support regulating screen time, but I do think governments should regulate big tech companies harder, while investing in free software - that genuinely serves user interests and has no incentive to be addicting or harmful - as an alternative.

Big tech explicitly tries to keep people addicted, whatever the consequences. They don’t support user agency. Even if you want to make Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc. less addicting, you are limited to a “show less like this” button that probably does nothing. On iOS and Android, companies abuse the notification categories, and yet there’s no way to filter out keywords or work around this, despite the widespread abuse of user attention.

If everyone had full control over their own (or their child’s) devices and algorithms, I doubt there would be such a backlash against technology as a whole. But, despite all the bad the techbros are doing, technology can be so empowering when it serves the users. To regulate screen time seems to me to treat the amazing parts of technology the same as the worst parts.

I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.

That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.

Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.

I really like the fade from silver to black. It’s like both of their colour schemes in one depending on which angle you’re looking at it.

There are a few such foundations!

• NLnet (among other things) donates to a lot of fediverse and similar projects, including multiple donations for lemmy.
• Software in the Public Interest acts as a fiscal host for its 45 member projects. You can make a general donation, or a donation to specific projects.
• The Software Freedom Conservancy, among other things, acts as a fiscal host for its projects. You can donate to individual projects, or make a general donation to conservancy and they will use it in whatever way best advances software freedom.
• Likewise, the FSF has a “Working together for free software fund” which has a few projects listed. I can’t see a way to donate to the fund as a whole, but if you don’t mind some (most?) of the money going to things that aren’t directly developing software, you could make a standard donation to the FSF.

Nice to see that even in the virtual world, anti-immigration protesters are not “patriotic” enough to know what the flag looks like.

Personally, I’m pretty sentimental about my bike (also a beater, but single speed) and want to keep it going almost no matter what. I think only the frame has remained the same throughout, and at times, I’ve definitely spent more than the bike is worth to fix it up.

I know that with cars, there’s a definite cliff edge where it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain compared to a new one. But I feel like that’s not really true with bikes, perhaps because there are just fewer parts to replace, and it’s less invasive to strip out any given part?

I suppose it depends on a few things. Do you have any sentimental attachments to it, and is there anything you would change about the bike if you were buying a new one? Do you think you can get a better one for $200?

Thank you. Of those I think JOSM is the most appealing, if it can directly show the results on the map. I’ll give it a go later just out of interest.

I also gave osmium tags-filter a go and it’s meeting my needs for now.

I spent quite a while browsing your brewery map earlier, very cool!

It is probably overkill for me at the moment, but it’s good to know if my needs ever scale up dramatically. Thank you!

Thanks for the tip! Your assumptions are correct.

Someone else suggested osmium tags-filter on the downloaded PBF files (which are ~150 MB), and that’s working well at the moment. I’ll keep this in mind as I’m presuming that importing into a database will be more efficient in case I ever increase the size of the map I’m working with.

Thank you for the tips! I should have been more precise in my question. The downloaded maps are ~150MB, in PBF format (although I would have been happy to use any other standard format if needed). I went with osmium tags-filter in the end, and it seems to be working well.

Thank you, this is perfect! Lightweight and easy to set up.

I can fake it by sending you a message if anything good comes up :)

It’s really hard. Here’s my best shot:

A discussion platform for communities.

It is not OP claiming that. It is the description from the link preview.

It’s an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There’s more info on the differences here.

I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.

You can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.

It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.