IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

Good for them, doesn’t change the fact I find driving at 20 mph very frustrating compared to 30 mph for that reason.

I think this policy will fail to be honest; while I’m not in Wales any more Oxford where I live now is a supposed ‘cycling city’ with most roads at 20 mph and honestly I hate being on the road there either in a car or on a bike; I get the bus in even though it’s often flaky. Driving you’re sat between second and third gear the whole time so you’re either revving too hard and wasting petrol or the car naturally speeds up so you’re spending a lot of attention on not getting fined rather than keeping it on the road, and when you’re cycling the cars that do keep to 20 mph linger beside you for what feels subjectively a lot longer when they overtake which isn’t fun either and the tiny bike lines make you feel vulnerable to traffic. I had a lot of near misses when I did it regularly and Oxford is a very small city, the idea of cycling somewhere like Cardiff would be terrifying to me.

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If someone is lobbying for climate change denial then they’re guilty of something morally akin to treason, but it’s not treason itself because instead of just betraying just their country they’re betraying their entire species.

Yeah even when I was chronically broke and a smoker I was usually able to scrimp enough together for a pouch of Amber Leaf. Rolling your own means you can roll skinnier ones too if necessary.

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A good flag for the subject of Zuckerberg then!

We’ve made enough questionable foreign policy decisions over the centuries, I think we should make him the live-in governor of the British Antarctic Territory. Or not, he’ll probably somehow start a culture war between the Emperor and Adélie penguins.

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The original '90s furby is unironically a fantastic platform for a hardware hacker, because they were so cheaply made the whole thing runs off a single motor and a clever arrangement of cams. It would be reasonably straightfoward to pull out the ‘guts’, fit a motor controller and a Raspberry Pi Zero, put a camera where the IR and light sensors go, put a better mic and camera in, then hook the bastard up to GPT-4! There’s a cam position sensor too so you could modulate its speech cycle by counting the syllables in the GPT output as well as move its ears, eyes etc.

Other improvements could include high brightness RGB LEDs behind the eyes to indicate mood, an ultrasonic sensor with a second motor so the furby can turn around and make eye contact with people entering a room, and using one of the pi’s GPIO pins and a suitable piece of wire as an FM radio transmitter (use a low pass filter because doing that shits out harmonics quite badly) to hijack nearby radios.

An easily disproved one too, as the sister ships weren’t actually identical. Also the recent scan on the ship revealed the hull number 401 on one of the propellers putting another nail in the coffin of the idea the ship is actually the Olympic.

Cool, cheers! I’ll give it a go later sounds well worth the £2.

Yeah as much as I wish I could use some mobile form of Gecko as I’m still hanging on to Firefox in the face of the Google juggernaut there literally is no point in alternate browsers on iOS so you may as well pick the most native-feeling. I’ve been using AdGuard but this is the first I’m hearing of Vinegar, is it reliable?

I’m a professional, I went to uni where I learned some theoretical computer science as well as to code properly (although I’d been a casual hobbyist a year or so before) and have been in the industry ever since as a software engineer. I’ve always been primarily focussed on the backend but I could keep a postgres database ticking over if push came to shove and I’m currently cross-training to do some operations stuff too as I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a team with enough staff let alone a reasonable bus factor in my life. I’m definitely a startups person too at least for the time being, job security’s been pretty dreadful lately but I’ll take insecure but interesting work over safe and boring for now while I don’t have a house or kids to worry about.

At the moment I’m working for a medtech company using AI to speed up cancer diagnoses, really cool stuff that I’d probably have palmed off as the press sensationalising things if I hadn’t seen it work first hand.

We all have to draw our own lines in the sand on issues like this and I respect yours, I’d argue on the other hand the open-source nature of Lemmy means the author’s politics shouldn’t make a difference to groups like BeeHaw which use it. A good example of this would be TOR which was developed by American naval intelligence of all organisations yet many drug dealers routinely gamble their freedom that it will protect them.

Also I’d argue as loathesome as your average tankie is (I really can’t stand them at all) they’re still a step up from the literal nonces that inhabited early Reddit.

They probably could use more manpower to some extent but everyone here’s forgetting the mythical man-month; just chucking more bodies at a software project doesn’t necessarily speed it up any more than nine women can have a baby in one month.

That said I’m happy to do the odd bit here and there if there’s any call for it, either for lemmy itself or BeeHaw.

Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.

If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.