If anything they’re the opposite. The petitions themselves are not binding, and if they’re not directly to institutions then they’re probably not even noticed.

…but they do convince signers that they’ve ‘done something’, the catharsis of which makes them less likely to do something that actually matters.

That’s fair, and you raise good points. Thank you for sharing and explaining your perspective.

The perception of cycling in general is already negative, but I suspect it has less to do with idiots on bikes and more that bikes can’t help but be in drivers’ way. Yet I still hear NIMBYs actively fight against bike lanes because they think cyclists are entitled, and don’t want to lose parking spaces to them, or get longer commutes if roads are converted to one-way. That’s not something responsible cycling can fix; that’s a direct result of car-centric culture being resistant to having a smaller slice of the pie.

EDIT: One thing to add. Human psychology is weird, and it treats being inside a car as like being in one’s own house. ‘Road rage’ is a real phenomenon of drivers feeling ‘territorial’ in protecting ‘their’ space. It means theyre more reactive, more impulsive, and often more spiteful. No doubt in part because driving is a highly demanding activity mentally, especially at higher speeds, so adrenaline spikes easily.

By comparison, we don’t get widespread ‘supermarket rage’ with our shipping trolleys, because it feels like a public space in a way ‘inside of my car’ doesn’t (and we’re slower and have time to think). And unfortunately, there isn’t anything cyclists can do about that, either.

Also, correction: I didn’t say all the things that piss off drivers are being done to make us safer. I said all the things that make us safer still tend to piss off drivers. Part of the Road Rage issue is that drivers get pissed off over any perceived infraction, regardless of context: even if their own inattention is at fault (like blaming people on the footpath for being in their way). Usually, the feeling passes In a couple seconds, but every now and then some asshole tries to run you off the road to ‘make a point’…

Absolutely, but the same idiots that text while driving and microwave grapes can also buy bikes, so the existence of idiots on bikes cannot be assumed to represent a philosophy for cyclists at large (in your area, anyway). Are these things you see many cyclists doing? Or just things you’ve seen a cyclist do?

I see the concerns you’ve listed, and I agree they’re not safe. But I know why people choose several of them, even if I personally don’t do them. I have headlights and a reflective vest, but if your hobby bike doesn’t and you need to get home after dark, you deal. If there’s no safe space on the road, or the visibility is too poor, you deal.

Some of the other things you name, I haven’t seen and cannot fathom why somebody would do such things. We’re probably not from the same country (let alone area) so our cycling infrastructure will be different.

One of them I have done: riding the footpath in the opposing direction. I’m going at low speed so I can brake, but the only risk is of a bad driver being impatient - the same risk a mobility scooter, mailbuggy, skateboarder etc would have. And I do this if a) the road only has one path, and the otherside i would be exposed on the shoulder, or b) when my destination is close on the same side because it makes no sense to cross the road twice within 100m. Both are decisions I make to reduce my exposure to cars.

Cyclists break laws to reduce exposure to cars and their drivers. Even walking on a footpath, you’re more likely to be killed by a car mounting the curb, or launching from a driveway than anything else. Car drivers are the apex predator of cyclists and pedestrians.

The reason cyclists avoid stopping is that our vehicles are pedal powered. If we lose all momentum, we take far, FAR longer to execute maneuvers. It means we spend longer in intersections, which are the MOST dangerous place for cyclists to be. Because of the cars.

And if we stop and wait, we need a far bigger gap than cars do. We cant inject fuel into our legs for a burst of speed. So drivers get impatient waiting for us to go and try to cut in front of us, turn in front of us, take any gaps we could’ve taken.

So the recommended action is to ‘take the lane’ (be in the middle of the lane so cars can’t pass us) and then drivers are angry we’re in the way and slowing them down and behave recklessly out of spite. Or politeness, sometimes drivers ‘help’ by stopping in the middle of intersections to create space, which also causes accidents.

Or we could be on the footpath, which means we now have to go much slower for safety and oh wait the biggest risk IS STILL CARS because drivers forget the footpath exist and launch out driveways at full speed without even looking. Cyclists, mobility scooters, skateboards; all irrelevant to the impatient driver.

So yeah, all the things that make using a light vehicle safer tend to make heavy vehicle users pissed off. I can do everything right, but if an impatient driver overtakes me in an intersection and collides with me, I’m still the one who ends up in hospital.

So… yeah. Being a defensive cyclists means minimizing interactions with drivers wherever possible.

What the alternative for heating? If it is AC, consider that much of the electrical grid is powered by air pollution anyway (especially coal), so the issue is at best deferred.

In urban areas, I believe the biggest cause of air pollution is vehicles, not woodsmoke.

Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

We probably don’t have enough user traffic to give people the specific help they need. Certainly not compared to something like StackOverflow, which is already what you’re describing.

The issues with generalised user-to-user programming help (esp re: StackOverflow) is that an increasing number of communities are doing this in closed-off areas like Slack and Discord, where their support is not indexed or searchable. Users running into the same problems are struggling to find each others’ answers. Creating yet another community that’s separated from the internet at large exacerbates this problem.

Man, I used to really like browsing the stuff at ThinkGeek. Even bought a few things. Now that it’s owned by… I wanna say GameStop?.. it’s ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things like the laundry basket that looked like a radioactive barrel, the shower gel that looks like a blood bag… that kind of light-hearted novelty stuff. But the new owner just gutted all the interesting content, and it’s just all IP collectables now.

It’s been long enough I forgot bout ThinkGeek. Damn. Wish something like it were still around.

• “progress on [1], fixed linting [2]”
• “[1] completed, setup for [2]”
• “[3] and [4] completed”
• “fixed formatting”
• “refactoring [1] and [2]”
• “fix variable typos”
• “update logic in [2]”
• “revert package.json and regenerate package-lock”

All my commits have comments. I generally commit after completing a ‘block’ objective, a describe what that was but in very simple terms mostly in regards to the file/section with the most significant logic changes. I don’t always specify the file if I did tiny typos/linting/annotation across a bunch of them, because the logic is unaffected I know that the differences will be visible in the commit history.

My weakness is that I don’t do it often enough. If I’m working on [2] for several hours, I’ll only commit when I consider it minimally-viable (completed 2), or when moving between machines ([further] progress on 2). And I have a bad habit of not pushing every time I commit, just at the end of the day or when moving between machines (though a messy rebase hopefully made that lesson stick), or if somebody else on the team wants to review an issue I’m having.

I think that’s a bad faith interpretation to imply that one eats animals exclusively because it being ‘animals’ is the point. Most people don’t think about it, their priority is making their daily life as simple as possible. They just eat whatever tastes good and is easy to get. And the people pushing for eating insects are thinking about it; they just have different priorities; they’re trying to make environmentally-sustainable food easier to get.

Insects are still a far better choice for protein. They don’t take remotely the amount of land or water that soy crops do, and they can be grown in areas of the world that don’t have as much freshwater. They can be fed off scraps and organic material that are waste to us. They also have a high return yield; they’re not being lost to droughts/weather/pests at the rate crops (especially organic) are. I’d posit that an insect-inclusive diet is probably more environmentally-friendly than the modern vegan diet is.

Humans are evolved omnivores. It’s both possible and noble to have an organic and herbivorous diet that meets your basic needs, but it’s difficult, often inaccessible, expensive; and it takes up huge amounts of land to grow the kind of crops needed (especially if much of them are lost to pests). Soy demands a lot of water, and avocados have been priced out of reach of the impoverished Central Americans they used to cheaply feed. Whether plant or animal, we are only alive by consuming life. There is no diet without some harm to somebody somewhere. Most vegan diets are too expensive (or unavailable), and are part of the deforestation for soy plantations overseas.

Ultimately now that principles have become a part of how we consume (and not just necessity, availability, effort etc), any philosophy requires compromise. If one’s primary concern is freshwater, the carbon cycle, deforestation for cropland, nutrition density, local food-chain, animal suffrage, animal consent, organic, local-grown, seasonal, etc… It’s not possible to follow them all, and it’s not reasonable to expect everybody choose a single specific one.

I have a preference towards attainable and environmentally-sustainable eating, which means that eating crickets (and mushrooms, yum) is less harmful ecologically than eating soy (deforestation, water), and far less harmful than cattle (magnitudes worse than any other livestock). I also avoid palm oil products (deforestation). I don’t disagree with any vegetarians or vegans who chose other principles; it’s excellent that humans are becoming increasingly mindful of what we choose to eat. We just have different priorities.

They’re all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won’t go into detail since it’s generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was “the (opposing) version of [Name]” (eg “Francine is the feminine of Frank”).

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was ‘very gender’ (eg: if Frank were to mean “buff and hairy”), so it was confusing if the opposing version’s meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.

But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.

1. AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).

2. It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.

3. And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.

AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.

I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.

If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.

These are essentially my thoughts. They’re helpful for indicating context (tone/expression/sentiment). The goal of language is communication; words alone can struggle with that. Well-placed emojis help improve communication. Numerous emojis breaking up sentences makes them harder to read; imo it impairs communication.

I also don’t like the idea of policing others’ use of a harmless sub-dialect of online communication just because one decides not to use it themselves. I personally don’t use or enjoy the ‘emojis’ that are just ‘fun graphics we like’ (most Discord custom emotes are this). Nor do I like that filter where 1-3 emojis are inserted after basically every single word. But that’s because it’s not my online dialect; it doesn’t mean people who use emojis that way are ‘wrong’.

Different platforms have different ‘accents’, and emojis are only one example of that. I find the numerous dialects of online English to be a fascinating topic that isn’t often considered.

Sometimes I’d feel sad that a trait of say, Tumblr’s dialect didn’t have a Reddit equivalent: Tumblr uses punctuation, capitalisation, and even typos as a tone indicator. A Redditor doesn’t know the different tones implied amongst these, even though most Tumblr users do:

• no. stop
• no stop
• noo staaaaahp
• noolkjaflakud STOP
• No. Stop.
• NO STOP

I can tell which of these are vaguely upset, genuinely upset, or pretending to be upset in a few different ways. Reddit doesn’t have that, because it expects everybody to write with formal grammar all the time, including not ‘allowing’ emojis as tone indicators. I suspect that formal writing style probably contributes to why so many comments are read in bad faith as smug/adversarial. 😢

What templates have you looked at?

I did sign up for Notion; I thought it would be a helpful repo for things like notes that I’d previous been writing down. However the amount of setup involved is preventing me from using it, like it did for Todoist. I would find something plug-and-play to modify and build off of very helpful.

It’s not like the service itself is complicated. It’s that I really struggle to prioritise what’s important, or categorise. My comments are miles long because I don’t know what words to cut, and I’m terrible at reducing grey spectrums down to black and white for things like NSFW filters or category sorting; I despise having to put #tags of anything I upload and I can’t estimate how long a task takes either.

The most useful thing I’ve found as of late is goblin.tools; the todo list uses Open AI to generate subtasks based on how scary/hard it feels to do. This is the part I actually struggle with; I’m extremely productive when I know exactly what I need to do.

Building a personal wiki seems like a great idea of documenting things like grounding exercises or strategies. I guess I’m hoping somebody’s done the skeleton for me, so I don’t procrastinate it for a year until I eventually close the tab.

Metaverse was such a weird pitch to me. It seemed to think the way we are living our lives in the way we want to live them, and just offered that in a sterile, miserable package of digital ennui.

Like I get it, our lives right now are built around work and material consumption. But we don’t enjoy work and material consumption! It doesn’t make us happy; it’s not what we’re excited about! We just can’t meet basic survival needs without money (work), and the stress kills us so much that we look to any shallow escape to recover juuuuust enough to keep doing it.

Why on earth would a working human - which is >90% of us - want to move into a space that has all the drudgery, tracking, oversight, micromanagement, and shallow pandering of the current world… and lose all the socialisation, birdsong, walking past a busker playing blues, the smell of a nearby cafe, the sound of passers-by laughing; life?

I want to wake up in the morning in a comfortable bed and open my curtains to clear skies without traffic smoke; you think waking up to traffic noise and grey skies and shuffling over to my laptop to do my economy-mandated 8 hours labour with a blue-skies backdrop is somehow appealing? If anything, it highlights just how incredibly dystopic the waking world is becoming in the name of productivity and efficiency. It makes the ennui even more visible than before, to see what life could have been and know most of us will never afford it.

How little does MZ understand about humanity, to think we want an existence devoid of nothing more than existing in a closed economy and 3D storefronts?

I’m not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people’s concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?

I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can’t operate for free forever. But the only news I’ve heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I’ve been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.

I wouldn’t blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn’t subscribe to them… so I’m not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.

Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

Board games! I particularly like ‘party games’ that are almost activities, easier to get other people to try and they support banter/socialising.

Here are a couple suggestions for playing with friends/family indoors:

• Banangrams (2+ competitive scrabble race)
• Codenames (2+ word association, or image association if you get the pictures version)
• Gloom (2+ card game, good for story-tellers)
• Dixit (3+ image association)
• Telestrations (2 or 3+ ‘illustrations’/‘telephone game’ - basically Gartic Phone)
• Just One (3+ word association)

But maybe you want something that you can do solo…? I have a few I like doing for that.

• Illustration. I do it digitally on PC with a drawing tablet, Krita is free art software.
• Jigsaws. I have a special jigsaw holder I can slide under the bed so I can take as long as I want and not block the dinner table.
• Sleight of hand. Depends on space. I wouldn’t twirl my staves inside, but things like poi, fans, card magic, yoyo tricks etc will work in a larger room.
• Origami. I recommend getting dedicated origami paper as its not only prettier, its already perfectly square and its a thinner stock designed for folding.

Curated communities would likely choose to defederate from instances like that since they have no barrier for entry, and may be bots, spam, or bad actors.

If you’re joining an established instance (or work with people to create a new one), then you’ll at least get a local community, which will both give a instance content if defederated, and legitimise it so it’s less likely to be.

Thank you for your kind words.

I believe things will change as gaming becomes the norm. It already has changed in younger generations; its just that OP is old enough that most people his age don’t play. All hobbies and lifestyles come with superficial assumptions when viewed by the people who don’t have personal experience with them.

Say, a person who drinks wines is considered distinguished, but a person who drinks beers is not. Yet a wine-drinker might just like getting efficiently drunk, and the beer-drinker likes crafting IPAs in their garage.

We are rapidly moving to gaming being the norm. I still believe that if somebody asks ‘what do you do’ your answer should be something that prompts a conversation, but that’s because that’s how dating works, not because gaming is wrong. Gaming at all no longer has stigma among the majority of younger people. It’s the ones who grew up in a time that they were toys who still see them that way.