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.

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.

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?

This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.

Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?

The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.

Go out of the house and go… where?

In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). [x]

There aren’t places to go anymore. There just aren’t. Libraries, but they’re underfunded and aren’t well-suited for socialisation. Parks, if you live in an area that has a planned/maintained one. There aren’t any nice pedestrian-focused city centres for people to visit just for the sake of visiting, to sit outside drinking tea while listening to the birds - just miles of thoroughfare and parking spaces, covered in smog and traffic noise. Who would ever?

Many countries (especially US and Canada) are so car-centric that they might not even have sidewalks at all in huge areas. Housing is sprawled in low-density suburbia. It’s hard to go over to a friend’s house and play a board game with them or host a party if it’s an hour and half driving commute to get there, so we’re not even visiting each other’s homes.

The only thing that exists anymore is the place you earn money, the soulless big box stores you spend money (if you have any), and home.

So, yeah. We’re all fucking home, because home is free, comfortable, and has a short commute.

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.

That’s a great point; the echo chambers. Supported by the lack of the downvote button, it’s one of the most impactful things Beehaw can do in fostering its goal of community.

Any platform that measures success by engagement (eg: for ad traffic) tends to evolve into either of two extremes: content that makes you feel good, or contact that makes you feel afraid/angry. Usually both: something to get angry about and degrade each other, and then share to your echo chamber to yes-man each other. Very little constructive discussion takes place.

Echo chambers deny people the growth opportunity that being exposed to diversity of experience and opinion brings. It entrenches people into ideas, including [self-]harming ones. Even good/benign ideas at their core can rapidly become steeped in tribalism, supremacy and animosity, particularly in conjunction with content that is engaging because it sparks anger or fear.

The most powerful things humans create are the things they create together. The most progressive decisions we make are the ones we make for the collective other. The easier it is for humans to form into competing cliques (especially as encouraged by algorithms), the more divided we become. People with similarities will draw arbitrary lines over their differences, enforced by algorithms and divisive moderator principles.

A community doesn’t require that we all agree to thrive - only that whenever we disagree, we know we all still belong.