I’m all for delivery robots. The idea of having people in gas guzzling cars taking up huge amounts of city space while polluting, just so you can have a private taxi for your burrito is crazy. The main issue here is them taking up sidewalk infrastructure instead of car infrastructure. Fix that and we’ve got absolutely no problems. Tiny electric vehicles SHOULD be delivering things. Fixing this infrastructure problem is another great time to fix deliveries in general blocking side lanes, bike lanes, and slowing traffic where it does actually need to flow.

While we’re at it, fix all traffic. Switch to a modified Dutch design of three types of roads (highways, distributor roads, and access roads) to further eliminate car interactions with pedestrians, cyclist, and yes probably small bot interactions. They should only be mixing on access roads. Dedicated and separated car lanes, bike lanes, and walking paths, and shared delivery lanes for bots and manned cars on access roads. It’ll take time, but a simple plan and slow progress will eventually fix things and cause less havoc like adding cars did to cities that were all horse based.

“Won’t someone think of the buggy whip makers?”

Not saying you’re against it, but having an actual social safety net and not worrying about particular industries/workers/special interests is a WAY better way to think about governance and change.

Dota?

Yes, this is an echo chamber. Yes, most things are very samey. You don’t see alternative opinions because this is a TINY community. Like crazy tiny. Lemmy has what, 60,000 active users? You know a ton of those are bots too. Even after a reddit exodus that site gets what, 2 million daily users*? So you’ve got a crazy small group but it’s also very similar in type of person who is here. It’s overwhelmingly educated middle aged men with a tech background or focus. So you’ve got a limited pool of opinions to draw on, and then EVEN if you do occasionally get a different opinion, even within that narrow band of experience it can get voted down or swarmed.

Look, I only lurk here occasionally, and I see stuff I disagree with constantly. I see stuff in this thread I disagree with. But I don’t post about it because it’s not worth it. I also don’t have time to argue a minority opinion on the internet, and my life is better since I stopped doing that. And I guarantee I’m not alone. But I ASSURE you this is a bubble.

…but if it makes you feel better though, most people live in bubbles. I have been lucky to grow up in a very different place than I live, and I’ve found that politically, most Americans absolutely talk past one another because they are incapable of understanding “the other side” because they’ve never truly talked to people on the other side or listened to them, much less lived with them and understood them. This isn’t enlightened centrist BS, I have a side I agree with, but I also don’t misrepresent the views of people I disagree with based on no actual knowledge. And with non politics it’s very similar - small groups beget small opinion spaces based on a small pool of experiences. Whether that’s cars or AI or Linux.

We used to get exposed to people with different life experiences and opinions in so-called “third places”, and we don’t have them anymore. Way fewer people go to chuch and the middle of the road protestant mainline has been subsumed. Social clubs like the elks and masons are far less popular. 12% of the population doesn’t serve in the military with a socioeconomic cross-cut. Kids don’t even have malls, sports start specializations early, and the Internet, almost worst of all, has made it easier than ever to get a social fix consuming only content from those most like you or what is algorithmically fed to you.

Anyway, things are bad, I do not have a solution, but I have a little bit of time and feel compelled to post when you are practically begging for unpopular opinions. So my unpopular opinion is holy shit is this place an echo chamber, and if you don’t feel that deep in your bones you need to immediately drive 2 hours outside of whatever city you live in and go to a pancake breakfast hosted by some local scout troop, go to some small town festival and talk to people, or hell go visit a church of a religion you don’t belong to. And don’t talk to people your own age, or same familial structure. Talk to someone who thinks voting is dumb. Talk to someone who doesn’t care which Linux distro you’re on because they don’t even HAVE a computer, they just have an iPad.

…and yes, realistically you’re probably not gonna make a connection that way without moving somewhere, and I’m obviously being mostly flippant, but at least don’t turn on conservative tiktok or watch Fox News and expect that to be “the other side”. Experiencing a different bubble is “growth” I guess, but people aren’t the bubbles they live in, and actually talking to them is a way better way to understand WHY we disagree, not just how. Again, like I said, I don’t have real solutions on how to do that. I just have the answer to your question and yes this place is a bubble.

*Note I’m pulling those numbers out of my ass, but I bet I’m close on orders of magnitude. And yes I know reddit is half bots too.

I think I’m gonna fix my partitions so I can distro hop, then check out bazzite. Keep hearing good things. Even though I do dabble in programming and AI image generation and other desktop stuff, I do mostly just game.

I’m glad you’ve had a good go of it. I’ve been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn’t expect it to just…not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just…not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of “well that’s not a problem, it must be your machine’s fault” when it’s happening to multiple people?

I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I’ll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she’ll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it’ll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.

It’s customizable as hell, it’s free and open-source, and it’s helping my computer skills, so I’ll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn’t love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction… I can’t imagine sticking with it.

Obviously the Internet plays a big role in this as people have said, but it’s worth mentioning this was also the era where tv stopped sucking (from reality tv awfulness to a bunch of absolute banger dramas), AND where Netflix and then other streaming services became available. So there are huge competition effects.

I’ve also never bought fully into the “reading good TV bad” mindset. Leisure is leisure, especially if the article’s raised point is “identifying with literary characters”. That certainly happens in other forms of media. Even if it’s reading to learn, I watch a LOT of YouTube these days, and probably 75% of what I watch is how to and instructional. Also let’s not forget with each new form of leisure: “fast-paced music” (classical), books for the masses, magazines, tv, jazz, rock and roll, DnD, the internet, VR etc…there was always someone saying the new stuff will rot your brain while they pine for something that was maligned when it was new.

Sounds like a smart guy. He gets meat AND all your dried goods!

Jesus Christ stop spamming the same regurgitated Marxist post everywhere. At least reformulate your “socialism is the solve to everything!” post in a couple ways, or just only post it once per thread.

Trump is definitely not a “figurehead only”. He is a tiger that what’s left of the Republican establishment has by the tail. They did not want him to win the primary again, they all hate him, and are just trying to get whatever judicial appointments and erosion of regulations they can out of him. Anyone who thinks Trump is a puppet is absolutely blind to American politics. He is an absolute wildcard that everyone is trying to react to, a whirlwind that folks hope they can push in the direction they want to destroy the things they want, but they are equally aware they can fall out of grace and be fired in two weeks like everyone in his last administration.

Slowly but surely. https://slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touch-screens-vw-porsche-nissan-hyundai.html

Also worth noting, US regulators knew it was a bad idea in 2013, but guidance has been completely ignored of course. Luckily tegulators in Europe are doing something with more teeth: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/driving-tech/is-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-car-touchscreens/#:~:text=Euro NCAP – Europe’s leading automotive,switches will be required instead.

Gross, awful, terrible. Buuuuuut…

Hard to swallow pill: This will probably get tweaked and eventually be very successful. Most people do not like or know how to mess with settings on their phones. You, on this website, are probably an exception but deep inside you know that. How many friends and family members have you had to explain how to change something on their phones? How many have you noticed that NEED to change something on their phones but didn’t even know it, much less think to ask? Now think of all the people whose phones you’ve never even seen.

Of course I’d love to see it go the way of touchscreens in cars where consumers reject it, but I just don’t see it. Assuming they can get it to where it does the 5 or 10 tasks the average user would want to do, this will probably be the new norm moving foward. Don’t believe me? Look at modern macs or windows and how many settings they hide.

Only been a tradition for 50 years. Relatively young compared to the age of many political dealmakers.

Just learned I was funded by rich people. Did I miss a paycheck somewhere?

-an actual economist, telling you deflation is bad

That’s total debt, he’s talking about individual debt. Deflation is bad. This is not really up for debate. 2% inflation is a fine target and worked well for decades.

This guy fucking gets it. Let’s go with hobbies. Show your kids passion and a love of learning, the ability to have fun, and wrap it all in in emotional support and love and everything will be fine. I have an office with a bunch of nerd projects and we’re building out the basement workshop. My 3 year old already “helps” me build stuff and I hope that only increases. Mom has a second husband of her job in athletics, so kiddo is learning about normalizing hard work and athletic endeavors, visits Mommy’s office and weight room, etc.

The meme is funny. A lot of this conversation is definitely not, glad there’s some reasonable takes down here.

The issue is a lot of teetotalers don’t drink anything because of their existing health conditions, really bad obesity, hypertension, liver problems, etc. So those that don’t drink at all are actually less healthy than the average population, and those that drink in moderation are obviously healthier than those who drink a lot. So the results look like moderate drinking is the most healthy but there’s an (or a lot of) omitted variable bias.

It’s worth noting that not only did I not have to create this meme, I didn’t have to Google that hard to find it.

What’s crazy is “Fred” used to mean the exact, literal opposite. It’s the only word I know of that has come to mean the full opposite of what it meant (except maybe “literally”, but that’s usually used for emphasis)

Fred used to mean the dude who showed up in jeanshorts on a huffy, who everyone was like “are you sure you want to join the group ride?”, and then he ends up pulling the pack the whole way. Somewhere along the line it ended up meaning dentist, which is the slow dude who buys all the expensive gear. I literally don’t understand it.

Yeah I didn’t realize votes were essentially public already. This will 100% change my voting patterns. The problem is, I’m an idealist who still follows old school reddit voting guidelines of “this adds to the conversation” or not…so I upvote stuff I don’t agree with as long as it is well thought out, well said, or at least civil and trying to have a good conversation. When I remember to, I also tend to downvote vitriolic nonsense or pithy nothing comments even if I agree with the values, because I don’t think it helps anyone to have annoying angry echo chambers. That’s like…the entire Internet right now, and Lemmy is already bad enough with that. It doesn’t need to get worse by making sure everyone is voting in lockstep lest they get brigaded (which there are no inherent protections against).