Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

@CelloMomOnCars

I agree that I would find an urban area with fewer cars to have a higher quality of life than the equivalent area with more.

However after two decades away, this country bumkin is thrilled to finally escape the crushing, crowded, noisy, built up environment of the city to get back to having an acre(half a hectare) out on dirt road where I have the space to grow my own food, not have to fight my neighbors about the value of established trees that might hit their building, and can see the stars at night. At least for me this is a higher quality of life than any city no matter how well designed.

@AmyPetty

Having only 80 Assemblymembers for 40,000,000 Californians means we have a ridiculously high 500,000 to one ratio in the lower house of our state legislature. No other state legislature comes anywhere near that level of poor representation in its lower house.

I would support a nonpartisan, good government ballot initiative to expand our State Assembly to 160 members so that we have smaller-size districts for our lower house.

#California #politics

@w7voa This is actually quite a brilliant move by the #UAW. Striking workers get strike funding from the union and cannot get unemployment. Workers who are laid off get to collect unemployment from the state instead. The union, by striking at only one of two closely aligned plants, gets twice as much harm to the companies while the tax payer picks up half the cost for them

I've been in tech for a long time but I'm not a big believer in IOT. My house is going to be Battlestar Galactica style for the foreseeable future. No networked fridges, stoves, light switches or toasters 😉

Airbus open sourced their new cockpit font. Make it the default for all your embedded projects, because it's REALLY good and has real testing in difficult environments!

https://b612-font.com/

In 2000, when we still had 56k modems, if your website took 10 seconds to load, you lost most of your users. Today, Outlook spins for 20 seconds on a 300 Mbps connection, despite being in cache, and everyone is somehow fine with this regression.

Since I’m new to JavaScript, I wrote:

𝚒𝚏 (𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔) { 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔(); }

…like an idiot. Then, I realized I should be adapting to JavaScript culture and make it inscrutable, so I re-wrote the line to:

𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔 && 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔();

But I suspected there was something even more nightmarish, and sure enough, of course. This is how _real_ JavaScript developers do it:

𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔?.();

And by “real JavaScript developers,” I mean “monsters”.

I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it's trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it's downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it's being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my useage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology

@petersuber @chronicle @academicchatter

I’ve made a good living over the years ($100+) without having a college degree. I learned “on the job” and have been able to work my way into incredible and well paying employment. A degree shouldn’t mean a person is worth more $. How one does their job should be the reason for making a higher income.

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) annual meeting in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=HariTulsidas%2Fmagazine%2FMind+and+Matter

No.

Any of these insider trading, safety net deleting, power hoarding, environment destroying, dinosaurs could have mentored the next crop of lawmakers and stepped aside.

Instead, we are left with a bunch of drooling, multi millionaire ancient-ones forcing us to vote for the lesser of two evils

Flagship Liverpool hydrogen buses out of action due to 'problems with global H2 supply' #ev #hydrogen
Green hydrogen is unaffected by this issue, but it highlights how much hydrogen is reliant on fossil fuels. Grey hydrogen is “more polluting wheel to well than diesel”
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/flagship-liverpool-hydrogen-buses-out-of-action-due-to-problems-with-global-h2-supply/2-1-1508528

@icanbob

He actually said the "least expensive" way to produce hydrogen is to crack the hydrogen atoms off hydrocarbons, and he's right. SMR is the cheapest, liberating all the H2 from the CH4 and all the H2 from the water.

Personally I don't care for hydrogen. Direct renewable electricity generation, its storage, use in domestic heating and transport is what I find exciting and enjoy reading about. Hydrogen is a distraction.

@antares