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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

    People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

    Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

    Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.



  • Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

    The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

    When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

    Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

    You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

    That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.



  • I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.

    One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.

    Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well EDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)

    David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.

    Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.

    Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.

    Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.





  • Whether that alone is something to be banned over is probably context dependent, and I don’t have any faith that that instance had a good reason for it. Nevertheless that person holding up their great take about the nuclear bombs being good actually does not paint a great picture of them as a person. It makes them look like a reactionary US nationalist who wants to believe anything that makes their side the “good guys”. They can pretend it was morally neutral all they want, but morality is the only reason anybody argues something like that because it’s so nebulous the only way you get there is with motivated reasoning.

    At any rate I wouldn’t put that on the pile of reasons to hate on the .ml instances, not when there are so many good reasons.



  • You fell back from the motte to the bailey then went ham on a strawman because the actual argument was getting too much for you.

    You accused Gen Z of some specific behaviour and when I asked you about it you fell back on some vague notion of the generations simply being different.

    You were clearly implying some difference of character, but when I point out that that’s pretty weak you pretend I was talking about biology, which I never mentioned.

    If you think Gen Z is more likely to block, check out, whatever, explain where you get it from. If you’re not going to do that then I will just continue to believe that you’re basing it on your own biases and move on. You clearly aren’t very disciplined about your thought processes.

    Oh but you had it worse as a kid? Also something we’ve been hearing for millenia from intellectually lazy entitled assholes.


  • Okay, but you brought it up and then when asked about it instead of explaining you fell back on the idea that it’s self-evident, which I think I’m right to not be convinced by.

    To the extent the generations appear different I think is easily explained by the difference in material conditions that each has grown up within and the necessarily different ages of each group at any given time, and nothing to do with the inate characters of the people involved.

    I see zoomers intensely involved in the issues that affect the world and any extent they feel the need to check out I think is 100% valid given the bleak world they have been born into, much bleaker than at any earlier time.

    I see a hard-nosed pragmatic awareness of the need for hope in the face of our grim reality because it is the only way we can find a path through. I have heard that message from people of all ages, but also from zoomers.

    Again, I don’t think there’s much difference and one thing that absolutely hasn’t changed over millenia is bemoaning the state of the “kids these days”.




  • I’d say the problem with bias isn’t that it exists, but when it’s covert. The ML instances were covert for a while if you weren’t paying attention, LW is “centrist” and “neutral” which means it defaults to a vaguely conservative position (conservative in the sense of being passively okay with the status quo, not the US sense in which conservative is an electoral party), but it remains covert simply by being default.

    It also has open sign up which means anyone can sign up, which will tend to attract people who know their politics suck, so it will tend to attract unpleasant users.

    Another instance with open sign up is sh.itjust.works which I’ve noticed a lot of the more toxic assholes I’ve dealt with come from. I imagine having profanity implied in their name doesn’t help with that.

    Whereas instances like lemmy.blahaj.zone and beehaw.org wear their bias on their sleeves and require sign ups be approved. I chose slrpnk.net for a similar reason. These instances seem like a much nicer experience in general, and I would recommend anyone wanting to join lemmy find an instance that they like that has an approval process.

    I think the fediverse presents a vision of an internet based on trust, and I think that sign up process is an important place to start building that trust.


  • I honestly disagree that blocking works the same. Social media relies on a network effect, and if they keep being allowed to operate popular communities then they will have that network effect in their favour, and new users that don’t know any better will keep joining.

    Defederation is an important tool to turn certain instances into pariahs for bad behaviour, and individual blocks don’t achieve that.