Here’s an opinion that’s actually unpopular rather than simply controversial: domestic flights in the UK other than to Northern Ireland (which isn’t on the same island so fair enough) should be forbidden on the grounds their contribution to climate change cannot be justified.

Instead we should renationalise the railways by letting the franchises expire without renewing them and expand their capacity as far as we can. Instead of pissing around with HS2 we fuck the NIMBYs over with an Act of Parliament which they can’t swat away or delay and extend it all the way up to Scotland.

I genuinely think Reddit lowered my expections of moderators so much over the years without me even realising, it's great to come to a place like this where everyone on both sides sounds reasonable and competent at what they're doing. Really excited to see how Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally develops.

This is still a ‘frog and the scorpion’ kind of situation I think, Meta is fundamentally predatory and incapable of good faith as a matter of collective psychology and culture. They’re a direct analogue of Big Tobacco and should be as welcome in the Fediverse as a diagnosis of the Ebola virus in my opinion.

Have you considered that people just don’t want literal paedophile content whether it’s legal or not in their servers?

Bloody hell it's amazing how desperate this marketing attempt is. I've got an AI that'll blow your faces off with its output but I can't show you because, well, your face will resemble Gus Fring after several weeks in an acid bath. I can show you if you pay me a Huffmanian sum for API access though, but only if you sign an NDA and promise not to say mean things about us.

I can’t speak for everyone on BeeHaw but the reason they do stuff like this is a feature rather than a bug for me, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but the good thing about the fediverse is that the only parade we can really piss on is our own and there’s a diversity of instances to choose from which is a good thing. One ‘master instance’ would defeat the point of federation pretty catastrophically.

They probably could use more manpower to some extent but we're all forgetting The Mythical Man-Month; just chucking more bodies at a software project doesn't necessarily speed it up any more than nine women can have a baby in one month.

That said I'm happy to do the odd bit here and there if there's any call for it, either for lemmy itself or BeeHaw.

If someone is lobbying for climate change denial then they’re guilty of something morally akin to treason, but it’s not treason itself because instead of just betraying just their country they’re betraying their entire species.

There really needs to be granular NSFW settings on Lemmy, or more correctly I need to improve my Rust so I can go and implement it myself instead of bitching about it!

I’m not anti-porn but I don’t want it mixed in my normal content. Other non-sexual NSFW stuff is fine 24/7, artistic nudity is fine 24/7, but I don’t want to see outright porn unless that’s what I’m specifically looking for!

Yeah living through the fifth once-in-a-generation crisis in this generation is powerful left-wing propaganda.

Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.

I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.

Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.

Yeah our problem is that our voter turnout is too geriatric, not our politicians. More young people need to vote.

I decided to jump before I was pushed and bin off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!

Yeah Meta are a scourge. If I had a friend who worked for them I’d look down on them the same if they worked for Big Tobacco or lobbying for the fossil fuel industry.

Neither are scams but the UK is fond of permanently doing temporary things. Income tax in the UK was first imposed as a temporary measure to fund the Napoleonic Wars but after Waterloo it was never repealed since it brought in so much. Same sort of deal for the 70 mph national speed limit, it was a temporary measure in the 1960s apparently in response to someone caning it down the motorway in an AC Cobra and as we know, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

To be fair if nobody can get rich from it the fediverse is probably going to stay a much nicer place than the rest of the internet. Profit motives are fine when you’re dealing with strangers but they always add an element of dishonesty to communities of people you intend to stick around with in my opinion, there’s no good faith when my presence is being monetised any more than a farmer has the best interests of their livestock in mind.

If I let a bunch of crackheads live in my house and endlessly defended their presence until I was forced by public pressure to reluctantly send them away the shit they got up to in the interim was at least partially my fault in my opinion.

I quite like the idea of a BeeHawDevs community, I'm not sure if there's a discord or something already but having a community specifically dedicated to building new features for BeeHaw would be nice I think. Since we'd all have to juggle things around jobs and stuff it would be nice if there was a centralised list of tasks/features that needed doing in order of priority that people could drop in and work on when they had a spare weekend.

I wonder why they’re forcing open not particularly advertiser friendly subs like piracy and antiwork?

Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.

Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.

It’s the Warhammer 40k variety and we’re all about to get bombarded from the heavens in the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind for tolerating their presence on Holy Terra no less.

The original '90s furby is unironically a fantastic platform for a hardware hacker, because they were so cheaply made the whole thing runs off a single motor and a clever arrangement of cams. It would be reasonably straightfoward to pull out the 'guts', fit a motor controller and a Raspberry Pi Zero, put a camera where the IR and light sensors go, put a better mic and camera in, then hook the bastard up to GPT-4! There's a cam position sensor too so you could modulate its speech cycle by counting the syllables in the GPT output as well as move its ears, eyes etc.

Other improvements could include high brightness RGB LEDs behind the eyes to indicate mood, an ultrasonic sensor with a second motor so the furby can turn around and make eye contact with people entering a room, and using one of the pi's GPIO pins and a suitable piece of wire as an FM radio transmitter (use a low pass filter because doing that shits out harmonics quite badly) to hijack nearby radios.

We all have to draw our own lines in the sand on issues like this and I respect yours, I'd argue on the other hand the open-source nature of Lemmy means the author's politics shouldn't make a difference to groups like BeeHaw which use it. A good example of this would be TOR which was developed by American naval intelligence of all organisations yet many drug dealers routinely gamble their freedom that it will protect them.

Also I'd argue as loathesome as your average tankie is (I really can't stand them at all) they're still a step up from the literal nonces that inhabited early Reddit.

I grew up in a Calvinistic worldview where every week you were reminded you were utterly disgusting in the eyes of God and simply by being born you deserved to be tortured more brutally than the English language can adequately express because you had by virtue of being human inherited original sin, and the only way you could get rid of it is if you had been predestined to be saved by Jesus (who did not come to save everyone, only a select few). Anyone can imagine the horrible effect this polar opposite of therapy has on rates of mental illness in that community. This kind of worldview was popular with the English Dissenters (those famous 'persecuted pilgrims' belong to this category) who later crossed the Atlantic in large numbers and I think I can see its unpleasant legacy in American political thought both left and right.

If there is one idea I could delete out of existence it's this notion of original sin in both its religious and secular forms. I would make it unlawful to tell a child that they were born guilty of anything simply for existing or that guilt can be inherited from anyone because of how psychologically harmful this is. While it's usually not the intention there exists a trend that de facto results in telling boys they're guilty of various things simply for existing, and then in the same breath we act surprised when scumbags like Tate are hoovering up their attention instead of everyone telling them what a piece of crap they are for being born. Manly qualities in my mind are qualities like physical and mental strength in the face of adversity, having the moral courage to make difficult decisions for the good of a group, a deep sense of good sportsmanship, being willing and able to take risks when required, that sort of thing. The left should be all over that as its history is littered with such examples!

I want /r/ music to ban all music except covers of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or maybe ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

I don’t think the ship is doomed yet but they’re definitely in ‘what is that ominous noise coming from the bilge’ territory. To carry on the analogy they’ll plug the leaks as best they can and try and make it to the safe harbour of the IPO (where she can sink at her mooring for all Spez cares) which they could still well do, but it’s also likely the captain and his officers being half-baked sons of lubberly farts will smash into several reefs on the way and sink their already damaged vessel.

Banksy had it right:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.

I think that is what counts as sinking for a large social media site nowadays. They’re technically still alive but they’re empty husks of their former selves and will never return to their heydays.

There's decent evidence that 'corporal punishment' and plain old abuse have very similar effects on the psyche of a developing child, even if there wasn't there's something downright unmanly about hitting someone much weaker than you that isn't allowed to fight back.

I think this policy will fail to be honest; while I’m not in Wales any more Oxford where I live now is a supposed ‘cycling city’ with most roads at 20 mph and honestly I hate being on the road there either in a car or on a bike; I get the bus in even though it’s often flaky. Driving you’re sat between second and third gear the whole time so you’re either revving too hard and wasting petrol or the car naturally speeds up so you’re spending a lot of attention on not getting fined rather than keeping it on the road, and when you’re cycling the cars that do keep to 20 mph linger beside you for what feels subjectively a lot longer when they overtake which isn’t fun either and the tiny bike lines make you feel vulnerable to traffic. I had a lot of near misses when I did it regularly and Oxford is a very small city, the idea of cycling somewhere like Cardiff would be terrifying to me.

Their code was open source until 2017 and it’s got progressively more dogshit for the end user since, I suspect if this is real it’s probably a bit juicier.

The inhabitants of the submarine aren’t under pressure directly like scuba divers are, they’re at atmospheric pressure while inside which is why the pressure hull needs to be so strong to resist the hundreds of PSI outside - it’s the pressure difference that crushes things in this case. If they are rescued there’ll be no requirement to decompress slowly as their bodies were never under compression and at risk of the bends (when nitrogen bubbles form in your blood with often lethal results) to begin with.

The inhabitants of the Kursk during that submarine disaster were subjected to high pressure in their last hours but that was because the water slowly flooding their compartment compressed the air like a piston, this isn’t a concern for this submarine as it goes far deeper than the Kursk and the slightest fracture to the hull would kill them instantly in a violent implosion.

As a Briton the idea of any of the last three PMs in a presidential system is really scary in my opinion. It’s easier to depose a leader that’s failing badly in the UK which is a good thing, I think the problem is the fact too much of our actual machinery of government is based on centuries-old gentleman’s agreements which is fine up until you get a complete stranger to honour like Boris Johnson who will abuse our fairly fluid constitutional arrangements to cling onto power like a tick.

In theory the monarch is supposed to be the last line of defence against a genuinely scary and out of control government that Parliament can’t reign in but we saw how well that worked over the last three years.

Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.

Getting people angry drives engagement, YouTube probably thinks you’re going hate-watch it and make them more tasty, tasty ad impressions that way.

IP maximalists really screwed the pooch by inventing the term ‘piracy’ for copyright infringement, they made the act sound ten times cooler.

To be fair both of them are practical and effective methods to prevent a person or group bothering you so it’s easy to confuse the two.

Yeah the Tories in the UK which were once the mainstream right are now sucking deeply on the crack pipe of Republican culture wars because after thirteen years in power it’s all they have left.

An easily disproved one too, as the sister ships weren’t actually identical. Also the recent scan on the ship revealed the hull number 401 on one of the propellers putting another nail in the coffin of the idea the ship is actually the Olympic.