cryptopian

It depends on which subreddit you're on. Reddit has this strange dynamic where it's simultaneously a series of web forums, and a single feed scrolling app. Some subs have more of a community feel and they can encourage longer form posts depending on the subject matter.

What's really notable is how the tone of a small subreddit post changes completely if a post gets boosted to everyone's front page. There's a small cycling sub I read with good posts about routes, tips, and advice. When something reaches the front page, it becomes a shitshow of car v bike culture war bullshit.

> has driven down >the cost of< renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010

I'm not one for pedantic corrections but I feel like this one's important

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

Ah, but you won't have heard about the ones that do put effort into these sorts of things

> guess who we are buying electricity from?

France, mostly.

> First, if someone's profession has been vastly transformed, and not necessarily in pleasant ways, they're allowed to have feelings about that

Of all the things that rile me up in this current landscape, the pervasive tone of "why aren't you happy? I'm happy! You should be happy about this" is the most infuriating.

It's one person's personal blog. You can complain that you see too many of one type of blog entry, but that's a result of whatever happens to be upvoted.

Like, I'd be tempted to write something like this just to crystallise the stance in my own head (i.e. writing is thinking) but if it got voted to the top of the front page, that doesn't mean I suddenly meant it as a world-bending thesis.

And no other osna.fm articles submitted to this site

While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)

~ A D V A N C E D ~

Doesn't even have to be anything that harsh. Narrow, twisty tree-lined lanes, speed humps, paved road surfaces that are louder inside the car

Worse than that, driving can be a partially subconscious activity and people tend to drive at the speed that "feels" right. It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.

I think that example's more a practicality of pronunciation. The two vowels in ce est are the same, and French runs the vowels together between words, so you'd end up pronouncing it the same either way.

That's not to say that you must always speak with perfect grammar all the time. You can play around with things for humour, character, rhetorical effect all day long.

The thing with standardisation bodies is that as much as certain organisations and journals can have their grammar mandated, regular folk will still continue to evolve the language as it does. For example, The Academie and French teachers would like you to use "nous" for "we", but it's been slowly creeping over to "on". No amount of browbeating is going to stop a French teen saying "le weekend"

I caught that the last time it went around Bluesky, and much as I like to dunk on awful genAI, it seemed pretty clear that it was a fictional poster designed to sucker in people who want to dunk on awful genAI

Sure we do. Remember when the ozone layer had a massive hole in because of CFC use in refrigerators? It didn't fix itself out of some natural law of the world. Regulators in democratic societies restricted the use of CFCs and then engineers worked on alternatives due to the regulations.

We should also not forget that a lot of effort has gone into decarbonising, and there's plenty of work going on in international cooperation, engineering, urban planning, education etc. whose work has already decreased the potential warming of the planet. We're still on a very bad trajectory that still needs more work, and there are moneyed organisations trying to stop the transition, but we shouldn't be so doomer to believe that nothing is happening.

It's important to remember how radical a change to electricity generation is. Apart from just new plants, you've got to keep the existing grid going, create new distribution infrastructure, reorganise supply chains and labour forces, and you'll also have old infrastructure aging out. It's not ideal, but a long term plan may involve building new fossil fuel generators in the immediate term

As an example, Tantacrul made a video about developing a sheet music font for Musescore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng)

London's also been putting effort into improving safe bicycle routes lately. I visit London every few weeks and if I'm going somewhere in central, I'll often just grab one of the Santander hire bikes instead of the tube. Well, most of London (looking at you, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea)

On the other hand, plenty of art can lean into being intentionally brash and be all the more memorable for it. The phrase "bad MS paint blog" immediately makes me think of Hyperbole and a Half[1] where the style feeds into the zany ADHD vibe of the blog.

Often, you find ugliness and rule breaking as a backlash to an overly polished status quo. AM radio rock gave way to punk, hair metal gave way to grunge, and EDM gave way to hyperpop. The most iconic album cover of 2024 was the word "brat" badly rendered on a plain, garish background.[2]

[1] https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/05/sneaky-hate-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_(album)

Wait til you find out that in Northern England, we call the evening meal "tea", not to be confused with "tea", the delicious leaf water.

I can't find it sadly, but somebody made an 80s style industrial control panel for a SQL server deployment, with all the clicky radio buttons and 7-segment displays you could wish for.

> start with a one-sentence definition, then a couple paragraphs of summary, then go into short specified sections, and keep links to the "Citations" at the end. It's been refined for 25 years, it's older than most of your engineers, it's 50+% correct by default.

I went to a documentation workshop at Pycon UK by Daniele, and this was actually quite similar to his approach for writing front pages for documentation. He'd give the same questionnaire to a few teams, with prompts like "in one sentence, what is this product?", "What can a user accomplish with this product?", "Who are the primary users of this product?" Once everyone's aligned on answers, the page writes itself.

And for the record, it's fine for people to set their boundaries wherever they want. All the author loses in this case is a bit of time writing one email

Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have a problem, I want to put my head in the problem space and stay focused there until it's done. Every time a test suite takes five minutes to run, or I have to look up some obscure docs in my web browser, or I have to go somewhere else to rebuild a failing service, is an off-ramp to that flow state, and that's where I lose a whole hour to procrastination.

I enjoy software more out of a love of maths than a love of technology. My favourite class of problems are the times I can boil a problem down to a simple equation without even touching a keyboard, and I seem to be one of the few people who enjoy algorithmic design. So for me, churning out a script using an LLM hits the same part of my brain as randomly inserting numbers into a sudoku until the app tells me I have the right answer.

Let's say you managed this. Say you designed trains and safety protocols for coupling/decoupling at 100mph, completely reconfigure the signalling system, solve the inevitable accessibility issues for embarking the fast train... You still have 100 tonne vehicles that need conflict management between different finite sets of steel rails. And all of those other things would need physical reconfiguration as well.

I find that when selling people on the idea of network upgrades, people find the solutions unintuitive because issues in one place are often caused by bottlenecks very far away. Half the North West and services as far as Scotland, Wales and East Anglia are stuffed because of a single mile of rail in central Manchester, so you have tell people in rural Derbyshire, "hey, Manchester needs more rail funding, it'll help you, promise". It will, but you have to know a bit about the whole network to understand why.

I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more software was needed. I tried my best to explain that we had in fact done that, and that in the end, there's no getting around the bottleneck of moving 100 tonne vehicles along a finite set of steel rails.

And like cookie clicker, once you're watching the number going up long term, it's hard for your mind to accept a point at which you have "enough".

It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.