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Can’t believe the car would do this all by itself
  • 100% agree that it's horrible wording, but the linguistics nerd inside my brain just has to say: that's not the passive voice.

    Passive voice would be something like "a store was smashed into" or "a car was driven into the store", where the grammatical subject is the semantic object. It can be used to avoid saying the subject of the sentence, who's doing the action, but in this case they keep the active voice and just change the subject from a "driver" to a "car".

    On another note, it's also telling that the article first comments on financial damage, then that the driver is unhurt and the car is damaged, and only after that does it say that the store-owner and the two customers were unharmed.

  • Seeking info on all of the many, lesser known desktop environments
  • The DEs listed for a distro will be ones you can get out of the box, i.e. you install the distro and it already has the DE. However, you can then install pretty much any DE/WM on pretty much any distro. Most of the time, you'll also get a login screen where you can choose between different DEs, so you can try multiple on the same distro to see how you like them.

    Most of the 'random desktops' will be window managers, there are just a few main DEs, which each have a window manager bundled in. If you take one of the separate window managers (which can be tiling, stacking, or a mix) you'll just have a bit more work to do to make it like you want, but they can have more customisation than full DEs. You can make most window managers look like pretty much any DE, but not necessarily the other way around. If you look at !unixporn@lemmy.ml, most of those are window managers. Saying they're confusing to understand and you don't want to have to customise them to make them look nice and add any separate programs you need for a full system is fair, but saying they're ugly is kinda nonsensical, since you can make them look however you like.

    As for why some distros' Plasmas look different, that's just because it is itself quite customisable (from what I hear, the most customisable of the mainstream DEs). So if you install XeroLinux, you could customise it to look like stock Plasma, and vice versa.

    Long story short, don't choose a distro based on their default DE or vice versa, don't disregard window managers out of hand (but do if you just want a full out-of-the-box environment), and look at different distros' customisations, as well as !unixporn@lemmy.ml and similar, to see what DEs can look like you want, but again you don't have to decide distro based on that.

  • [Discussion] Opinion on Motorbikes as Car Replacements

    I'm about to get a motorbike and, while this is in no ways reasoning for getting the bike (it's pretty much entirely for fun), it's had me thinking a bit about the social impact of motorbikes/scooters, especially if they were widely used (like they are in India, South-East Asia, and a couple other places) for commuting.

    They're obviously more efficient in many ways. Less fuel usage, less material required to manufacture and transport, less space required both when driving and for parking, less infrastructure maintenance cost, etc. However, they're less efficient for all these things than the solutions mostly advocated by this and similar communities - namely public transport, cycling and walking. All of which are significantly better.

    In contrast to those alternatives, though, motorbikes need basically no infrastructure development to be used, so it would be far easier to make incremental progress with individuals riding a bike instead of taking the car, rather than requiring organised political action.

    Specifically for the USA and, to a lesser extent, the more similar countries like Canada and Australia, it's probably also more socially acceptable to not be riding public transport with the plebeians, or having to do physical exercise. And you can easily overcompensate with a massive bike, while still being far better than the massive cars coming out of the US - a litre bike is big, while a litre car is tiny. Obviously this isn't a 'good' reason, but it does seem to be a real consideration.

    The main counter-argument I can think of is safety. But if you look at the countries where motorbikes and scooters are common, they seem safer than riding a motorbike in Western countries (anecdotally, from people who have ridden there on trips but wouldn't think of it at home; if anyone can find statistics for it, I'd love to see them). I'd say this is because of their prevalence. You'd get rid of the selection bias for risk-takers, and for high-power bikes. You'd also reduce the issue that car drivers aren't aware of motorcyclists, and often don't notice them. Any collision that does happen would also be more likely between two motorbikes, which would be less deadly than a motorbike and a car. And if we transpose this prevalence of motorbikes to a western country with stricter regulations around licensing, required safety gear, road rules, etc., surely this would be even less dangerous than it is in those countries.

    Also, the safety argument seems quite similar to the safety argument for large SUVs for ferrying kids to school. Inside the car, you're safer, but that's at the cost of safety and health of those outside the car, as well as all the other negative effects we're all aware of. Obviously it's not quite to the same extent, but it just strikes me as similar.

    So, those are my opinions, which ended up a bit longer than I was expecting... But the reason for posting is that I'd love to hear yours. Do you think largely replacing cars with motorbikes would be beneficial but insufficient, infeasible, or do you think it would actually be worse?

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    How can I keep dropdown menus open while inspecting them in dev tools?
  • You can't style options, as they're browser-dependent and there isn't an agreed standard. You'd have to use a replacement, which provides the functionality with other components.

    Then, to keep it open, you should be able to toggle classes and states in the inspector. I'm Firefox, it's above the style inspector, labelled as .cls and :hov, I believe (I'm on mobile at the moment).

  • Firefox users may import Chrome extensions now
  • Seems like it. The article also mentioned that there are only 73 pairs available, so it sounds like Mozilla has to explicitly define what Chrome extensions corresponds to what Firefox extension.

  • Firefox users may import Chrome extensions now
  • Instead of importing the Chrome extension directly, Firefox is installing the Firefox version of the extension from Mozilla's own extension store.

    Seems like it's just for making the switch from Chrome smoother, rather than being useful for long-time Firefox users.

  • First keyboard build!
  • Aha. That all makes perfect sense. I wouldn't personally have so much duplication, though, and get shift & modkeys on the thumbs to make easy combos, but it's fine if you want them elsewhere. Do you use function keys that often? I just realised I use them so much I forgot to setup a layer for them, but that at least seems like it could go on one of the pinky keys. And a rotary encoder there would make heaps of sense.

  • First keyboard build!
  • That's quite an interesting layout. Is the vertical thumbkey easy to press? And what's the right arrow you've got in both thumb clusters? Does having a letter key on the thumb feel natural?

  • Tesla owners are expressing buyer’s remorse - if not by selling their Teslas, then at least with an apologetic bumper sticker.
  • Eh, if you vote Republican, complain about things getting worse, then vote Democrat, that's changing your mind. If I saw someone with that sticker, I'd assume they regret the decision and won't be getting another one. Being able to change your opinion with new information really shouldn't be discouraged.

  • Touch screens on linux?
  • It works great for me on Arch with Hyprland, even though that really isn't designed with touch in mind. I think there are some programs that provide touch gestures generically (egg something comes to mind?), but I've never needed them. I'm sure if you go with Gnome or something it would work great, so long as the touchscreen is recognised properly (I've never had issues, but that doesn't say much about if you would). I'd just get a live USB with whatever you would install, and see if it physically works. If it does, I'm sure there's a DE/WM that fits the workflow you want.

  • SLPT : Problem solving flowchart
  • A quick search shows it's just a person born out of wedlock. You might talk of 'bastard sons', and it's probably more common to talk of the bastard sons since they're the ones that might try to claim legitimacy and overthrow your 'legitimate' sons, but it seems to apply to both.

  • Book where the MC is hated for a reason? (With no romance as the focus)
  • Not quite what you're asking for, but Dalinor in The Way of Kings is at the very least distruted by his peers and hated/feared by the non-Alethi. He's not hated by most of the other main characters though, so not quite a loner that everyone hates. We don't really know why at first, but it ends up being for quite a good reason, and definitely leads to drama and conflict, as well as character development.

  • What would be good to learn if I want to do small to mid scale freelance webdev work?
  • Thanks for the reply. I've only had to use Django solo, so haven't had that issue since I know my own configuration, but I can see that would be problematic. What you say about the community though is certainly not what I would expect. Quite interesting, I suppose I'll have to have a better look now... Or, rather, add it to the list of things to have a look at.

  • What would be good to learn if I want to do small to mid scale freelance webdev work?
  • Is one of the other framework's you've used Django, and if so, how do they compare? I've never used Rails, but as far as I know, it's a similar concept, with batteries included and MVC architecture.

    If there isn't anything else that makes it better, I would personally recommend something like Django just because it's Python, which isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If you are having issues with Python, the answer is pobably a google away, and if you want to do something other than webdev, it's more likely to be in Python (AI/ML, data science, etc. mainly), including if you want to integrate something into a website. As far as I'm aware, Ruby's pretty much only been used with Rails, and both are waning in popularity - as you say, you yourself have moved away.

    That being said, I don't know Rails so that's all conjecture. If you tell me it's got something Django doesn't that makes it easier to use, I'll take that back.

  • A (probably not) unexplored issue with Google's Web Integrity Proposal

    I'm probably late to thinking this, and plenty of smarter people will have seen this, but I was just watching a video on Google's proposal which read out Mozilla's position on it, and noticed something that I haven't heard mentioned. As it says, it's designed to help detect and prevent 'non-human traffic', which would likely harm assistive technologies, testing, archiving and search engines. All of which Google is involved in.

    If they're an attesting body, which presumably they would be, they could just say that their indexing crawler is legitimate traffic and get all the data, while other search engines not accepted (yet) by an attesting body wouldn't be able to. So search engines will be locked down to only what exists now. And AI training currently requires scraping large amounts of the internet, which they won't be able to do. So this could also help create a moat for Google Bard, that their earlier memo said didn't exist, to outstrip open-source models, just due to access to data.

    I've heard people complain that this is an attempt to monopolise the browser market, but they practically already have done that, and I haven't heard anyone mention this. If all I've said is accurate and I haven't misunderstood something, this could allow them to monopolise (or at least oligopolise) everything that requires access to widespread internet data - basically everything they do.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DO
    donnachaidh @lemmy.dcmrobertson.com
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