balsoft

Unless you have sustainable electricity production and battery recycling set up, EVs are not substantially better for the environment compared to ICE cars. Raw materials for lithium batteries have an enormous ecological footprint. Energy transmission & charging losses mean that if you're using fossil fuels (especially coal) to produce electricity, in terms of raw CO₂/km EVs are only 10-30% more efficient than gasoline-powered cars. Doesn't matter how much pollution control you slap on there, greenhouse gases are kind of the main problem here and carbon capture on fossil power plants is mostly a greenwashing scam and doesn't work.

Sure, EVs are a bit better for the environment in almost all cases, but if you compare that with efficient public transit it's a bloodbath.

That's before you even start considering other issues with cars, like all the microplastics released from tires, the noise (yes, EVs are also really noisy at speeds >30km/h), the financial and environmental cost of covering our cities in asphalt, the societal damage caused by car-centric infrastructure, the amount of parking space they need, the psychological stress they cause to everyone around them, and finally just how fucking dangerous they are. If you consider all of those, it's insane that we still allow people to bring private vehicles into densely populated areas at all. Cities should not have private cars, period, doesn't matter if they're battery-powered or self-driving or whatever. In fact I'd go as far as to say almost no human settlements with developed infrastructure should have them.

Cars are good for one thing: traveling medium distances in places with little or no infrastructure. For everything else better modes exist.

I should have clarified this is about individual vehicles

I agree that it does "the right thing", that is it behaves as documented. But that "right thing" could be surprising to a human.

There's ls -v which does "version sort" which would seem like a more reasonable default, at least for human consumption. I know it's impossible to change now because a bajillion tools all over the place depend on the sort order.

However new tools like eza do this by default:

❯ eza
1  6   11  16  21  26  31  36  41  46  51  56  61  66  71  76  81  86  91  96
2  7   12  17  22  27  32  37  42  47  52  57  62  67  72  77  82  87  92  97
3  8   13  18  23  28  33  38  43  48  53  58  63  68  73  78  83  88  93  98
4  9   14  19  24  29  34  39  44  49  54  59  64  69  74  79  84  89  94  99
5  10  15  20  25  30  35  40  45  50  55  60  65  70  75  80  85  90  95  100

❯ touch `seq 1 100`
❯ ls
1    18  27  36  45  54  63  72  81  90
10   19  28  37  46  55  64  73  82  91
100  2	 29  38  47  56  65  74  83  92
11   20  3   39  48  57  66  75  84  93
12   21  30  4	 49  58  67  76  85  94
13   22  31  40  5   59  68  77  86  95
14   23  32  41  50  6	 69  78  87  96
15   24  33  42  51  60  7   79  88  97
16   25  34  43  52  61  70  8	 89  98
17   26  35  44  53  62  71  80  9   99

(Do I need to tell you how many times I fucked up like this myself?)

How would you make it easier? Currently it's on the sidebar with a big "Releases" heading and the link to the most recent release. From there you just look at Assets and download your file. The only way I can see it being easier is if it showed an annoying pop-up for all non-logged in or new users.

I just realized I can now "read" the writing systems of all European languages (if you don't count hebrew as European which I don't), neat

As for autumn it's been rainy/snowy but otherwise quite nice here.

So 86% of registered republicans have never read a middle school history book? About checks out actually.

Rust is socially vaguely on the left/progressive side, yes. Not so much economically of course, because of all the corporate involvement.

GNU has some right-wing libertarian culture in it, but is also vaguely leftist and anti-corporate otherwise. I would actually say Rust is slightly more progressive than GNU on social issues, but not by much; and GNU is more anti-corporate, but also not by much.

I know there some other more certainly leftist FOSS projects out there (like the one we're chatting on right now 😉) but overall Nix is pretty good on that front.

Well, yes, there are two separate contentious points.

The Anduril thing actually happened a month or so ago. I feel like this will be resolved at the next election, since tomberek's term is ending and I don't think he will be reelected, knowing how much most people in the community hate US MIC.

The moderation team independence is more complicated. It looks like the Steering Committee tried to remove a member from the moderation team, and also tried to push a new member onto it. I don't know the exact details there. If we just read the constitution, the SC has that power, but the moderation team was very unhappy with what they see as meddling in their affairs for political reasons, and decided to quit out of protest. I feel like the new member was a right-wing (in the context of the kinda leftist Nix community anyway) political appointment (since the stated reason was "to balance things out politically" and the mod team was mostly leftist), but don't know for sure and this is pure speculation. In any case, I think the moderation team is special and should not be under complete control of the SC (unlike purely technical teams). I don't know how that would look like, and indeed as you say a restructuring is needed. Maybe the SC should only be able to veto people joining the team, but the candidates have to be chosen by the mod team themselves, and in order to disband the mod team the SC must disband themselves too. Otherwise the moderators will have no good way to moderate any discussion involving SC.

Unfortunately "direct suppliers of the arms industry" covers like half of the IT industry. I've also avoided such companies but it's surprisingly common.