We can’t have any of those things, because humans are shitty, and are as a whole just in it for themselves.

I disagree, I don’t think humans are, as a whole, shitty. Most people are willing to do good when faced with a moral decision, even one they stand to gain from. Its just the ones that make it into seats of wealth and power aren’t part of that majority, so we see and hear about these awful people far more than the millions of good people all around us.

In a community as wide reaching as the internet there are going to be people looking for personal gain over others and they make everyone else withdraw. I don’t think you could ever have a gathering of millions, with some actually representing corporate profit motives, and freely share without risk. But not because everyone in there wants to stab you and take your money, but because a few do and you have no idea who some of them are and one of them is Jeff Bezos and he pays you.

I’m not sure if I’m adding anything new here, but the wall wart appears to be a ballast which traditionally drives fluorescent tubes. There are led tubes you can just plug into a light fixture or lamp with a ballast, there are also ones that want you to rewire the lamp and remove the ballast. I won’t be able to help on rewiring as I’m in the US on our special voltage and I’m not qualified to be giving advice on that here much less anyplace else. There is another type of tube that can operate both with and without ballast (after a rewire).

The first step would be to ensure the tubes you’ve got are ones that need the ballast to work, it should say on the product page. In the US they refer to these as type A, the ones that work without ballast as type B, and ones that work with both as type AB. I’m unsure if that is the same elsewhere, but I do notice the “AB” in your picture, so that may be the case, but you would need to confirm.

If it works with ballast you could replace the old ballast with a new one, which is easier and safer than the alternative, though you may struggle to find one that fits where you want it to and they are less energy efficient. I have no experience replacing ballast, so I can’t help you there, but it may be as simple as getting another ballast and wiring it in. You can probably get a brand new one as they do wear out over time and need to be replaced.

If if works without ballast, since you’ve already removed it, it may make sense to rewire the lamps for the LEDs to run directly off of main voltage if the tubes are made for that and if you can find the resources to teach you how and you have the ability to do so safely. The lamps can be wired differently and the led tubes can require specific wiring. Its not the most dangerous thing you could do with electricity, but its got a lot of room for personal harm and fire if something is done wrong. I’ve done it without incident, but I’ve also rewired my home, adding light fixtures, a new circuit breaker box, and a heat pump, and had it inspected/approved by the local authorities, so I was pretty confident in my abilities. I don’t think its that hard to do safely in comparison to those other things, its just important to be very sure of what you are doing with electricity. Sometimes things can work but are incredibly dangerous still, other times they might blow up in your face. It takes years of training to be an electrician for a reason, you don’t get to make many mistakes more than once.

Also please don’t open up the transformers or ballast, they aren’t safe without the shielding they come with.

Good luck and stay safe.

Guild Wars, the original, is still up and running. It isn’t what OP is looking for, but an MMO released in 2005 is not only still playable and has people playing, but also gets very infrequent little patches. Pretty cool stuff.

I think, based on conversations I have with people in real life and read online, that the people in the US haven’t challenged the 60 years of propaganda about Cuba, and believe it a totalitarian nightmare dictatorship.

I have a close friend who went to Cuba for ecological research (did you know they still have intact reefs) a few years ago, and when they would tell people they were going to Cuba, the most common reaction was a fearful “that’s scary” and a confused, almost accusatory “why”.

I don’t think they realize that everyone else can just go to Cuba, it’s only the blue US passport and a bunch of old white guys, and probably now more Cuban Americans, with their fear of communism and land reform stopping them from enjoying a very nice bottle of state owned rum and an experience of how other people live.

I’m glad other countries have been stepping up to help the people there, the Cuban people deserve happy and comfortable lives, and we clearly don’t have the appetite to stop starving them of that right now. Until we shake that propagandized view, I don’t imagine that will change either.

No? That’s a weird deflection from the misery of a people, to point at other miserable people and imply, look they’re worse off so we can ignore everyone else. Or are you just lost, read a different piece, and replied to the wrong thing.

What you’re doing sure looks like deflection using whataboutism, but why deflect something you’re not at fault for? You don’t have to help the US government defend their actions.

I know it’s just a little sarcastic comment, but that’s only true if everyone goes along with it. Show them pain in their bottom line and it won’t seem so necessary to their shareholders and lobbyists anymore, and you’ll have a lot louder voices arguing against that law.

Also I’m totally cool being a ‘hermit’ if by hermit we mean chatting with friends on IRC and hanging out in real life, I’m always up for a LAN party.

I don’t think the company knows what it is anymore. They still pretend to be all about quality coffee and customer connection, but then push wild promotional drinks and very low service times while closing stores and cutting staff. They are clearly a fast food chain, but deny it, and do a poor job of it while also being a lousy place to hang out.

I worked at corporate for a while, and the culture, as it appeared to me, was all about folks vying for promotions and more desirable projects, with little weight put into what was or wasn’t good for the people who are in stores, customer or barista.

Maybe the new CEO has a better grip on this stuff, but his remote hq next to the golf course tells me he’s not gonna be better, also his previous company, Chipotle, isn’t exactly a place I seek out in 2026.

Well we’ve recently entered the race to the bottom category, we’ll see how that one goes

More seriously, the US did lead the way in various ways for a while for the time. Just gotta ignore the racism and colonialism. Unfortunately many innovations turned out to be the limit of American imagination and any attempt to continue to improve and grow is now met with hostility.

It’s probably at least somewhat a product of years of corporate and conservative interests marketing a return to an imagined golden age for economic and political gain. No room for new things in the fantasy of the '50s, just easy money, grass suburbs, giant cars, and unconcerned white people as far as the eye can see.

Yeah when I start ranting about the government’s cheese caves under Missouri people think I’ve finally cracked, but they’re real. It started as a program to help farmers during the great depression, but by now it’s just socializing the dairy industry and keeping prices artificially high. I don’t think they sold it to fund the program though, they distributed it through food security programs.

There’s gotta be better foods for the government to stockpile and distribute to the hungry than cheese though, it’s tasty, but it’s not great for you and it’s not filling many nutritional gaps. Not to mention lots of people can’t even eat it without getting sick

This or sit down to read a chapter before bed, look up and it’s 6 hours later and I have to pee and I haven’t touched my glass of water and my alarm goes off in 4 hours

Never in between

Symptoms vary not just by male and female, but from person to person, background to background, childhood to childhood, and they change with age. Autism covers a huge range of symptoms, and in reality anyone can have any of them even if they don’t match the typical archetype.

You’ll also find a lot of folks who weren’t diagnosed as a child, and then choose not to be diagnosed as an adult (it’s hard to get an adult diagnosis, and it’s expensive depending on where you live). More often than not these people will be able to live life without being noticed as autistic, but depending on where you look for info, they may not be included.

Seconding what the people I replied to said, talk to autistic people, every one will have a different opinion and outlook because they (we if you count self diagnosis) are all different people.

Personally, I recommend looking into the Autistic Rights Movement. It challenges the notion that autism is a disability and places an emphasis on autistic people doing the scientific research and helping each other.

The apps are bullshit but the slower cycles take less water and energy, which is definitely a positive.

Idk why the speed is a big deal to folks, it’s not like you have to sit there and babysit it, just hit play and go do something else

I use transit for transit (it’s in the name) but it also gives fantastic bike directions and transit+bike if I’m not feeling a particularly long ride. I may have had to mess with the settings but it almost always shows biking as an option.

Otherwise I use OsmAnd, but since I almost exclusively get around by bike and bus I am usually looking places up to manually plan routes, not using navigation.

Yes, the airlines aren’t being held hostage, no one said this.

Boeing has been subsidized for years and has generally been the only aircraft purchased by American airline companies. That was the claim and it’s true.

Sure they could buy Airbus or Embraer (and they do a lot more these days since Boeing has lost favor due to some fairly catastrophic crashes and basically stopped making the airplanes companies want), but historically they were much more expensive and “not American” (Airbus) or literally didn’t really exist as a serious choice in commercial air (Embraer). Bombardier hasn’t been in the commercial aircraft business at all since I think 2020, though the CRJ was a relatively common sight in the states for short flights until they stopped making it (I’m having trouble finding which airlines fly them though I didn’t look that hard).

Airbus didn’t have an American factory until 2016, and American Airlines, the airline with the most Airbus aircraft today, only started ordering them in 2011. Delta didn’t have any Airbus until the early 2000s when they bought out a company that did, and they still buy mostly Boeing. United has some Airbus these days too but the vast majority of their fleet and their entire historical fleet is Boeing, Lockheed (been out of commercial air for a long time), or McDonald Douglass (now Boeing).

Those are the current major airlines in the US, and even today they fly mostly Boeing, though that is changing when looking at current orders. There are a few more larger carriers such as Southwest, Alaska, Hawaiian, or Spirit, but many of them also fly mostly Boeing and I’ll let you do that research for yourself.

No company has anyone by hostage, but Boeing clearly has had the market in the US and it has been largely due to government subsidy in the form of “job creation” initiatives, military and space contract, and lax oversight.

Turns out lugging millions of heavy metal boxes around is a tough thing to make climate friendly

I wonder if we were developing petroleum refining and engines now instead of them being established and subsidised, if we would also find them to be unfeasible. I know petroleum products are ludicrously energy dense, but the whole process to make it usable is pretty intense, the infrastructure needed to get it everywhere is extensive, it leaks, it burns, and it smells bad.

It would be interesting to see the modern day cost associated with building out and maintaining gas infrastructure for cars

I feel like I am just repeating myself, disability does not prevent creative expression? A broken arm does not define your ability to paint. Perhaps one medium or another is more challenging but art has many many forms and we have been managing for thousands of years without a tech startup reinventing art. And not every culture in history has been as ableist as the one while live in today. Anyone can already make meaningful art.

As for not having the time, I think that’s an excuse for taking a shortcut using other people’s art and trying to make it their own. It won’t be as impressive, no matter how long they spend typing prompts into the computer, the person badly sketching mushrooms on their 10 at the local coffee chain is far more inspiring.

I wish we lived in a time where we were allowed to do what we loved and I may be a little envious of the people who are able to, but they have a right to complain that their work is being stolen and invalidated by people who don’t value it.

It’s using endless electricity and water to perform tasks I could do powered by a bowl of cereal in the morning. I’d rather need one solar panel than ten, and a river rather than a dried up well, personally, but ever increasing energy demands require the latter two.

If by accelerating you are referring to making the problem worse so we have to deal with melted ice caps sooner, then I agree! I for one don’t really trust turbo predictive text to solve the collapsing jet stream, but I sure do expect it to play a part in causing it. Or maybe just the extraction of increasing material from colonized countries to pay for our funny memes and your “art” through solar panel and battery. Either way, it is contributing in a very real way to the destruction of our planet for little gain that could be achieved more efficiently by other means.

The cool part about a smartphone is I actually wanted it and it did a thing nothing had before (except some PDAs maybe). Also living without one is very possible and I do so frequently, I’m not a chronic poster or social media user. Machine learning with a gui on it is neither something I wanted nor is it novel, and it is not improving the world we live in, it is making it worse.

The saving grace is this fad will pass as it becomes clear it’s the same as home automation, block chain, machine learning, the concept of web domains, etc. and it’s mostly been hype by tech investors all along. I would care about it a whole lot less if it weren’t so full of negative externalities.

I don’t think ‘disabled people’ need a computer to generate content to participate in art creation, and I don’t think artists making art is exploitation. The artists, meaning anyone who ever had their art posted online, are the ones being exploited here, their work was stolen and made to work for tech investors.

Even if these were tangible benefits they are a small compensation for the accelerated degradation of our shared planet, the mass robbery of nearly everyone on earth, and the further damage to our ability to critically think and create. And on top of that, the stuff it generates isn’t even very good.

If it turns out to be real, that would be the easiest buy I’ve ever had with a car. But with a design supposedly about practicality, why do they have to go with the iPad car controls? Hopefully that trend dies out soon and we can have buttons again.

I can’t see myself spending money on anything beyond a smartphone with a touchscreen for everything, and seeing it in this makes me more skeptical about the product as a whole.

It’s nice to imagine we can keep living exactly as we are and not have to pay up for any of the consequences of our actions. Maybe there will be a tech miracle to save us and the non-consenting species we are taking with us, but that hope, belief, and gamble is not a solution to the problem we have.

We have the solution, we know what it is, and we know how to execute it, we just lack the will. Until that miracle appears we should try to actually fix the problem.

Waiting for a tech solution to appear is like standing on the beach after an earthquake as the tide goes out praying that it won’t come back in.

Edit: Or maybe eating a nice dinner out and continuing to order hoping they forget your bill or someone else pays it. Either way it’s not doing a thing to make the problem better.