Yeah, all surely true and it’s always the solution given and it’s even the greenest one. But I just don’t think this is a real solution for normies, who tend to buy computers new (to the extent that they even buy them any more). And in this respect I’m like them, personally.

Hmm. Having trouble parsing your negatives but I think you’re saying “expensive”.

What bothers me is that a decade ago there were loads of Linux-compatible budget netbooks on sale at every big-box retailer, whereas there seems to be nothing today under 500 bucks/euro except Chromebooks, and nothing at all with a smallish screen except mega-expensive ultrabooks. It’s becoming a problem.

Great job. As I see it the real problem is that low-end Wintel laptops seem to be going away, replaced first by Chromebooks and soon probably by Android laptop edition, which presumably will have the non-Intel architecture and weird blobs and locked bootloader of any smartphone. Or is this too pessimistic?

I’ve been using it for a few years

undergoing a significant rewrite for the 0.4 release

I plan to try it when it’s ready. Some time next century at this rate.

So you’re saying that (you think the data says) most people here are not blanket-downvoting anything that gives them marginally bad vibes, and that the damage is being done by a busy few? Interesting if true. I too basically never downvote, on the principle that it’s toxic and hostile and just not something that has a polite equivalent in person. I had assumed I was a massive outlier.

All decent advice. Here’s a thought experiment.

Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about [etc]

By the same token it would be bad to stop such a discussion, right? Right.

Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits

Therefore it would be bad to *destroy" such communities, right? Indeed.

Upvote the things you like

So, it would be bad to downvote the things you - personally, subjectively - don’t like - right? It wouldn’t? Why so?

Don’t downvote other people’s good-faith opinions. It’s petty, it’s juvenile, it’s toxic. Even if you don’t see it that way. It’s precisely what will discourage the participation we all want to see.

Great - as long as it’s a web app.

Yes, all good points. I did mention points 2 and 3, and I agree they’re all important.

Very thorough and informative article (even if from an interested source).

IMO the fact that even Switzerland is going here should tell us that the privacy camp is not really winning this whole argument.

And personally I’m even slightly divided on it myself. If we look at this through the lens of legacy offline equivalence, there was never a guarantee of privacy in the pre-encryption era, even in democracies. For two people corresponding with each other, the police have always been able to ask for warrants to spy on mail and tap phone calls. In practice, privacy depended more on obscurity, and the fact that data-mining phone calls and mail was not possible. Now take a group chat with 1000 people - to ask for total privacy for such a conversation in the pre-internet time was just a logistical impossibility. These are the “common-sense” arguments that the police and - let’s face it - many ordinary people today find pretty persuasive. Countering them is going to be hard. Especially since there clearly are cases where bad stuff is plotted in the secrecy of encrypted spaces. Organized crime of all kinds, terrorist attacks, even genocide (over Whatsapp in Myanmar and elsewhere). To win this argument, we’re going to need convincing answers for all this.

One good answer is that (as I understand it) human intelligence (i.e. infiltration) has always been more effective for police than the “lazy” option of signals intelligence.

Then there’s the natural expectation of privacy argument. IMO this is very persuasive for 2-person conversations. Personally I find it absolutely outrageous that some policeman, for purposes of “public safety”, could just listen in to my private conversation with a single friend. Maybe this is a Western mindset. I’m not sure that in China everyone feels this way.

But a total guarantee of privacy for group conversations of 10, 1000, 1 million? Perhaps. But among the general public that argument is yet to be won.

As I recall, a major reason it didn’t take off was very simple: the new “Sunday” only came every 10 days instead of 7!

The best bit about it was definitely the evocative month names.

13! A prime number indivisible into anything. Ugh!

Exactly. Let’s wait and see.

Source is Meta itself, so perhaps not a good overview of the story.

The two third parties mentioned have not even launched yet. .And the “Join the waitlist” buttons on their websites look suspiciously similar.

Would be interesting to understand better what’s going on here. Lots of us are waiting patiently for a way to interact with the billions of Whatsapp users without accepting (as they carelessly do) a contractual relationship with Meta.

The statistics show that for typical night-train itineraries, flying is far (far) more popular. The rest is just my own anecdotal experience.

China’s high-speed night train is definitely an option. I doubt it will ever happen, there are so many other projects with higher priority (the kind of projects that the Chinese get done in a year and that take Europe a decade).

I have taken trains of all kinds all over Europe, and indeed all over China. Including the 30-hour variants. My opinion is that if we want to get people out of planes, slow trains (day or night) are basically an irrelevance. Even if they were cheap they will still just be toooo slooooow for most people. The only thing that can compete is high-speed for the 600km itinerary. The rest is nice to have. It’s a romantic experience for train fans like us, and irrelevant for almost everyone else.

Yes I was aware of France’s abusively high track fees.

I’m just noting a societal phenomenon that IMO affects France in particular, as it happens. Many of the same people who complain about night trains being axed do not in fact take night trains themselves. Aspirational night-train passengers, you could call them. They themselves take cheap flights, which are objectively easier, more comfortable and (uh) cheaper.

French night trains, which I have taken a number of times, are not very full and not very good. I know things are better in central Europe. Personally, I’m convinced they will never be the answer to planes. If they were, China would be investing in them and not in high-speed rail. The market for night trains will never be more than a romantic footnote and I wish we would not be so distracted by them.

So why are they always fighting closure? What is certain is that they are, AFAIK, never profitable (unlike many high-speed lines). Not every train line has to be profitable - but then, if there’s no problem with demand, why would they not just raise prices to ward off closure? Something’s off!

This is becoming quite a chestnut in Europe. If only there were as many people who wanted to take night trains as there are who want to save them.

I’m mortified :( It’s never been my goal to make others feel bad online. I had a quibble with the wording on a meme and clumsily worded my idea of “Our differences shouldn’t be minimized because they make us special” was seen as transphobia/TERF rhetoric.

Try not to take it personally. You waded into a subject which has become a sort of rationality-free zone. Perhaps more so even than Israel-Palestine, or immigration in Europe. On these topics there is almost nobody left who is interested in nuanced debate, it’s now only a question of identifying which “side” one’s interlocutor is on, and then unloading on them (or downvoting, or deleting, or blocking, or banning) as appropriate. You stumbled into sterile trench warfare, basically.

Soon after I joined Lemmy I was banned from a (somewhat serious) community for making the same mistake you made. I learned my lesson. With certain topics, genuine debate - open-minded, good faith discussion - is just not possible. I see it as a failure of Lemmy, yes, but mainly of the whole medium of text-based social media. It’s certainly not your fault.

There’s a sweet spot between CLI and GUI: TUI.

Since when did I claim to be “passionate” about anything? My proposal concerns new users, it’s in the title. I’m not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it’s important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.