I follow a couple of channels on youtube that post replays of interesting radio communications between pilots and air traffic control. There are technical issues that cause departing flights to return to the airport virtually every single day. Electronics, landing gear stuck down or stuck up, engine stall, engine fire, flaps jam, a sensor says something unexpected. Every brand of airplane imaginable. Pilots are trained to navigate every possible failure mode a plane can encounter. Getting permission to carry commercial passengers requires an incredible level of training and testing. Commercial planes are rigorously engineered.

I’m not trying to carry water for Boeing, but this article describes a relatively common operation (as far as I can tell).

I guess my phrasing wasn’t great on that, but also deeply skeptical of literally everything that came out of Rush’s mouth.

Think I’m getting the hang of a shift in dietary stuff. Feeling less overwhelmed after a few weeks of mental chaos. Little more glass half full.

I’m confused. Are Feiglin, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich not Israeli?

Quotes from a right-wing Israeli get together in January isn’t completely out of context, but it is pretty out of context for a reaction article to something in June.

Him quoting Hitler isn’t even the main issue in this case

I think it sort of is in the context of this article if the author is seeking a response to cite.

Lastly, if there are not a lot of public quotes condemning this coming out of Israel, for them to quote, isn’t that itself kind of a problem?

Sure, that is possible. But you would assume someone citing Hitler in Israel would get some sort of response, so not touching that at all seems like an omission. Yanis’s thoughts on that are less interesting to me than a random Israeli teenager on Omegle. Also, this Feiglin person seems to have last held office in 2015 (I don’t know, just a quick Google), which might be useful context. I want to know if this nutter has any hope of grasping political power, or if he’s the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh.

I don’t know understand why this article would quote Yanis Varoufakis or Trita Parsi, but not a single Israeli. Does Moshe Feiglin have meaningful support? Is he likely to hold a seat in the Knesset? What are the odds his party gains seats against Likud in the next election?

Do I have the wrong expectation of what journalism is?

It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn’t really explain Google’s changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.

Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub

Not to downplay the seriousness of the title or claims, but undergraduate enrollment is in a relatively steep decline. It seems to go without saying that faculty members without tenure would be near the top of the list for cuts.

Side note…did theintercept recently go paywalled? I don’t remember having issues in the past.

Random thoughts…

Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.

Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.

China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).

There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.

opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon

While it might not explain everything, you can take a look at some stats here: https://fedidb.org/

I switched. Not happy about it and will continue to consider it a factor in my next, but that will be years from now and I’m sure the list will be even smaller.

I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!

Amazon is moving away from Android. This move isn’t exactly surprising. It is disappointing though, imo. From my limited testing, I was able to side load an xmpp app on Android and message, voice call, video call seamlessly. In theory, the ability for developers of some types of apps to target Android and reach Windows without writing a touch of Windows-specific or accommodating code was a huge opportunity for open source developers to effortlessly reach cross-platform audiences.

There isn’t off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn’t to say there isn’t frivolous spending there - I have no idea.

Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.

Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn’t a good platform to deliver advertising through.

My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.

I don’t think that “bigwig” has a negative connotation, but maybe I miss its common use.

I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper’s campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.

Worth mentioning that most modern clients support omemo at this stage.

Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.

My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.