bryndos

The Transport & Environment thinktank has urged the government to use the autumn budget to bring in a levy on the largest vehicles, which it said would reflect the damage they caused to the environment and infrastructure.

Has this ‘thinktank’ met the spineless tory wannabees that are in the government?

When i can take a car on the bus and use it to listen to mp3s or play games or read ebooks while I travel, and I can get a decent used one for £50 and have a few quid a month operating costs; then maybe I’ll think about replacing my phone with a car. Until then, a car is nothing like a phone.

“For over a century, the automobile has represented freedom, power, and the thrill of mechanical mastery.”

Fuck that bullshit - I think whatever poor soul wrote that must’ve never seen a train.

I think I’d notice birds, it could be spiders though. My hair is pretty thin white and wispy whatever of it is left… But it’s significantly less strong than steel - maybe pacifist spiders who resent their own culture.

I’m not doing anything intentional, where is it appearing?

I think I had one back in the late 90s. Now-a-days nature takes care of it.

I’d say on the Hardware side, degoogling is a pain. Android devices are not very ‘open’. I think graphene is the only alternative that’s easy to install and that only works on a couple of devices. For others like linage there are a few more devices but some of the install procedures are shonky and can leave you with unlocked bootloader and stuff like that. Scares off many people I’d think. I think a device that was designed to allow you to install an OS and is not basically locked down is attractive.

Put another way, you can fork android all you like, but what are you going to run it on, and how do you install it? If there was a device that made it easy , it might get popular enough to attract more interesting open source innovations.

On the software side , once you ditch google there’s also way fewer applications. F-droid is ok; but being able to use one of the major distro with an ARM repository would give a decent amount of stuff - albeit not optimised for touchscreen.

I think there’s an options also some technical stuff about how much call and cellular data has to go through your cellular network, and whether bypass or switch off is an option - I think that’s for the real privacy people - I don’t really know about it.

Yes the headline is exaggerating the evidence presented in the article - (I’m shocked /s).

I think the authors are confident that the observed crash rate seems to be higher for eBikes . . . but that’s not enough to say which is more dangerous.

I’d think rider attitudes will be one of the main things here - take a negligent or reckless eBiker and put them on an eScooter and I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to crash it. It’s not obvious to me that they used trip average speed as a proxy for this - I think they should at least have tested if their ratios were the similar when comparing fast with fast and slow with slow - that’d have been easy enough and they probably have the sample size to do that.

They mention high-res GPS data so they could maybe have done a better “driving characteristics” thing - using acceleration and braking data as a proxy for riders who are either bad at reading the road - or are impatient. That might be where they’d need more data, as they’d probably need to establish a “normal” profile for each route - to benchmark the extremes of behaviour.

I guess that’d have taken a lot longer and the funding only goes so far. Interesting dataset they have for sure - maybe they’ll do some more papers on it in future.

Judging by their stats they must have had data on 150,000-200,000 e bike trips overall. So if you treat each trip as an relevant event for determining the crash rate - then I think it’s a decent enough sample size of eBike trips. It’s just they had heck of a lot more of eScooter data.

The main biassed I’d think are around the rental companies they got data from, and the customer populations. And that they have basically only 7 cities.

but the findings were remarkably consistent over 3 measures of exposure and within each city except Dusseldorf (not enough ebikers to have any crashes).

A couple of the p-values were over 5% or 10% , so some were weaker when narrowing down to an city or just one of the exposure measures - but still a fairly consistent pattern.

I second this. No one forced me. Even when work tried to force me to use smartphone 2FA it was easy enough to say “I’m not putting any f-ing micrsoft crap on my phone”, they found a workaround - magically they could just use the basic telephone network to do the 2FA.

I chose to get one because it’s more convenient than having phone, walkman, camera, book, torch , map, compass etc. I still carry many of those things from time to time when I want them, or when I want extra resilience. But I’s choose the phone most times because it is a cheap, lightweight, small, convenient alternative that makes so many things just a bit easier.

Bloody hell just faffing around with walkman batteries and recording compilation tapes was annoying enough.

It’s also very easy to just leave your phone behind and use the alternatives, they pretty much all still exist in some form. I mean that happens to me regularly whenever I lose my phone of when I forget to charge it or (partly) when I’m just out of range of the celluar network. I don’t remember either dying or having any police jump on me and force me to buy a new one or charge it up immediately.

“If you’ve done six impossible things today, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways!”

The best salvation I can suggest is:

I use CDs, Records and occasionally bandcamp - usually just for a free listen before I go to their concerts and buy from them there.

But just to be clear I also buy a lot of used records and cds; which I think can be seen as similarly immoral. Evil used record stores hoarding all the margin and never compensating the original artists. Again if they’re any good and ever play nearby, they’ll get a ticket sale and maybe I’ll by a record direct from them if they do a good show.

Mostly I only care about the morality for small/new/unpopular bands, first few albums and so on.

I couldn’t give a shit about compensating large successful artists like the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan - or more accurately, whoever they sold their catalogue rights to.

Pretty much nothing i use my phone for can be done on a flip phone. Smartphone is no distraction for me - I just use it when I need it to do something for me.

maps - occasionally GPS. mp3 player
mp4s watching on long train / bus rides or when camping. large sd card (500gb) memrise/ language learning app. occasionally guitar tuner occasionally internet is useful for checking events, buying tickets, checking for hotels and stuff. occasionally checking emails. occasionally playing mindustry (when i want my battery to die).

I don’t carry a laptop most of the time that i’d need for most of that stuff above. TBH - I can’t use many other apps anyway because I don’t want GPS or microG installed - so I’m mostly just f-droid apps.

Edit - i’d also prefer something like simpleX to SMS, but I don’t actually know anyone else who uses it - so not an issue really. I just have to SMS.

If you don’t want portability, and do want expandability, then I don’t think Steam Deck is a good choice for you.
Much as it is a brilliant devicel it’s also a wee bit old now. And anyone who wants the anti-cheat games is still stuffed.

I disagree with any others saying it is openable and repairable. It’s better than modern slimline laptops - which is not saying much. I don’t think it’s as accessible asa Mini PC - and frankly if you want to upgrade, go desktop. If you can get a used old case with a decent PSU - then buy the rest of the guts - you’ll end up with something way better - and you’ll be able to make sure you can fully power your GPU and CPU for the things you want to do with it. And far easier to cool it properly and avoid throttling if you’re really pulling a load of watts into it. This probably does matter if you want to game at high resolutions with high frame rates for modern games. If you don’t mind dropping to lower resolutions or <=60FPS, or turning off some fancy GFX features, then the mini PC would be fine. Of course with a desktop you can adapt the components a bit to your budget, and maybe swap in cheap second hand stuff as a stop gap until you upgrade a component.

Fair warning - the rest of this post is pro-linux bullshit . . .

For steamdeck - the only reason i could think that remains is if you had a desperate need to get out from under microsoft’s thumb - and didn’t want to go for a full DIY linux install - then SteamOS is excellent in both gaming and desktop mode. It really shows how user friendly linux can be if you pay full time devs to maintain a distribution with a specific customer group and specific hardware in mind. And IMHO ( I only use MS at work so maybe I’m a bad source) it actually shows up how fucking awful windows is. SteamDEck really is just turn it on and get on with what you want to do , no bother; games console level usability. I think even computer-illiterate people would find desktop mode pretty easy to get on with.

But it’s only half-arsed “proper linux”, and half-arsed independence from big tech, as you’re just substituting Valve as the ones who you rely on to curate your OS for you. And if ever Steam gets bought out you might have to move to something else. So it doesn’t have the independence of full open source; though it’s a lot closer to that than MS.

It’s also quite a lot of money to pay for an old device just to try a different OS. To do that I’d get a cheap real PC and experiment - a used miniPC from 5-10 years ago with some of the retro gaming linux distros are a fun and cheaper way to do that.

… end of pro linux bullshit

Call the (US) police.

Can you do the last panel but also including the burnt out husks of the EVs that they got trapped in?

Well it means Arsenal FC supporter. So there’s certainly an overlap, but there are many other wankers out there. I mean there’s all the other types of football fans for a start, for example there’s a bunch for whom this type of thing would perfectly normal, habitual even:

“My condolences on you recent bereavement. Sincerely, A.F. Wanker COYS”

Coprolite

That’s probably why risc-v is getting quite popular in embedded stuff - smaller companies wanting more supply chain independence. Hopefully it’ll start to get more powerful soon for more serious computing. Its nice that stuff like debian now has risk-v version too.

Driving killing machines / operating heavy mahinery should be reserved for adults. An ‘adult’ being someone who is mature enough to not to instigate or escalate these types of situation. I think both drivers should be banned from driving until they can prove that they are competent to operate heavy machinery.