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Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck?
  • I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will 'cam out' (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out

    Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they're great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they've been painted over.

    Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun

  • Controversial law designed to free up hospital beds to be tested in Ontario court
  • This is horrible.

    It would be reasonable to assume that the lack of LTC supply is at least partly because it's not profitable to have extra spaces you're not using.

    That lack of supply makes it more likely that seniors would have to look at places further away.

    Plus, the people profiting off LTC are folks like former Conservative Premier Mike Harris, who not only used to be chair of the board of Chartwell Retirement Residences, but has also owned millions of dollars in company shares (as of 2022, Harris no longer controls >10% of the company, so he doesn't have to file public disclosures of his holdings).

    https://burlingtongazette.ca/its-time-that-we-take-the-words-private-and-profit-out-of-how-we-care-for-our-seniors/

    While premier, Harris also pushed hard to privatize the industry that he would later benefit from.

    This looks like another case of Ford making sure his buddies rake in as much money as possible, even if it causes human misery.

  • As the open social web grows, a new nonprofit looks to expand the 'fediverse'
  • Unfortunately, Meta is listed as one of their partners

  • Evan Prodromou Launches The Social Web Foundation
  • Would be very interested to know if Meta (listed as a "partner" organization) is providing financial support, like how fellow partner the Ford Foundation lists a $50k grant[1] in February 2024 to the Exchange Point Institute, which is the "fiscal sponsor" of the Social Web Foundation[2]

    [1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/our-grants/awarded-grants/grants-database/exchange-point-institute-149412/

    [2] https://socialwebfoundation.org/donate/

  • Conservatives call on Elon Musk to step in after Liberals provide loan to Ottawa-based satellite operator
  • Not to mention that their napkin math is wrong by a factor of 12

  • Record speaker (audio out) in Bitwig?
  • No replies yet so I'll give it a try - feel free to ignore if you solved this already

    Are you using pipewire? I would think that either helvum or qpwgraph would be able to route the audio from youtube into bitwig but I haven't tried to do this.

  • (CW: Transmisogyny) Transmisogynistic parents harass girl at New Hampshire school soccer game
  • Regardless of what happened on the sidelines, Hawkins added that on the field, there was sportsmanship, as some of the Bow soccer players reached out to the transgender girl on the Plymouth team.

    "Some of the fellow soccer players from Bow actually sent supportive letters of love and support and encouraging that student to continue to play," Hawkins said.

    The kids are alright ❤️

  • Conservatives call on Elon Musk to step in after Liberals provide loan to Ottawa-based satellite operator
  • Did no one in the replies happen to notice that this is a loan

  • Generative AI is reportedly tripling carbon dioxide emissions from data centers
  • Yep absolutely, and even those numbers likely represent raw emissions figures vastly lower than the true impact these data centres are having on global emissions.

    For example, that Google report talks about EACs - here's a great podcast episode that explains why these kinds of accounting methods are a complete disaster:

    Reveal: It's Not Easy Going Green

    https://revealnews.org/podcast/its-not-easy-going-green-update-2023/

  • UK datacentres to be designated critical infrastructure
  • This move, at least on the face of it, seems to privilege the cloud giants over say, a company that maintains its own servers. That's effectively a handout of public resources to those already fabulously wealthy and powerful corporations.

    That's where I drew the conclusion from

  • UK datacentres to be designated critical infrastructure
  • Isn't technofeudalism great?

  • Canada is not broken.
  • I would like to hear you say it

  • Canada is not broken.
  • What's strange about defending people's freedom to be themselves?

  • Canada is not broken.
  • Why not do both?

  • Canada is not broken.
  • What's the problem with drag queens reading to kids, exactly?

  • What's your favourite bitwig trick?
  • Very cool! Yeah I will definitely need to crack open some more of these tools and just keep playing, I haven't even tried most of them yet, will have to explore that select-4 module first though

    Also that strip on your controller looks like fun to use!

    I don't have a video to share but one of the things I discovered was, if I use the note expressions to randomize velocity a bit, and then map velocity to the likelihood of transposing notes up an octave.... now every time a midi chord plays, I can get a different voicing. Got a feeling I'll be using that technique a lot

  • What's your favourite bitwig trick?

    Relative newcomer to Bitwig, making music as a hobby. Mostly in-the-box synths & samples stuff, but sometimes I'll record instruments or vocals too.

    The last DAW I was using was Cubase v5 (lol), so I've been checking out some tutorials on Bitwig's workflow and functionality. I really like the ease of adding subtle expression variations, and the modulation options are an absolute game-changer.

    But I feel like I've only scratched the surface - what are some features that are not quite so obvious that you like to use?

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    Nov 5th? Is he planning to blow up parliament?
  • Like it or not, things sometimes become symbols for other things, and especially given the political climate, it makes sense for people to get their guard up if they see something that looks like one of those symbols that represents, say, an utterly toxic ideology.

    Not wanting to make others navigate that stuff unnecessarily is a sign of thoughtfulness and pro-social tendencies, not weakness.

  • Indigenous leaders burn PRGT pipeline agreement, blockade B.C. road | The Narwhal
  • With energy companies, you mean? Like, we've seen federal governments of various countries cancel (or re-approve) pipelines all the time - Keystone XL comes to mind, for instance

  • Indigenous leaders burn PRGT pipeline agreement, blockade B.C. road | The Narwhal
    thenarwhal.ca Indigenous leaders burn PRGT pipeline agreement, blockade B.C. road | The Narwhal

    Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs are blocking the road to a work camp for the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, and Indigenous youth are at the forefront of opposition

    Indigenous leaders burn PRGT pipeline agreement, blockade B.C. road | The Narwhal
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    Designing Friction (philosophical essay about technology)
    designingfriction.com Designing Friction

    A fundamental design principle for techno optimists. How we need to move towards friction in digital culture. By Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters

    Designing Friction

    cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39429322

    > Interesting essay looking at the role of friction in human development, and how a particular vision of technology's function in society - one that seeks to eliminate friction - paradoxically reduces our autonomy, rather than enhancing it. > > This post was reported as spam on technology @ lemmy.world, and was removed, then eventually reinstated, by the mods. The original reason for removal was "it's not really technology-related." I suspect it's being brigaded due to my cryptocurrency criticism, but I have no way to know for sure.

    (Edit - update: I have now been banned from technology @ lemmy.world for ... I guess asking the mods how this isn't tech-related? LOL)

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    Designing Friction (philosophical essay about technology)
    designingfriction.com Designing Friction

    A fundamental design principle for techno optimists. How we need to move towards friction in digital culture. By Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters

    Designing Friction

    Interesting essay exploring the role of friction as it relates to human progress, and how the reduction or removal of friction, through a particular conception of the role of technology in our society, actually limits our autonomy, rather than enhancing it.

    0
    Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji (blog post)

    35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called "Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji".

    F that

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    The Slow Fedi Movement: Toward a Green, Independent, and Equitable Fediverse

    The Fediverse - especially the microblogging side of it - has deep issues when it comes to environmental sustainability.

    And the high resource requirements, which result from an incredible level of redundancy, aren't just bad environmentally: they make running a server more costly, and increase our reliance on Big Tech's infrastructure.

    I wrote about all this, along with some suggestions for how we can improve things somewhat.

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    smallpatatas smallpatatas @lemm.ee

    see also: @smallpatatas@gotosocial.patatas.ca

    Posts 8
    Comments 56