Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery)

I’d say be aware rather than avoid. E.g I bought a $10 camping lantern that claimed 2.5 times its true capacity, but it still runs for hours and is a great, well designed, if flimsy, product for the price.

The sort option by “orders” is good for this. Far from infallible but still useful.

That’s a much broader term.

Although I came from vi (pre-vim and pre-evil) and still have the muscle memory, I don’t and haven’t used it myself.

I hear it described as a “nearly complete” and “very comprehensive”. There is definitely a solid community of people using and enjoying it, but on the other hand there are always some reports of getting tired of having to work through, and sometimes extend, an additional interface layer, so in the long run being happier to just adopt the default bindings.

I know there are a few areas where trying to follow common vim workflows doesn’t work as well. Historically the performance of line number display been weak in Emacs, though I believe it’s recently much improved. A lot of people seem to make heavy and constant use of it in vim but conversely for me (and I think it’s more common in Emacs) it’s only an occasional, transient need when some external log or error quotes a line number, so I have them only displayed when I hit the go-to-line binding.

Overall, I think the most frustrating issues people have trying to adopt Emacs from vim are due to trying to impose their specific familiar vim workflows. The most obvious example is people concerned with startup time, but for more typical Emacs workflows it’s a non-issue. Users typically stay in Emacs rather than jumping in and out of it from a terminal (and if you really want that workflow, you run one instance as a daemon and pop up a new client to it instantly). My Emacs instance’s uptime usually matches my computer’s uptime.

The draw of Emacs is not about it only being an editor so much as a comprehensive and programmable text environment. It is a lisp-based text-processing engine that can run numerous applications, the primary being an editor (the default, or evil, or others…) but also countless other applications like file managers, VC clients, subprocess management and many others. It 95% replaces the terminal for me, and many other tools. So it’s the environment through which you view and manipulate all things text that is very accessible to modify and extend to fit your needs. Hence the joke about it being an OS is pretty apt, though to believe it needs a good editor implies vim isn’t a good editor ;).

Which Emacs community? I’ve been following it for ages in a few places (Reddit is the most common) and I literally do not encounter any of that. Calling it evil was humor - as if people who went to all the bother making it would be trying to push people away…

Using the evil package is very popular and often recommended, which means literally using it like vim, but with all the Emacs ability on top. I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.

And yet Emacs users don’t fight vim users. Emacs users decided vim’s interface was pretty cool and added it to Emacs. Somehow people still call it a war though.

I’ve had buffalo wings, and American barbecue. Also I’ve been to American Thanksgiving meals with weird things like sweet potatoes with marshmallows on. So I’ve had some American ethnic food for one thing.

I had no idea you could do that - I was thinking of Mastodon. I don’t see that as an option and don’t see any emojis on posts there. Where do you have in mind?

It would weaken my point, but there is no algorithmic weight attached to it. You can’t sort by how many negative emojis are attached.

Yes - the only way to express disagreement is to compose a post.

[This is particularly bad on Facebook where an account is typically public with your real name, so reactionary blowhards spout their shit and the only possible resistance is from people willing to publish a statement against them. I find it ironic that (in my opinion) their requirement against anonymity significantly adds to the level of toxicity. But that’s Facebook and Facebook should die.]

Superficially it could be argued this is beneficial, as you have to have thoughtful reasoned discussion, or something, but in reality when I see something I think is wrong-headed or toxic, I just have a dread of getting sucked into trying to fix “someone is wrong on the internet”, and move on leaving them unchallenged with no sign of disapproval or disagreement, and I’m pretty sure my reaction is typical.

I find it interesting that, in my opinion, negativity (downvoting) and anonymity are actually positives for healthy discussion, contrary to many people’s opinions and a common contemporary cultural view that only positivity is helpful.

I remain skeptical that the microblog format is beneficial for anything much, except for the self feeding logic that people use it, so therefore it becomes a place to discover things.

Discussion is limited and stunted, with negative feedback only be of the form of posts. Systems without negative feedback cannot be stable. Facebook groups have the same problem and it’s one of the reasons its geographical groups descend to toxicity.

On the one hand the Lemmy/Reddit style is better, but I’m pessimistic Lemmy has the ability to survive the manipulations that grow with popularity. Both are best in their backwaters that avoid bot/shill or authoritarian enshittification.

I have a similar approach but primarily in Emacs rather than a terminal. Tiling WMs — i3/Sway specifically — have definitely become home.

I’ve been through a bunch of tiling WMs after Ubuntu dropped Unity (where I had enjoyed some light pseudo-tiling but wanted more). I started with i3 but couldn’t shake the feeling it was kind of impure and slightly inelegant. But every other one I tried had more annoyances and weirdness and I came back to i3. To me, i3 it is to tiling WMs as Python is to programming languages - nagging feelings of impurity, limitations, and grubby corners, but in the end it is very practical and gets the job done well and has been refined over the years to round off its rough edges.

Recently with things like PaperWM I thought perhaps I could get the benefits of being closer to mainstream, but after trying to get comfortable I just could not and am back on i3 and will switch to Sway eventually.

I3’s model of workspaces per monitor, and semi-automatic tiling, semi-manual, and i3-msg, sometimes feels inelegant but is actually highly practical. You can add plugins like autotiling to automate more, and powerful scripting behavior attainable through i3-msg and Python bindings (I recommend if you start piping i3-msg output through jq to get info, just make the full jump to scripting in Python, it’s easier in the long run).

This really appealed to me too but I also want fixed workspace numbers and workspaces per monitor and paperwm shat itself on the former (Ubuntu, 22.04 and 24.04) and didn’t appear to offer the latter as far as I could tell, or anything I could manage to work reasonably with multiple monitors.

Perhaps I really just didn’t understand the intended workflow with workspaces and monitors but I couldn’t find anything coherent. It seemed like the only option was either only workspaces on one of the monitors, or move workspaces in lockstep across all monitors (more a Gnome failing than a PaperWM failing). Neither of which made sense to me. So I scuttled back to i3 again in the end.

It tells us that everything we’ve done so far is an ineffective approach, and therefore not really a big deal and to do anything useful we need a radical rethink. I think I envy your faith that scaling up our best approaches yet can resolve our predicament, though I’m not quite sure.

From the linked study:

between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents […] total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2.

Oof, it very much reads like that’s total over 24 years, rather than per year. Global emissions being over 37 billion tonnes last year and rising, if my quick googling is to be believed.

a small fraction had a big impact

I wonder what glowing words would be left to describe a hypothetical situation where we were actually making things better, rather than just making them worse fractionally more slowly.

Make sure to buy lights that follow German StVZO regulations if you’re on the road. They’re not necessarily expensive. they have controlled beams with a horizontal cutoff so they don’t blind people, like motor vehicle lights.

Are you claiming that solar panels have a positive co2 footprint?

Wait, are you claiming they don’t? (assuming you mean a positive CO₂ footprint means net emission of CO₂).

Solar panels absolutely don’t reduce CO₂. They make things worse more slowly, just as electric cars do, but they’re still making things worse. They are most certainly not carbon neutral, let alone permanently capturing CO₂. They’re an energy multiplier, which is less bad than using the energy without the multiplier, but it isn’t a net positive.

Which I think is probably the crux of OPs point.

Edit: WTF, where are OP’s messages? They weren’t abusive from my memory, they were quite the opposite of climate-crisis-denying. They were perhaps hyperbolic and absolutist, but I from my memory of them there was no reason to remove them.

I had an old waxed cotton bike poncho made by some hippies in Oregon or something that was great, but wore out and they’re shut down their business. I bought a Cleverhood.

Gotta say, it’s adequate, but not particularly good. The hand loops are crude and awkward. Inexplicably it’s made out of breathable fabric, which is pointless in a poncho, as a core poncho upside is plentiful airflow underneath, plus you only wear it when it’s actively raining at which point any breathable fabric ceases breathing. My shoulders get damp where they touch the cloth, and that didn’t happen with my fully waterproof waxed cotton one.

I’m tempted to clean, fix, and rewax my old poncho as it did a better job, albeit it was heavier and more bulky.

Your imagination is not serving you well. Ponchos do catch the wind and are very much not aero, but they generally have loops or something for your hands to hold them in place, and are never long enough to go down to your wheels, that would be lethal.

Their biggest downsides is they don’t protect your knees and below, and they flap around in the wind, and may obscure lights and cameras on your handlebars if you’re not careful. They’re also worthless unless you have full fenders/mudguards.

But they’re great in warm weather because ventilation is excellent, even if they’re made of cheap fully waterproof material. Indeed there’s little point in making them out of breathable material because it’ll only make a fractional improvement, and you generally only wear them when it’s actively raining, and when it’s wet, breathable material isn’t breathable any more anyway.

They’re also easy to put on and take off over clothes so for utilitarian/transportation use when you don’t change clothes at either end they’re extra convenient.

Weird, your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I wear a poncho to avoid getting sweaty, which I can’t avoid in a jacket no matter how breathable it is. The airflow under a poncho is great.

Especially good in the summer. They allow you to stay very dry but also get great airflow. Feet and lower legs are unprotected, but wearing shorts in summer it’s not much of an issue, and at worst you have to wear waterproof pants. Some long custom open backed gaiters would be ideal.

They aren’t aero though. I wouldn’t want to ride for tens of miles in one. Excellent for the daily commute though.