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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • They know.

    Capacitive touch sensors are WAY cheaper than physical buttons, and aren’t nearly as prone to mechanical flaws. Plus they can market them as “newer”!

    Car companies only care about your safety as much as it affects their bottom line. It’s unfortunately commonplace for there to be known fatal flaws which occur infrequently enough that it’s cheaper to just pay out the injured/killed victims than to issue a recall. Driving is inherently dangerous - any car companies that tried to fix everything would go bankrupt, or at least be squeezed out by those that don’t.

    Now, if only there were a way to build the places we live so that we didn’t need to take on the risk of driving so frequently…



  • My guess is that in a climate like Germany’s, solar isn’t consistent enough to provide the steady baseline power that coal plants can.

    One of the complexities of power infrastructure is that demand must be met instantaneously and exactly. Coal and solar typically occupy different roles in a grid’s power sources. Coal plants are slow to start, but very consistent, so they provide baseline power. Solar is virtually instantaneous, but inconsistent, so it’s better suited to handle the daily fluctuations.

    So, in a place like Germany, even in abundance, solar can’t realistically replace coal until we have a good way of storing power to act as a buffer. Of course, nuclear is a fantastic replacement for coal, but we all know how Germany’s politicians feel about it…





  • Depending on their impact, it is often worthwhile to seek alternatives that are less effective or convenient, but also less dangerous. We’ve had materials in the past which were also deemed “essential”, and yet we moved away from them.

    A lot of miracle substances tend to be extremely dangerous. There’s nothing quite like asbestos when it comes to fire and heat resistance, but we can still make firefighters’ clothes, or fireproof buildings, or brakes, even if it means they’re heavier or harder to manufacture. R134 and especially R12 make fantastic refrigerants for car AC systems, but we phased those out in favor of substances that are more complex and costly to implement because of the calamitous effect they had on the ozone layer. Carbon tet is an incredible solvent and great at extinguishing fires too. But we don’t use that anymore either.

    You could be right, maybe there is truly no way around PFOAs, but I’m just calling out a pattern here. And maybe there’s no workaround right now that doesn’t cause more harm, but with enough research and investment, we can get there in the future.


  • sqibkw@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldHow about Vivaldi Browser?
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    1 year ago

    I jumped ship from Firefox to Vivaldi back in 2020 for the same reasons. Not only did Firefox give some huge pay raises to their execs, but they also laid off tons of people at the same time. By tons of people, I mean like 250 all at once, and they only had 750 people working there total in 2020. Huge shame that they’re just pocketing all the money meant for something important, to keep browsers diverse.

    In my experience, Vivaldi has had superior customization and privacy settings, even to those in Firefox and Brave.

    And about the UI code being closed source, from what I can tell, it’s all minified JavaScript. So while they don’t have documented code on GitLab or anything, anyone can still parse through it and run security checks on it if they want. Not perfect, but at least it’s there.