Yeah, obviously you “can” merge, but in doing so you insert yourself into the middle of a 2 second gap creating 2 × less than 1 second gaps. Like I said, in this hypothetical everyone is a perfect driver that always follows the rules, so that’s not an option.

For that matter, the driver behind should see that you are about to merge into a gap that’s too small and slow down to leave a space that’s at least 4 seconds big.

I’d also like to point out that your attitude to driving is terrible, the size in meters of anything on a highway is irrelevant, 2 seconds is not a lot of time to react and slow down a car at 100, and that just because you “can” do something doesn’t mean you should.

I have a question on this. Let’s assume everyone is a perfect driver and must have at least a 2 second following distance at all times. If there’s a free flowing queue of traffic on the highway with 2-4 second gaps between, merging in is impossible without someone slowing down and letting you in. Every time I merge this situation stresses me out.

Rural areas shouldn’t be this busy. This design is fine as long as it’s quiet, but it would take 1 more car waiting to turn left to back up the whole upbound road.

Let’s worry about the inefficiency of SUVs and pickup trucks for transporting one person to work. Compared to that solar panels are a drop in the bucket.

But sliced bread has become something else that doesn’t exist with loaves. You can’t buy an unsliced loaf of ultra-processed white bread.

I can speak as someone who thought they couldn’t do parties. Parties are incredibly intense, and can be the best or worst experience of your life depending on the smallest details. Eventually you will learn how to party best for you, what substances to take, what to wear, where to stand and what to do, which parties are just not going to work for you. Keep trying new things, but also if you’re not feeling it, take some time out or just leave.

I think the older you get, the more you realize that everyone has imposter syndrome and anxiety all the time, but you just have to fake it until you make it. If you pretend everything is fine, it usually turns out fine.

Looking at history, it feels more like an attempt to make sure the poorest don’t fall into the “nothing left to lose” category that can cause so much trouble.

That’s because it is. That’s the point of welfare, give the poorest something to lose and they won’t revolt. Even if it’s the most meager, unfair, dehumanizing scraps.

By the way, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter does not weigh 14.79 grams. 1 US tablespoon is a unit of volume that’s equal to 14.79 milliliters(mils). Grams are a unit of mass. In order to convert between them we need the density. Because the metric system is great, the density of water is 1g/mil, so 1 US tablespoon of water weighs exactly 14.79 mils. However the density of peanut butter is a bit higher, so the US tablespoon of peanut butter will weigh a bit more.

Additional pedantry, yes I did have to write US tablespoon every time. A US tablespoon is 14.79mils, a metric tablespoon is 15mils, a traditional Australian tablespoon was 20mils although now they mostly use metric tablespoons.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

I haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.

OSMand tends to choose a much more intuitive route.

Statistically, 100% of large numbers are irrational so we should assume that it is

The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.

Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.

We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.

In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That tells me it’s about right.

Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.

I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.

Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.

But isn’t that the whole point. The working class becomes the new rich class. That sounds like equal distribution of wealth.

But why is it less weird to suck on rotten plant ovaries? That’s what alcohol is. Food is fucking weird.

5 year olds are pretty cringe

Their aggressive, misleading and clickbait ads, particularly as YouTube sponsorships. From my experience the product is fine, but the ads make it seem like their covering up for something.