Yes and no. I’ve said for years that EVs exist to save car companies. They saw the writing on the wall and realized gas engines wouldn’t be viable forever. So I 100% agree with that.

However, a large part of why China’s EVs are so much cheaper is because they use different battery chemistry. American EVs went with lithium ion, because it has amazing energy density. But it is also prone to spontaneously exploding, the batteries age relatively quickly, and the construction requires massive amounts of a relatively rare metal. Something like a third of the cost of a new American EV is simply going towards the batteries. With a $30k car, that means ~$10k is simply going toward the batteries.

But China didn’t use Li+. They went with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries instead. These batteries had much worse energy density originally, (only about half of Li+), but they were easier to manufacture, cheaper because they didn’t require as much lithium, not prone to exploding, and they don’t lose capacity as they age. And so China did the math, and realized that very few people drive more than like a hundred miles at a time, and decided to go with LFP batteries instead of Li+. They were willing to take the reduction in range in return for a much safer, easier, cheaper battery.

And then something interesting happened. As Chinese manufacturers began using LFP batteries, the technology improved. A lot. So now, LFP batteries are closer to 90% of the energy density of Li+ batteries, and they still have none of the drawbacks that Li+ batteries do. If a Li+ EV gets 300 miles to the charge, a comparable LFP battery may get ~270 miles. And since they don’t quickly lose capacity as they age, they actually end up overtaking Li+ batteries after two or three years of regular use. And since those Chinese EVs aren’t pumping tons of lithium into their batteries, they’re able to keep their costs relatively low in comparison to the much more expensive Li+ batteries that American manufacturers have used.

All of this is to say that the battery advances alone will likely be worth the cost. China is quickly shifting towards solar, and batteries are a huge part of that. By adapting LFP technology into their solar systems, they could easily hit 100% renewable energy usage overnight, at a fraction of the cost (and risk) of using Li+ battery banks.

Yeah, lots of users seem to treat this like oldschool 4chan before they had moderators. Back when you could just casually scroll past everything from CSAM to terrorist beheading videos, because none of it was moderated.

and for most users, microsoft knows what they are.

This is notable specifically because Microsoft has been compelled by courts to turn over those keys before.

I don’t blame Microsoft for complying with legal court orders, but I 100% blame them for building systems that allow them to access users’ data (including the keys) in the first place. If they used proper E2EE, they wouldn’t be able to access your keys at all. But that would prevent them from gobbling up all of your private data to sell. And the fifth amendment doesn’t protect third parties. So if the FBI confiscates your PC and you clam up, the feds can just compel Microsoft to give them your keys instead.

I mean, the concept behind BitLocker is fine. Encrypting drives by default should be the norm, the same way we encrypt our web traffic by default with https. The issue is Microsoft’s awful implementation that has led lots of users to accidentally lock themselves out of their own data, without even realizing what they were doing.

You think people who ship apps with 127.0.0.1:[port number] as a URL can figure out how to set up a personal VPN?

Yeah, there is a very large part of society that tends to default to “if I change anything, I’ll probably break it. It works now, so I won’t change anything.” It likely has a lot of overlap with the “you touched my computer eight months ago, and it stopped working yesterday. Whatever you changed must have broken it” population; anyone who has become the de facto family tech support will know exactly who I am talking about.

Orion has gotten around that, somehow. Not sure what kind of wizardry they’ve pulled, but they managed to get both Firefox and Chrome extensions working on iOS.

Hah, you’re 100% correct. I use WaterFox as my daily driver, and remembered all of the frustrations with persistent data deletion from initially trying Librewolf. I swear WaterFox came with those features by default, but I probably transposed the frustration from when I initially tried out Librewolf instead.

Yup, exactly. The concept of forced updates is fine, as long as it is handled properly. The issue is that Microsoft has not handled it properly.

When I need to use Chrome, I just use the Chrome Mask extension in Firefox to change my user agent. I haven’t had a site that actually failed to work on the Gecko engine instead of Chromium. It’s just lazy devs checking your user agent to see if you’re using Chromium, and then throwing a fit if you’re not.

Chrome Mask even has a built in site reporter, because broken sites don’t actually conform to modern web interoperability requirements. If it fails to work on Gecko, there’s a good chance that it will also fail to work on other platforms (like Apple’s WebKit) as well. And the reports go to the team that develops Firefox, so they can figure out why the site is refusing to work on Gecko.

It’s always funny seeing the recent Reddit migrants here. Brave did a massive astroturfing ad campaign on Reddit for a while, and it was hugely successful. After things reached a critical mass, the echo chamber took over and Reddit users naturally began pushing Brave’s marketing fluff to the top. Brave is wildly popular over on Reddit as a result.

But they never targeted Lemmy, and Lemmings were pretty quick to jump on the “Brave is run by a very problematic person, and has a problematic past” side of things. Lemmy also has a very vocal FOSS enthusiast crowd, because the idea of FOSS meshes very well with why people would land on Lemmy. So Lemmings tend to prefer Firefox forks instead.

But you can always tell when someone has recently migrated here from Reddit. Because they’ll post a comment praising Brave, expecting to get upvoted like they would on Reddit. And instead, they get buried in downvotes and “my specific fork of Firefox is better” comments.

And sure enough, OP’s account is less than a day old, so they’re most likely a recent Reddit migrant.

OP, to address your point, Brave is still a Chromium browser, and has all of the trappings that entails. It is also run by a dude with a problematic past, and the company as a whole has a problematic past too. You should consider switching to a Firefox fork instead, with uBlock Origins or AdNauseum (which is a uBO fork) as ad blockers. I personally suggest the WaterFox fork, though you’ll likely want to disable some of the more strict privacy protections (like wiping all of your data every time you close the app) because it can make daily use a bit of a chore otherwise. There is always a matter of give-and-take between convenience and privacy, and WaterFox tends to skew more towards privacy.

iMessage sends read receipts by default, so she can probably see that he read it.

Why the hell did that website request my precise location data? No, get the fuck out of here with that BS.

Yup, exactly. It needs to meet a critical threshold of users. Otherwise, sites will just look at those few users and go “lol update to a phone that works, loser.”

I keep making the joke that we should just sell our data directly to the dark web sites that sell these data dumps. At least then we’d be able to cut out the middleman and profit off of our own data. And every single time a major leak like this happens, it becomes a little less of a joke.

Möbius Sync can sync photos via SyncThing, but the photo support is currently in early beta. So results may work perfectly, or maybe not at all. Möbius is also what I use to automatically sync my Obsidian vaults, since Obsidian locks cloud vaults behind their subscription model. I just sync all my devices to my NAS (and to each other) via SyncThing.

Yeah, her entire page is wild. She’s always one of my favorite creators to see come across my feed.

For the curious: She has a bait account where she edits her photos to make herself look like an ultra-conservative white woman. When creepy dudes inevitably message her, she trolls them. Usually by cranking the conservative conspiracy theories so far past 11 that they loop back around to liberal again, to see if she can get them to agree.

AFAIK, it’s only playable on a hacked original Switch, by loading the compiled game onto an SD card.

Chris Chan is an interesting “Frankenstein’s Monster” case. In Frankenstein, the monster is regularly treated like a monster by everyone they encounter. So eventually, he basically decides “if I’m going to be treated like a monster regardless, I might as well give them a reason to fear me.” The monster begins acting like one… By the end of the book, the monster has done plenty of monstrous things. But it didn’t start out that way…

And Chris Chan’s case has a lot of parallels to that. Maybe she didn’t initially deserve the bullying. She’s always been weird, but it’s entirely possible that her life would have been on a different trajectory without the constant harassment. However, by the time the Chris Chan stuff was really coming to a head around 2020-2021, she was a full blown racist, misogynistic, homophobic, sexual predator piece of shit. Her potential life is an interesting hypothetical “Nature vs Nurture” thought experiment. But as it currently stands, Chris doesn’t deserve a platform.

Making fun of her is fine, just do it for the right reasons. She’s a bad person who happens to be autistic and trans. She’s not a bad person because she is autistic and trans.

The company was literally named OceanGate Inc. So yeah, it very neatly fell into the “call every scandal [thing]-gate” media habit. The actual sub was named Titan.