This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

I read recently that the lidar on many self driving cars can wreck the CCD on most phones. I don’t know how it works, but maybe parking one of the cars by your front door will solve your problem.

The issue does not exist with the version installed from F-Droid. I think the Play Store version is a different build with the feature disabled as a condition of hosting it on the Play Sore.

The Android app itself still works with the permission, and we released new versions on the external F-Droid store. So the limit is a “purely” Google Play Store-related problem.

Probably true, but there were still some useful bots that I enjoyed on a regular basis like the metric conversion bot, the invidious link switcher and the remindme bot.

I think that Lemmy will allow you to use bots only if you declare them as such which should allow users to block or allow to customize their own experiences.

I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.

Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.

I hear this argument against unionization all the time:

During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.

For those too lazy to click through to the article and don’t know what an Ai Pin is;

The Humane Ai Pin is a wearable, internet-connected AI device designed to offer a phone-free way to interact with an AI assistant from anywhere.

I’ve had the same thought. It’s defeatism. I was told that protests help bring like minded people together to organize, share ideas and implement plans to change things. A person can’t change things but many people can.

What if just being there helps you feel hope again?

I had to read way too far to get to the reason:

Trump has spoken about how he believes the US is being “ripped off” on global trade. He believes Trump genuinely wants to restructure global trade, which, however, has turned into a “revenge thing.”

“The problem with it is he really only has one metric, which is the bilateral trade deficit, and he really only has one tool, which is tariffs,”

I feel like Trump wants these countries to do something and he can’t control it, so he is using tariffs to apply pressure. Being who he is, he can’t back down until he gets what he wants despite anything else. Never show weakness. I worry that we’re all feeling the hurt from this narrow mindset.

I can’t speak to the quality outlook, but from what I understand about enshittification, it typically requires a self-serving entity like a corporation whose interests are not in alignment with its customers/consumers/userbase. In some of Mr. Doctrow’s writings, he indicates that federating cans be a “circuit breaker” for enshittification.

In a well federated platform, when one node begins to act counter to its users, the users can easily move nodes/instances. This is one of the reasons why there needed to be a law to allow phone number portability. Email is similar, but only if you own your own domain. Look for Cory Doctrow’s writings on BlueSky for more examples.