That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this.

For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.

To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.

I expect (at least) one party will eventually adopt Rejoin as a distinguishing policy, and maybe sooner rather later.

But the appetite for Rejoin will probably depend on the shape of the UK economy and the political direction of the EU in 10+ years. If the Starmer project really has been delivering tangible growth by then, people may feel Brexit has (inadvertently) “worked” in the end. If the EU achieves greater and greater integration in the UK’s absence it may seem less palatable to enough voters.

Both of those are also going to be influenced by external factors like the direction of a possible Trump second term, the outcome of the war in Ukraine etc.

Years ago a Microsoft breakup was also once on the table, but it never happened.

I wouldn’t get too excited that regulators will follow through with this for Google either.

So I’ve heard they have already switched eBay in Germany to this no-fee system. It proved more profitable for eBay because private sellers who accrue an eBay balance from sales were in turn more likely to spend it on eBay.

Presumably this adds more cost and complexity to buying and installing appliances though if they have to integrate into these systems, which I’m guessing aren’t currently well standardised.

It’s an interesting idea nonetheless. I’ve heard of other projects using excess heat from large data centres to provide energy for district heating systems.

The current population of the UK is somewhere around 68 million.

Thats enough people that you could probably find “dozens” who would say yes to just about anything.

We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.

There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.

I don’t think Mozilla running a Mastodon server is losing focus. The ethos of Mozilla and the Fediverse have a lot of overlap, and Mozilla should desire to have a foot in it.

An official Mastodon server is also a useful platform for marketing and outreach. In contrast an organisation claiming to be all about privacy and open source retreating from a social media platform that embodies those is not a good look.

High energy bills and misinformation about energy saving seems to be causing some odd behaviour here in the UK.

I have relatives who go round turning off every device and appliance at night, despite the negligible power draw they have in standby. Another will only charge their phone at night during cheaper the electricity rate - but runs the tumble dryer during the day.

I also often hear stories about people fearing electronic devices will catch fire if left on standby over night. Which may well be a risk for charging a dodgy Chinese e-bike but probably not for a home router.

I think the difference here is that medical reference material is based on long process of proven research. It can be trusted as a reliable source of information.

AI tools however are so new they haven’t faced anything like the same level of scrutiny. For now they can’t be considered reliable, and their use should be kept within proper medical trials until we understand them better.

Yes human error will also always be an issue, but putting that on top of the currently shaky foundations of AI only compounds the problem.

But it will make it a nicer day out for tourists.

Isn’t that what Oxford Street is, more or less a tourist attraction? I don’t imagine many people going for their weekly shop.

The P and D symbol is the DisplayPort logo. I’m not sure when it was first used, but the DisplayPort standard itself is quite a bit older than USB Power Delivery.

It’s still confusing though regardless of which can lay the best claim to the letters P and D. I would have suggested Power Delivery could use some sort of lightning bolt symbol, but then I realised that would probably conflict with Thunderbolt, which also uses USB-C.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

Having a holiday threshold sounds like a good idea. Allow a set amount of days and fine beyond that to discourage excessive absence.

So long as it’s not during exams or something I can’t see the harm in allowing a 1-2 week holiday a year. It would be much fairer and more flexible for families, and less complicated than things like different areas having staggered term dates

Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

I have an X220 with an i5-2520M, I don’t use it for gaming but I have briefly played Half-Life 2 with it and it was comfortably playable.

So I would say mid-2000s titles and before will be fine. It really depends on the age the Thinkpad you want is, and the age of the games you want to play.

It’s nearly the same for me, depending on what offers Dominos have that week.

We tend to mostly get Chinese takeaways now because it comes out at almost the same price as fish and chips but with a lot more variety. Even just a portion of chips from the chippy is pricey now.

Reducing suicide is always approached as trying to block pathways to death, rather than by improving life.

As always with this country it’s putting a plaster over the symptoms rather than addressing the cause.

Dedicated and separated cycle lanes are the way to go. Cars, cycles, and pedestrians all need their own space. The challenge for the UK is our often quite narrow existing roads. Making space for physically separated cycle lanes is often going to mean taking lanes away from cars. Which is not necessarily a bad thing but obviously creates a lot more friction to be implemented.

Many cities in Europe have had an easier time with this due to more post-war modernisation/rebuilding that created wider roads.

I wish more would be done to link up walking routes. There’s a lot of footpaths in the country but they often poorly connected to each other. Local authorities are supposed to have plans on implementing new routes but progress seems very slow.

This is the inevitable path for nearly all proprietary smart devices. There’s a handful of manufacturers that will see privacy as a marketable feature, but most won’t be able to resist the sweet taste of data.

It’s a shame there are no “dumb” TVs left, except for expensive industrial options.