To start, let’s verify that Bluesky the app is indeed open-source. Yep, it is. But that’s not the same as having all the machinery be open-source, where anyone could spin up their own, compatible service; maybe named ExampleSky. To be compatible, ExampleSky would need to use the same backend interface – aka protocol – as Bluesky, which is known as ATProto. The equivalent (and older) protocol behind Mastodon and Lemmy is ActivityPub.

ATProto is ostensibly open-source, but some argue that it’s more akin to “source available” because only the Bluesky parent company makes changes or extensions to the protocol. Any alternative implementation would be playing a game of chase, for future versions of the protocol. History shows that this is a real risk.

On the flip side, Mike Masnick – founder of Techdirt, author of the 2019 paper advocating for “protocols, not platforms” that inspired Bluesky, and recently added member of the board of Bluesky, replacing Jack Dorsey – argues that the core ability to create a separate “Bluesky2” is where the strength of the protocol lays. My understanding is that this would act as a hedge to prevent Bluesky1 from becoming so undesirable that forking to Bluesky2 is more agreeable. To me, this is no different than a FOSS project (eg OpenOffice) being so disagreeable that all the devs and users fork the project and leave (eg LibreOffice).

But why a common protocol? As Masnick’s paper argues, and IMO in full agreement with what ActivityPub has been aiming towards for years, is that protocols allow for being platform-agnostic. Mastodon users are keenly aware that if they don’t like their home instance, they can switch. Sure, you’ll have to link to your new location, but it’s identical to changing email providers. In fact, email is one of the few protocol-agnostic systems in the Internet still in continued use. Imagine if somehow Gmail users couldn’t send mail to Outlook users. It’d be awful.

Necessarily, both ActivityPub and ATProto incorporate decentralization in their designs, but in different fashions. ActivityPub can be described as coarse decentralization, as every instance is a standalone island that can choose to – and usually does – federate with other instances. But at the moment, core features like registration, login, or rate limiting, or spam monitoring, are all per-instance. And as it stands, much of those involve a human, meaning that scaling is harder. But the ActivityPub design suggests that instances shouldn’t be large anyway, so perhaps that’s not too big an issue.

ATProto takes the fine-grained design approach where each feature is modular, and thus can be centralized, farmed out, or outright decentralized. Now, at this moment, that’s a design goal rather than reality, as ATProto has only existed for so many years. I think it’s correct to say for now that Bluesky is potentially decentralizable, in the coarse sense like how Mastodon and Lemmy are.

There are parts of the Bluesky platform – as in, the one the Bluesky organization runs – which definitely have humans involved, like the Trust and Safety team. Though compared to the total dismantlement of the Twitter T&S team and the resulting chaos, it may be refreshing to know that Bluesky has a functional team.

A long term goal for Bluesky is the “farming out” of things like blocklists or algorithms. That is to say, imagine if you wanted to automatically duplicate the block that your friend uses, because what she finds objectionable (eg Nazis) probably matches your own sensibilities, then you can. In fact, at this very moment, I’m informed that Bluesky users can subscribe to a List and implement a block against all members of the List. A List need not be just users, but can also include keywords, hashtags, or any other conceivable characteristic. Lists can also be user-curated, curated by crowd sourcing, or algorithmically generated. The latter is the long goal, not entirely implemented yet. Another example of curation is “Starter Packs”, a List of specific users grouped by some common interest, eg Lawsky (for lawyers). Unlike a blocklist which would you’d want to be updated automatically, a Starter List is a one-time event to help fill your feed with interesting content, rather than algorithmic random garbage.

So what’s wrong with Bluesky then? It sounds quite nice so far. And I’m poised to agree, but there’s some history to unpack. In very recent news, Bluesky the organization received more venture capital money, which means it’s worth mentioning what their long term business plan is. In a lot of ways, the stated business plan matches what Discord has been doing: higher quality media uploads and customizations to one’s profile. The same statement immediately ruled out any sort of algorithmic upranking or “blue checks”; basically all the ails of modern Twitter. You might choose to take them at their word, or not. Personally, I see it as a race between: 1) ATProto and the Bluesky infra being fully decentralized to allow anyone to spin up ExampleSky, and 2) a potential future enshittification of Bluesky in service of the venture capitalists wanting some ROI.

If scenario 1 happens first, then everyone wins, as bridging between ActivityPub and ATProto would make leaps and bounds, and anyone who wants their own ATProto instance can do so, choosing whether they want to rely on Bluesky for any/all features or none at all. Composability of features is something that ATProto can meaningfully contribute to the protocol space, as it’s a tough nut to crack. Imagine running your own ATProto instance but still falling back on the T&S team at Bluesky, or leveraging their spam filters.

But if scenario 2 happen first, then we basically have a Twitter2 cesspool. And users will once again have to jump ship. I don’t personally use Bluesky, being perfectly comfortable in the Fediverse. But I can’t deny that for a non-tech oriented audience, Bluesky is probably what I’d recommend, and to opt-in to bridging with the Fediverse. Supposed episodes of “hyping” don’t really ring true to me, but like I said, I’m not currently an invested user of Bluesky.

What I do want to see is the end result of Masnick’s paper, where the Internet hews closer to its roots where interoperability was the paramount goal, and the walled gardens of yore waste away. If Bluesky and ActivePub both find their place in the future, then IMO, it’ll be no different than IMAP vs POP3.

Pew Research has survey data germane to this question. As it stands, a clear majority (79%) of opposite-sex married women changed their family/last name to their husband’s.

But for never-married women, only a third (33%) said they would change their name to their spouse’s family name. 24% of never-married women were unsure whether they would or wouldn’t change their name upon marriage.

From this data, I would conclude that while the trend of taking the husband’s last name is fairly entrenched right now, the public’s attitude are changing and we might expect the popularity of this to diminish over time. The detailed breakdown by demographic shows that the practice was less common (73%) in the 18-49 age group than in the 50+ age group (85%).

However, some caveats: the survey questions did not inquire into whether the never-married women intended on ever getting married; it simply asked “if you were to get married…”. So if marriage as a form of cohabitation becomes less popular in the future, then the change-your-family-name trend could be in sharper decline than this data would suggest.

Alternatively, the data could reflect differences between married and never-married women. Perhaps never-married women – by virtue of not being married yet – answered “would not change name” because they did not yet know what their future spouse’s name is. No option for “it depends on his name” was offered by the survey. Never-married women may also more-strongly consider the paperwork burden – USA specific – for changing one’s name.

So does this help answer your question? Eh, only somewhat. Younger age and left-leaning seem to be factors, but that’s a far cry from cause-and-effect. Given how gradual the trend is changing, it’s more likely that the practice is mostly cultural. If so, then the answer to “why is cultural practice XYZ a thing?” is always “because it is”.

For anyone looking at Keygen Church, also see their adjacent project, Master Boot Record for computer metal.

In my homegym I have an AbMat foam pad which I also use as a knee pad. And while I think the thick foam would work outdoors on tougher terrain, it would not meet your criteria to fit in a backpack.

My other suggestion would be a scrap piece of horse stall mat, which are nearly solid rubber sheets commonly employed for homegym floors. This is what I use when working in my yard, for tasks requiring a lot of kneeling. Such a piece – while heavy – could be cut to whatever size you need, using a sharp knife or a jigsaw.

A mid-mount gearset is new to me. I wonder how the belt drive behaves when driven slower and with more torque than an equivalent setup using rear hub gears. On the flip side, the tighter integration with the motor could mean the motor can internally rev higher, to prevent lugging and keep the motor running healthily.

I am a software engineer by trade, so when I started cooking, everything and every tool was intimidating, because I had no idea how it worked nor what it was meant for. I knew nothing about knives besides not to drop one, didn’t know the difference between a wok and a skillet, and didn’t understand how oil creates a non-stick surface on a non-non-stick pan.

What helped me was a book that wasn’t like a recipe or cook book, but something closer to a food and kitchen textbook. The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt goes into some excruciatingly scientific detail about the role of different kitchen implements, and then showcasing recipes that apply theory to practice. Each step in the recipes thoroughly describe what to do, and the author puts a lot of content onto his YouTube channel as well.

It was this book that convinced me to buy, strip, and season a cast iron pan, which has already proven its worth as a non-sticking vessel comparable to my old Teflon-coated pans. And I think for you, reading the theory and following some of the recipes might develop sufficient experience to at least be comfortable in an active kitchen. It’s very much a chicken-and-egg problem – if you’ll pardon the poultry pun – but this book might be enough to make progress in the kitchen.

Also, since it was published in 2015, it’s very likely available at your local library, so check there first before spending money to buy the book. Good luck with your culinary development!

I was once working on an embedded system which did not have segmented/paged memory and had to debug an issue where memory corruption preceded an uncommanded reboot. The root cause was a for-loop gone amok, intending to loop through a linked list for ever member of an array of somewhat-large structs. The terminating condition was faulty, so this loop would write a garbage byte or two, ever few hundred bytes in memory, right off the end of the 32 bit memory boundary, wrapping around to the start of memory.

But because the loop only overwrote a few bytes and then overflew large swaths of memory, the loop would continue passing through the entire address space over and over. But since the struct size wasn’t power-of-two aligned, eventually the garbage bytes would write over the crucial reset vector, which would finally reboot the system and end the misery.

Because the system wouldn’t be fatally wounded immediately, the memory corruption was observable on the system until it went down, limited only by the CPU’s memory bandwidth. That made it truly bizarre to diagnose, as the corruption wasn’t in any one feature and changed every time.

Fun times lol

As there may be regional differences, you might want to specify your area. For example, ice cream in the UK doesn’t have to meet the same requirements as in the USA, so oddities like cheap ice cream made with no dairy or cream is possible, using vegetable oil instead. Evan Edinger has a video on UK ice cream in particular: https://youtu.be/CfM7yZD0PlE

These little guys get beginners onto bikes.

Absolutely, 100%. In my dreams, the entry-level for e-motos would perfectly overlap with the mid- to higher-end of Class 3 e-bikes. It would basically be a two-wheel continuum where price and capabilities align in increasing fashion. From bicycles to e-bikes to e-dirtbikes to e-motos and beyond. I want this to be real one day, because it’s the sort of progression that allows new riders to get started and work their way to whichever suits their fancy.

The only caveat I can think of is that safety education should also scale in the same way, but in the USA, the most comprehensive two-wheel safety course is for a motorcycle license, which means dirt bikers and e-bikers don’t currently have the benefit of that training, unless they already had their motorcycle license. I do believe in “cross training” between the various two-wheel machines, but I don’t know how the pedagogical consideration would influence things.

While technically correct, I feel like the headline should have mentioned that these two new models are aimed at the off-road market. As in, electric dirtbikes.

And while I am indeed thrilled that prices are pushing downward, I’m still not sure if $4200 is going to substantially move product, at least not without convincing buyers of the unique benefits with going electric. A cursory web search shows that 125cc dirt bikes are in the 7 kW class, but can be bought new for $3500. So the gap is definitely closing, but it’s still notable.

I do wonder if they plan to go even smaller, into the 3-4 kW class, which would roughly be the realm of 50cc or 80cc. That would definitely be an off-road only category, and is more atuned for kids. Or perhaps adults wishing to leisurely cruise around dirt tracks. It’s also a category where low-duty cycle (ie one season only) and short range are most common, and the immediate benefit of electric is not having to stabilize two-stroke fuel over the winter. An electric dirtbike that can sit in a shed but ready to use when pulled out three times a year, is the sort of product that suburban buyers might appreciate.

In a lot of ways, it follows the same trend of hobbies or necessities being developed by a community of the most devoted (eg ham radio, BBS/forums, electric bicycles) which then get taken/co-opted by investors and salespeople until the community is barely involved at all, and is actively harmed by commercial interests.

In the case of ham radio, commercial radio stations stood on the backs of brilliant engineers at Marconi as well as experimentalists doing odd things that were then refined. Things would be alright, until the commercial entities found that the allocated spectrum for ham radio would be “of better use” for privately-operated communications networks or whatever. Those “high frequency” bands that were considered junk compared to long wave? Taken away and only a narrow slice given back for the experimenters to hone their craft, yet again. As a side note, early wireless networking used the then-junk band of 2.4 GHz, because that’s what microwave ovens used. But today, the 2.4 GHz band is probably the most important and congested band in the world, precisely because all manner of consumer and industrial devices around the world use it. Early computer and radio hobbyists were responsible for making that happen.

The rich history of BBS systems led to modern web forums, but then led to things like Facebook groups where it’s a requirement to sign-in to read, let alone engage in the discussion. The Fediverse is more aligned to independent web forums (using a common protocol) than it is to a monolithic social media platform.

And then electric bikes. Or initially, motorized bicycles, which were a new concept when brought to the USA from Sweden in the 70s, as a solution to the oil crisis. That trend quickly faded, but left a group of hobbyists dedicated to homebuilt two-wheel mobility within a narrow yet still legal framework to run on the road. Who could have predicted that the advancement of lithium ion cells – documented well by the flashlight community, btw – would set off a renewed passion in electric motorized bicycles, which ultimately gave us commercially-produced ebikes with massive uptake? In Germany last year, the number of ebikes sold exceeded the number of acoustic (read: conventional) bicycles. What do these initial hobbyists have now? Mostly burdensome regulations because a small number of shoddily-built commercial ebikes went bang too often. And now a homebuilt ebike is viewed with great suspicion despite not accounting to much of the total population of ebikes at all.

Can you tell what some of my hobbies are? :)

I can only hope that right-to-repair legislation in some US States and the EU will aid the situation, but it might still be a while.

The YouTuber BigClive observed through dismantling many so-called disposable vape pens that they tend to have new, high quality, high amp cells, paired with decent or good charge controllers. He posited that this is to prevent them from going bang in people’s faces, which would be quite bad.

Around my area, I still find discarded vape pens in bike lanes or road shoulders, so I’m continuing to collect them. Although I never imagined stringing them together into a battery pack for an ebike haha

My guess is that reading tomes like this is useful as a vocal exercise and can be a way of “getting one’s name out” for aspiring vocal talent. After all, what better way to showcase voice work on a resume than to point to examples online? As for the exact tome, it doesn’t really matter for this purpose but might as well also contribute to the wealth of human media.

When I see “Xitter”, I think it might be pronounced Exeter, like the town in southwest England. But that feels like an undeserved slight against the good people of Devon and England.

In summary, Denver’s ebike rebate experiment was inspired by utility rebates from other regions, was stupendously successful, flattered by emulation in other jurisdictions and the State of Colorado itself, to the point that the city might recast its program to equitably incentivize low-income riders, as well as focusing on other barriers to riding, such as poor infrastructure. The experiment has paid off, and that’s before considering the small business boost to local bike shops and expanding the use of ebikes for transportation in addition to recreation.

With that all said, I want to comment about the purported study which concluded that ebike rebate programs are less economically efficient than electric automobile rebates. Or I would, if the study PDF wasn’t trapped behind Elsevier’s paywall. I suppose I could email the author to ask for a copy directly.

But from the abstract, the authors looked to existing studies which originally suggested that ebike rebates are less efficient, so I found a list of that study’s citations, identifying two which could be relevant:

• E-bikes and their capability to reduce car CO2 emissions (Phelps et al, 2021, open access)
• Impacts of e-bike ownership on travel behavior: Evidence from three northern California rebate programs (Johnson et al, 2023, open access)

The first study looked at ebikes in England – not the whole UK – and their potential to displace automobile trips, thus reducing overall CO2 emissions. It concluded that increased ebike uptake would produce emissions savings faster than waiting for average automobile emissions to reduce, or from reductions in driving by other means, as a means to slow the climate disaster. This study does not analyze the long-term expected emissions reduction compared to cars, but did conclude that ebikes would produce the most savings in rural areas, as denser cities are already amenable to acoustic cycling and public transport.

The second study looked at a year of how new ebike owners changed their travel behavior, for participants from three California jurisdictions offering incentives, two in the San Francisco Bay Area and one along the North Coast. The study concluded that in the first few months, most riders used their ebike 1-3 times per week, but towards the end of the study period, most riders reduced their use, although the final rate was still higher than the national average rate for acoustic bicycling. The study found that at its peak, ebikes replaced just a hair above 50% of trips, and thus concluded that the emissions saved by displacing automobile trips was not as cost effective as emissions reduced through EV automobile incentives. They computed the dollar-per-co2-ton for each mode of transportation.

So it would seem that the original study looked to this second study and reached a similar conclusion. However, the second study noted that their data has the caveat of being obtained from 2021 to 2022, when the global pandemic pushed bicycling into the spotlight as a means of leaving one’s house for safe recreation. It would not be a surprise then that automobile trips were not displaced, since recreational bicycle rides don’t compete with driving a car from point A to point B for transportation.

Essentially, it seems that the uncertainty in emissions reduction is rooted in variability as to whether ebikes are used mostly for recreation, or mostly for displacing car trips. But as all the studies note, ebikes have a host of other intangible benefits.

IMO, it would be unwise to read only the economic or emissions conclusion as a dismissal of ebikes or ebike rebates. Instead, the economics can be boosted by focusing resources for rural or poorer riders who do not have non-automobile options, and the emissions savings can be bolstered by making it easier/safer to ride. Basically, exactly what Denver is now doing.

I get that the weight pales in comparison to the rider or cargo. But a lighter bike – electric or otherwise – comes with some quality of life improvements. There’s the extra redundancy where a dead ebike is still ridable if it’s light enough or has sufficiently low rolling resistance. Then there’s transporting the bike, whether by bus, car, or just hitching a ride if the bike is dead or damaged.

My experience at university – where an ebike would have been phenomenally useful back then – involved hauling my acoustic bike up two flights of stairs daily. At 15 kg, that was doable. 25 kg is starting to push things. And my current ebike at 40 kg would be infeasible unless I decide to really work on my deadlift.

But I agree that there’s a point where ebikes are Good Enough™ given the constraints of technical and economic feasibility, as well as what consumer demand looks like; all consumer products tend to do this. We’ve reached an equilibrium in the market – which isn’t bad at all as it means more bikes available to more people – but I just hope the industry continues to push the envelope to welcome even more riders.

Someone out there will have all the preconditions for a short/medium distance ebike commuter, where they can replace a car drive or waiting for three buses, down to just a single bus and a modest ebike ride to their final destination.

Irrespective of the model variant chosen, the weight is stated as 26 pounds or 12 kilograms. Such a low weight can only be achieved, particularly on an e-bike, with a carbon frame, and the fork is also made of the material.

Is this actually true though? I’m not a mechanical engineer, and while I do know that material properties necessarily influence the realized design, I can’t quite see how swapping out an aluminum or steel frame for a carbon fiber frame is going to save any more than maybe 2-5 kilograms max.

My cursory examination of the popular ebike models suggests the current average weight is around 25 kilogram. I would posit that the higher weight for run-of-the-mill ebikes compared to this €5800 model is more likely due to: 1) overbuilt, stock frame designs in errant anticipation of offroading or hitting potholes faster than an acoustic bicycle would be subject to, 2) a lack of market demand for pushing the weights down, since the motor can compensate for the loss of performance, and 3) if a bicycle of any type is going into the mid four figures, of course it would use premium, lighter components than other cheaper manufacturers.

What I’d love to see is a teardown of a commercially available $2k range ebike to see how much the frame really weighs. The motors and batteries can’t really be reduced without substantial electrical or chemical engineering, but frame design is well within the remit of bike manufacturers, and I think it behooves them to not overbuild the frame. Ebikes deserve to be equally hauled up a flight of stairs, or onto a bus, or just onto a bike stand. And it’s not like acoustic bikes can’t get up to ebike speed going downhill, and their frames generally hold up just fine.

To be clear, I’m mostly talking about conventionally shaped bicycles versus conventionally shaped ebikes. It would be apples to oranges to suggest that a cargo ebike should weigh only as much as an acoustic commuter bike. For a cargo bike, payload capacity is a major consideration and so would warrant an appropriately sized frame. But the weight discrepancy between an equally capable cargo bike and cargo ebike should not exceed that of the motor, battery, and ancillary components.

So far as I’m aware, non-occupational pre-nominal honorifics inure to the individual, so generally speaking, if that person doesn’t want to use their title, they don’t have to. And in the same way that most people will go along with someone’s acquired honorific of Dr or Capt or whatever, the same should also apply if someone expressed that their honorific should not used. I have no citation for this, other than what I’ve seen in life.

As a sidenote, in Britain, I understand that medical doctors are able to use the pre-nominal of Dr, but surgeons specifically will drop the Dr and just use Mr. or Ms.

Apparently this stems from ages ago when surgeons did not have to have a medical degree, and the doctoral view was that surgeons were akin to butchers. This may have reflected the crudeness of early surgeries. As a result, surgeons developed a history of being Mr – it’s not clear if female surgeons also took on Mr. So after the various laws/rules changed so that surgeons also had to be medically qualified, they still kept the tradition of Mr.

Thus, a male student of medicine in the UK could go from Mr, graduate to Dr, and then graduate as a surgeon to Mr again. I have no citation for this either, but it’s plausible for the ardently traditional British nation.

If you were to properly consider the problem the actual cost would be determined by cost per distance traveled and you essentially decide the distance by which ever you are budgeted for.

I wrote my comment in response to the question, and IMO, I did it justice by listing the various considerations that would arise, in the order which seemed most logical to me. At no point did I believe I was writing a design manual for how to approach such a project.

There are much smarter people than me with far more sector-specific knowledge to “properly consider the problem” but if you expected a feasibility study from me, then I’m sorry to disappoint. My answer, quite frankly, barely arises to a back-of-the-envelope level, the sort of answer that I could give if asked the same question in an elevator car.

I never specified that California would be the best place to implement this process.

While the word California didn’t show up in the question, it’s hard to imagine a “state on the coast” with “excess solar” where desalination would be remotely beneficial. 30 US States have coastlines, but the Great Lakes region and the Eastern Seaboard are already humid and wet, with rivers and tributaries that aren’t exactly in a drought condition. That leaves the three West Coast states, but Oregon and Washington are fairly well-supplied with water in the PNW. That kinda leaves California, unless we’re talking about Mexican states.

I’m not dissing on the concept of desalination. But the literature for existing desalination plant around the world showcases the numerous challenges beyond just the money. Places like Israel and Saudi Arabia have desalination plants out of necessity, but the operational difficulties are substantial. Regular clogging of inlet pipes by sealife is a regular occurrence, disposal of the brine/salt extracted is ecologically tricky, energy costs, and more. And then to throw pumped hydro into this project would make it a substantial undertaking, as dams of any significant volume are always serious endeavors.

At this point, I feel the question is approaching pie-in-the-sky levels of applicability, so I’m not sure what else I can say.