Unexpected take.

Yep I learned about that too recently. Encouraging.

Realistically, there’s going to be no way to stop this. It’s too useful. It works and most people appreciate it. I know this because I have visited southern China recently. I’ve seen the train stations and coffee shops where people now think nothing of leaving their belongings completely unattended. This level of surveillance effectively makes petty crime impossible. It’s widely seen as progress, in a way it is progress, and there’s no going back.

The challenge remaining is to keep some level of democratic accountability over our governments. That’s feasible but it’s not going to be easy.

This has to do with the terrifying shifting baseline theory. Every generation can only compare within its own lifetime. The baseline of what is considered normal can therefore slowly drift without anybody noticing. When the planet is 90% dead, people will only be whining about how much better it was a few decades previously when it was only 80% dead, oblivious that there was once a time when it was completely alive.

This post breaks literally rules #1, #2 and #3 of this community. Crazy.

Mods please wake up and DO YOUR JOB.

To be clear, the problem is a factor of total population and per-capita economic activity. So reducing either will logically mitigate the problem. (The X factor being technology.)

You seem to be advocating global genocide so your take is rightly unpopular.

But clearly population is a major part of this problem. The sheer figure for human biomass is totally unsustainable for any kind of healthy global ecosystem. Personally I find it irritating that there are so many who deny these inconvenient facts.

Completely agree. That one was a terrible take.

Growthism is a de-facto religion IMO. The obsession with this weirdly abstract indicator is obviously irrational.

Breaks rule #2 completely. Not a showerthought.

THIS IS NOT A SHOWERTHOUGHT. This just an opinion. There already a ton of places to put your banal talking points like this. Why can’t you put them there??

For examples of what a showerthought is, look on the right. Another one was posted 2 minutes after this very post:

“With all due respect” could imply that no respect is due and therefore none is given

That is a showerthought.

PS: Want more substance? It breaks rule #4 partially and rule #3 totally.

Indeed, confusing terminology. I consider that collaborative document editing is the activity, cloud hosting vs P2P is the technical implementation.

Like it or not, nobody much is doing the latter because it’s much harder to set up and the available cloud solutions provide a much (much) better user experience. I don’t say this a better situation but it’s the way things are.

Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.

Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.

The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.

Agreed as to vim.

Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.

Yes, true.

My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.

Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.

Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.

Very useful concrete example of how these changes might be a problem. Thanks.

For info, in the EU you need an entry-level motorbike license to ride this. That means a one-day course (expensive) if you already have a car license, otherwise a 20-hour course plus exam.

That’s for anything over 4kW and this thing does 8.

At 11kW you would need a full motorbike license. Which means passing a theory exam, multiple (hard) riding tests, and in some countries even an interview where you have to regurgitate accident statistics. It’s all extremely expensive and inconvenient. I speak from bitter experience. That’s how much they don’t want young idiots riding powerful two-wheelers.

And the second is going extinct.

Mice? What is this thing you talk of?