as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read

Joke’s on the websites, as I run Cromite, so no pop ups or anything.

…But also, most of the written web is trash now.

:(

the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.

Are you sure about that?

I opened YT links without premium on a new browsers and holy moly! I got 1-3 minute unskippable ads every time.

I immediately clicked them off, of course.

GN is indeed a rare outlier. They’re like an oldschool tech site that rose at the exact right time to grow up on YouTube.

And our site was like the opposite. Uh… let’s just say many Lemmy users wouldn’t like its editor, but he did not hold back gut punches, and refused to watch his site turn into a clickbait farm.

I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)… And I’m surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.

Why?

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I’m way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.

And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.

They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I’m surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.

And I’m not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.

Bread.

This guy is the US president’s son.

Cruel shitposting is apparently now the desired norm in U.S. politics. Ugh.

deleted by creator

I mean it’s not as if the USA has been even remotely helpful as NATO countries face their greatest threat since the Soviet Union

Uh, except a truckload of actual military support? Even during the Trump administration. And a boatload of support to Ukraine?

This is so petty of JD Vance it’s unreal. “Block my friend’s private company and we’ll terminate our 75 year defensive pact.” In another decade, he’d get impeached for even saying that, for multiple reasons.

But there’s truth there. The US gives a lot, and the EU should give more to Ukraine and spend more if it doesn’t want to be so dependent on its fickle overseas ally who’s binged a little too much Fox News.

They’re physically possible, just massive engineering challenges. Read Orion’s Arm’s overview, it’s largely based on current known physics.

What about the moon? Surely not…

Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth’s gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don’t have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom…

Train.

What about interstellar travel?

Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a

So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end…

Yep. Train.

Just imagine if the UN had teeth for enforcement, at least for overwhelming votes like this. I feel like its one of the biggest oversights of the post WWII order they tried to make.

Big countries, of course, would never allow that, but still.

It’s easy to forget how bad it can get.

One day I wandered into /r/kotakuinaction over some linked comment on the Tomb Raider animation, and the Fallout TV series, and… yeah. I remembered.

And that’s a pretty mild example.

I just despise the format and the intense engagement/attention optimization over just finding what you want. It buries information so you have to spend time in it.

Sure, here you go: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7329

One of many such bills.

Take a look at the sponsors. I’ll give you 1 guess at which party would vote it down, because it would hurt them in elections.

It’s the same reason Puerto Rico will never be a state.

As long as the bots click on the ads?

Nope.

+1

Also Reddit accelerating its decline, just to start… Basically all my preferred niches have turned into fragmented Discord black holes.

I know we’re on a fediverse lifeboat here, but there are a lot of empty seats.

You know, a few years ago, I never thought I’d be so pro arms export, but…

Send them!

Send the tomahawks!

I mean, the cybertruck could be interesting… if it wasn’t hilariously expensive, and clouded my Elon Musk. Look at James May’s amusing take, which sets that aside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQzYhMDNLPA

I, uh, appreciate that they took a risk with the styling instead of making it so samey like every other car on the market, even iif it didn’t work out super well. It has some neat features. But I don’t feel a ton of sympathy for people being shamed for driving one, as it’s always been rather hypocritical, even before Musk really jumped into the deep end.

I hate to sound cynical, but the U.S. military probably sees this as real-world lab for drone warfare. They are gonna watch what the Ukrainians cook up and how it works very closely, and I would not be surprised if Ukrainian innovations coincidentally turn up elsewhere. Or if they, like, slyly pass it to the Taiwanese military.

But if that gets Ukrainians money for drones? Good. EU countries should pitch in too.