I suppose an extra sentence in the first paragraph could have made things clearer, but the AAR, which is the focus of the article, is an industry trade group made up of companies that operate trains in north America. Those are the “operators” in question.

Very thorough and well sourced analysis. Thank you for putting it together.

No Man’s Sky

Isn’t this the one that crashed and burned on launch, but the devs owned their mistakes and put a ton of work into patching and upgrading? What a fuckin redemption arc for it to end up on this list unironically.

I’m reminded of this video about how changes to the construction industry starting in the '50s resulted in the loss of ornamentation in architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4

Looks like it’s time to post my favorite SMBC again

space is so terrible that in order to be a better option than Earth, one calamity won’t do. An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars.

From A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

It’s an interesting piece of tech ephemera, but devils advocate here, I’m not sure that I agree with the implication that this is a bad thing. The UI works. It gives you all the options you need with no major downsides or pain points. In this case, I think there’s something to be said for: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

It’s a movement driven in no small part by rage. By people who looked at [the financial crash of] 2008 - who looked at the system as it exists - but concluded that the problems with capitalism were that it didn’t provide enough opportunities to be the boot.

All credit to Dan Olson’s masterpeice video Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go watch the whole thing again.

These days, the only ones I stay permanently subscribed to are independent platforms: Dropout and Nebula. They’re both cheap, entertaining, and they feel like responsible companies trying to make a positive change in their industry.

For all the others, I subscribe on a month by month basis when there’s something specific I want to watch. I try not to have more than one active subscription at any given time.

I got 8 in the span of about five hours today. Absolutely insane.

Yep, I got a series of those recently claiming that I had unpaid paid tolls. Each messagr came through as a group text with two or three random numbers, which were immediately removed from the group after the text arrived. I’ve been wondering why they started doing this. I assume they’re trying to exploit some kind of loophole in the carriers spam filtering.

Yes, but it’s also the common ancestor of kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and (obviously) farmed cabbage.

All of those foods were bread from the same plant by selecting for different traits.

Ceci n’est pas une rock

Fun fact: Victorinox has been operating since 1884 and has never had to lay off an employee.

To avoid this they set aside profits during boom periods to supplement recessionary periods

What a novel idea.

https://labor411.org/411-blog/this-company-has-never-laid-off-an-employee-100-of-which-have-been-with-the-company-for-over-40-years/

Huh, I was under the impression that they used their own index. I just did a quick search found a blog post they publisted back in 2023. Here are some relevant excerpts:

At the time of publication, Qwant has in its servers 20 billion indexed web pages

Qwant uses Bing to supplement search results on which we do not have sufficient relevance, and on images where storage capacities are very important. On the rest, the main SEO logics are often the same which explains why you often find the same search results, ranked slightly differently according to the weight given to one or the other.

Of course, that’s the company pushing their own preferred narrative, so take it with a grain of salt. But assuming it’s not an outright lie, then they’re definitely more independent than a lot of other search engines.

I’m partial to Tom Cardy’s view: Pluto isn’t a planet, but that doesn’t matter because it’s still hot shit.

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

I think I can answer that, although I’ve never actually seen it explained, so it’ll be interesting to see if anyone else has a different take.

The Lemmy posts with “rule” in the title are all made to the 196 community. Per the sidebar, rule #1 of 196 is “you must post something before you leave.”

Putting “rule” in the title is basically shorthand for “I don’t have anything specific to say, but I have to post, so here’s some random shit I find funny.”

At least, that’s how it started. At this point, it’s evolved into a bit of a meme in its own right.

All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.

FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that’ll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.

You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd