Spyke

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memes

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Used to consume not produce

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Ford Model T came with a complete manual for disassembly, maintenance, and repair. It made a generation of Americans fluent in mechanics who then went on to win World War II, to the Moon, and higher up skyscrapers than ever.

“Learn this as a child:”

“Do this as an adult:”

Never again. Right to repair doesn't do much when the manual is so expensive only brand-dedicated repair shops can afford it.

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What do you think have we taken for granted before it was enshittified?

OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.

Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:

  • removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
  • removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
  • removed keyword search - no more finding rare interests not included in the questions, like "furry"
  • removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
  • deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
  • deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
  • deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
  • they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven't been messaging in a while, as if that meant they're not a match - no, we're just distant for now
  • they police inconvenient statements in the users' introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing "fuck the healthcare system - make a better one" was deleted without sending me a copy to edit

Avoid the whole Match Group.

Now that I think of it, the destruction of OkCupid looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.

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A cool guide to heat absorption between different colored T-shirts

"The amount of heat gained by a Bedouin exposed to the hot desert is the same whether he wears a black or a white robe. The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin."

Bedouin robes, the scientists noted, are worn loose. Inside, the cooling happens by convection - either through a bellows action, as the robes flow in the wind, or by a chimney sort of effect, as air rises between robe and skin.

Thus it was conclusively demonstrated that, at least for Bedouin robes, black is as cool as any other colour.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/aug/15/research.highereducation

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Tinder-alternatives for the Fediverse

Let's not clone trash. Tinder sucks because it has no matching mechanism to filter out incompatible people. To find one interesting profile on Tinder I have to swipe about 500 profiles. To get more matches, I risk some false positives and like ~2% of profiles. Then I need to filter the matches in person. Very inefficient, a waste of time.

The opposite of that was OkCupid before Match Group destroyed it.