Spyke

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Destruction of OkCupid as an attack against its liberal-skewed user base

That is a real shame, I met my wife on OK Cupid. We liked it for all those features that are gone now. I've recommended it to several people over the years, guess I'll stop doing that.

As for being politically motivated, maybe? But my first guess would be that the changes were driven by immediate profitability factors. Because really, what is more important than quarterly and annual profit reports?

vamp_tm

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Faith can hurt sometimes

I liked the Dresden Files approach to this, it is having faith in something that repels vampires, not the things people have faith in. So the main character repels vampires with a pentagram necklace and his faith in magic.

bluesky

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Adobe Deletes Bluesky Posts After Furious Backlash

I started freelancing on the side recently, needed a PDF editor, Acrobat was cheaper than Bluebeam, so I thought I'd give it a try after not using it for years. It sucked. On top of being inferior in every use case it was infuriating to even have installed. It said it was opting me in for usage data collection but I could opt out in account management, I never found that option. And it had a dozen and a half background processes running on startup that would restart after being killed in task manager. Had to make a little batch file to kill them all at once. Adobe, the software and the company, is cancer. On purpose. Being mean to Adobe online is absolutely justified.

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Biden Administration Is Said to Slow Early Stage of Shift to Electric Cars

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They are too expensive. But only because auto manufacturers are only making midsized and larger suvs or luxury cars. The average price of an EV has dropped over 50% in China since 2015. That would have been tough for us to match, mostly because of batteries, but we could have made much more progress than we have.

The electric grid isn't nearly as unprepared as people say. Sure, we need to build out more charging stations, but the grid as a whole far exceeds current needs. In fact, nationwide electrical usage is actually trending down in the US because of efficiency gains. Better building codes, heat pumps, LED lighting, if it uses electricity newer stuff is more efficient. If we had sold 8 times as many EVs in 2023 than we did, electricity usage would have stayed about flat.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/02/the-us-added-1-2-million-evs-to-the-grid-last-year-electricity-use-went-down/

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Three people ‘sucked out’ of apartments as they slept by typhoon-like winds in China

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A typhoon is what we call a hurricane when it is over the northwest Pacific Ocean. A tornado is a very different event. A hurricane covers an area 1000x or more larger than a tornado, but the tornado has significatly higher wind speeds, and is much more dangerous if you are directly under it, but you will likely be fine standing in your yard half a mile away. As many cell phone videos show. Until it turns towards you, because they don't always travel in consistant directions. As many cell phone videos show.

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Republicans are pulling out all the stops to reverse EV adoption

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Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn't overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.