While it might be a tough decision, I wholeheartedly welcome it.

Community-driven projects should be managed by the community, and I fully trust the Mastodon nonprofit to lead this part of the Fediverse into the future.

Good luck on this new stage, Eugen. And congratulations to all Mastodon users.

This part actually doesn’t depend on Microsoft

Fair!

Though I had a bit of fun around the absurdity of their argument. Quickly went downhill though.

Your ignorance would be you missing out, not me.

Besides, judging by your repeated claims that you’ll get banned here, I must assume you to be a Nazi or other kind of supremacist. If that’s the case, I strongly advise you to stock up on history and philosophy books before proceeding with physics. If it’s not so - it’s still your issue not reading it.

Cheers!

Less than low, a simple zero

So, essentially removing the single most important advantage of marine transportation (hyper-cheap global transportation due to tricking physics with large-scale ships) is nothing? May I remind you that 1 (one) container ship stuck in a Suez canal four years ago threatened to cause a global economic outage? Without extreme economic efficiency of large ships, the modern economy as we know it is about to collapse. This is not an exaggeration. You simply cannot maintain this level of trade and exchange with smaller ships, as most things will be prohibitively expensive to deliver over the long range.

Our ships aren’t infinitely large

Indeed, because, again, structural integrity and the requirement to pass through things like Suez and Panama canals. Overall, however, the bigger the ship - the better. And you cannot build any rowboat that would even remotely, on the same order of magnitude, match the efficiency of container ships.

We’ve never really found a way to make sails work for ships that size

You’re writing this under an article about sail-powered vessel able to deliver 5300 tons of cargo.

No idea what you’re trying to say with this part

Rowers would need to be seated on the sides of the ship, or need paddle systems (probably rotationary) large enough to have many rowers drive the same shaft. Either way, you’re very limited in how much rowers you can put in there, and the wider the ship - the more you’ll see it’s simply not an option. Modern container ships are way wider than it makes sense to put rowers to.

What I should do to make it so all ships are electrified with pure renewables within 24 hours.

Absolutely nothing can be done to achieve this - and it’s equally impossible to turn every vessel into a rowboat in this time. What’s the point? We have industry and technology to turn vessels into either, so why choose the inferior option?

I’m glad you have no explanation for how to make this one happen

Huh? Nuclear-powered vessels are traversing this route for many decades already, particularly the icebreakers, but really all sorts of crafts, even mobile nuclear power plants. And they have good track record as far as reliability and environmental impacts are concerned. Nuclear power is inferior to renewables in terms of ecological footprint, but stays way ahead of diesel and other chemical fuels. And in many applications, particularly in very remote areas with few ports and complicated navigation, they are the only sensible option anyway.

Are you trying to tell me there’s something wrong with me for thinking “big” is a fair enough word for the biggest rowboats…?

Yes, absolutely. The biggest rowboats are not big enough to even remotely match modern container ships, and this translates in a loss of efficiency - a very big one.

What?

In the realm of shipbuilding, larger ships are more energy efficient per unit of cargo volume/weight. Aside from that, hosting a crew large enough to propel the ship would carve out a lot of space otherwise used for cargo. Finally, rowing a ship is a very tough but also unnecessary job, i.e. something people struggle with for no good reason.

You make it seem like it’s either oil or rowing, or that we can turn any ship into a rowboat overnight. In fact, turning a container ship into a rowboat would require a much more complex and expensive rebuilding than installing an electric powertrain. There’s really no merit to your idea at all, or at least I didn’t hear a single one good argument for it - not because I don’t care to listen, but because, with all my attention put into it, I see nothing but odd fantasy completely detached from physics.

I don’t think it’s worth it to keep this discussion in any capacity or on any platform. If anyone here bans you (which I doubt anyone will, unless you end up nagging everyone), it’s not because you’re a visionary beinging truth to stupid people. It’s because it is you wasting people’s time without reading a single physics book to have your grand ideas easily disproven, allowing you to move on to more productive choices.

With genuine hope that I didn’t waste a couple dozen of minutes on some aggravating AI bot, goodbye.

You said “thousands of tons”

Thousands of tons on a single vessel. The reason we have such huge container ships is that while the surface area and subsequent water resistance gets squared, the volume growth is cubic.

This means the larger the vessel, the more energy efficient it is at delivering anything from point A to point B. This is exactly how shipping has become the most efficient way to deliver goods.

If you want to deliver the same amount of cargo by many smaller ships, you’ll need way, waaaaaay more energy to do so. This is incredibly inefficient, and ships of the past were of that scale exclusively due to structural limitations. Hence, shipping costs were incredibly high, leading to only the most expensive items being transported.

Now, rowboats cannot technically be wide, because otherwise you won’t be able to seat enough rowers to drive the ship. And they cannot technically be too long, or else, being narrow, they will be turned over or broken in a storm. So, they are forced to be small.

Oil

I answered you right there - you can use electricity generated through renewables instead of heavy human labor. Sodium ion batteries for smaller missions (like ports in Asia), green hydrogen for longer hauls (like China-US), and nuclear for particularly long hauls through complicated areas (like the Northern Sea Route).

Strawman argument

I re-read your comment again. You claim we’re all wage slaves anyway and it’s better to row a cargo ship until people in power decide to rather throw us into war. You also mentioned that it’s either rowboats or ecological collapse. Did I get it right, or did you mean something else entirely?

What’s your basis for what you’re saying?

Studies on the issues of modern agriculture and recent developments in renewable energy tech. We do have safe ways to grow food, indeed, but they require much higher level of investment and do not pay off very well, while renewables are already cheaper than their traditional counterparts, naturally leading to massive rollout. We just need to keep going with this.

You think sailing is a 9-to-5?

Obviously not as in “9 hours a day, 5 day a week job”. It’s more of a cultural reference to the current work time conditions. If there are too many workers and too little job, maybe the best course of action is reducing work time and redistributing gains made through automation?

This way people won’t need to do useless jobs like rowing a boat in the era of electric propulsion, and will have more time for themselves.

Bad faith

By no means. I was genuinely engaged with the conversation, but it just so happens that the point of your argument completely misses me. There are obviously better ways to do what you propose, and I fail to see the merits of going back to rowing as means of ship propulsion.

Rowboats cannot be big, hence they fail to reap physical benefits that come with larger ship sizes, which alone makes them so incredibly inefficient; they require intense manual labor and overblown crew, raising costs and reducing useful load, and they offer a very grim picture of the future full of pointless jobs instead of worker liberation.

So…why rowing, of all things?

I’m absolutely positive they’ve done exactly that.

Never on a historical scale we moved so much cargo. Long-range ships were primarily used to move something extremely valuable, such as spices and gold - and now we have ships hauling everything because it’s so much more efficient than anything else.

Our owners have never been so far from needing more of us

And so the solution is, instead of reducing work week and expanding social programs, to crank people up in dangerous conditions and make them do one of the hardest and most avoidable jobs known to humanity?

I didn’t say “use bad methods to grow food and fuel the crew with that.”

Fair, but it follows. Nowadays, in the age of cheap solar and new, eco-friendly power storage options, it is much, much easier and cheaper to add an electric engine than to maintain a fleet of wage-slaves fed by agricultural surplus.

Your kind of “solution” is both economically inefficient and inhumane, and doesn’t seem to get out of the box of “9-to-5 to everyone by all means”. So, don’t rush to accuse me of shortsightedness.

I’m pretty sure rowboats are absolutely not viable for moving thousands of tons of cargo. Also, they existed because there was a huge supply of slave labor.

That’s not to mention the larger crew doing hard manual labor would require much more food, which is a sort of fuel in itself, one that is not commonly produced in an environmentally sustainable way.

Electric motor seems to be the superior option all-round (except for energy density in storage, where diesel still reigns supreme by a large margin)

Nice, though I wonder about reliability of this thing, as well as capital costs. In any case, an auxiliary motor is a must, and good thing they have that too.

Wild that some of the instruments are so historically new that we have the videos of creators showcasing them

As one of like the 100 people who knew of theremin, I’m impressed!

I’d say a noncommercial, maybe UN-backed index that is widely recognized would help.

Also, journal format is extremely outdated. We need to reform the way we store scientific data, and create an international standard.

For all I know, Nostr is a kind of social network with distributed identity.

The problem with publishing elsewhere is not that it’s hard or can’t give you reach.

It’s the scientific metrics dictating your readership, job prospects and essentially your entire scientific career. Not only your ratings are affected, but also ones of your institution, so you have to play by the rules to have a job.

For your publication to count, it needs to be published in journals listed in certain international indexes such as Scopus and Web of Science. These indexes are, in turn, corporate-owned (by Elsevier and Clarivate, respectively) and the respective boards are free to reject (and certainly will reject) your independent publishing source.

As a scientist, we desperately need it. Corporate ownership of publishing platforms is driving science down extremely badly, while exploiting all parties besides themselves.

Many folks at our institution, including myself, simply cannot afford to publish high-rank open-access articles, and with paid articles, our reach will be minimized, especially now that Sci-Hub does not automatically scrape articles after 2021.

The latter also strikes the other way, as many recent articles are simply unavailable if your institution is not shilling millions to subscribe to all possible publishers. So often a seemingly great article addressing exactly the specific part required is behind a paywall by the unavailable publisher.

Finally, plenty of older articles are lost to time and cannot be found because the hosting platforms have gone down and pirates didn’t step in timely.

All in all, fuck publishers and let’s go fix that shit ASAP. Science is absolutely destroyed by greed nowadays.

Terminal is the only thing that is pretty much universal in all distributions. It is too essential to lose relevance. Besides, even when giving advice to new users, you can either list settings for each specific DE and possibly distribution, or you can just give a terminal command.

Said software must not be resource-intensive, or else you’ll have to do GPU passthrough, which not only adds a heap of complexity, but also requires a dedicated GPU.

Also, I think it’s much easier to teach dual boot (just install Linux, most installers will do the rest automagically) than proper VM setups.

Still, for experienced users, Windows VM is a brilliant option.

Dual boot should be default suggestion for everyone trying Linux out. No pressure, just try it.

There will always be newbie-oriented distros as well as ones for experienced/professional users. It’s alright if the former will go towards simplification, as long as we have plenty more keeping the tinkering spirit.

Besides, each and every distro has a powerful tool that can help you do everything: the terminal. No one limits you there, and unlike in Windows, terminal is heavily and commonly used.

Aside from all controversy around snaps and stuff, which newbies don’t have to get into, there’s GNOME coming as default.

Desktop environments essentially define how the new user treats the system and Linux as a whole. And I believe GNOME is a terrible starting point, at least for those coming from Windows.

It follows entirely different logic, is very different visually, and overall, adds a lot of extra confusion.

IMO, for a smooth transition, you’d rather offer something based on KDE or at least Cinnamon. Kubuntu will do fine, but it has to be mentioned specifically. Mint will be nice. And then as they explore, they’ll find what fits them best.

For what in partricular?