I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.

It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?

And the original concept, as it pertains to wolves, is evidently not a thing. So if we’re just saying things, the software metaphor is as good as any other.

Right, and to your point, part of that is stymieing focused, direct action and ramping up of industry in the western world. So it makes perfect sense to be a global leader in every part of the EV supply and manufacturing chain while being interested in sowing division elsewhere so there’s no convergence of public interest and policy momentum that grows competitive industries. There’s no contradiction between those two things insofar as they serve China’s interests.

Sounds like the heydey of the Geo Metro, which got astonishing MPG for its time.

is one where our impact as private citizens is as close to nil as it can be

Individual choices aggregate into large scale consequences, and individual choices do matter at scale.

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you’re missing your own point. If it’s not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift’s emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of “corporations/billionaires”. So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.