Fine, whatever. You can’t ever search on SearxNG without paying. You win.

I’ve seen your comment history and it’s full of negative comments because you’re just trolling everyone. My only mistake in this conversation has been to reply to you when you’ve only been saying things you don’t even believe yourself just to troll me. Sigh.

You’re still missing the point, you’re comparing hosting vs using.

If you wanted to host Google, you’d have to spend a fuckton of money on servers. If you want to host Lemmy, it’s unfortunate that you don’t own a computer (this puts things into perspective) but the requirements are absolutely minimal.

If you want to use Google, you have to pay the same as for using Lemmy, or searxNG, zero. However with Google you will pay with your data, whereas with SearxNG you have the option to donate, and the option to self host, if you choose. You don’t have the option to self-host something like Google unless your last name is something like Bezos.

You can host lemmy on an Android phone but not on an iPhone, which is pretty locked down - you’d have to convince Tim Cook to open the OS.

You can install it fairly easily on a library computer as long as you get permission from the library. You can’t install things on computers you don’t have admin rights to; other examples of computers you can’t use to host Lemmy are an ATM on the street, a self checkout machine at the supermarket, or the cockpit computer of an Airbus A350.

I (rather obviously) am talking there about the Google search service, not a single query, as Google doesn’t disappear after a single query.

I’m not sure what you’re pointing at though? Surely hosting Google search is more expensive than hosting Lemmy when you’re insinuating otherwise?

You’re funny. 😂 What I actually think is that your mind reading skills are terrible because I never said anything even remotely similar to that.

Enlighten me, why do you think I can’t tell the difference? Is it because as a maintainer I want to provide something for free? Do you see “consumers” of free content as leeches?

Yes I do. I’m totally the one who can’t understand that “free” is a nuanced concept and something can be free when there are costs but they are externalised.

Exhausting. If you don’t consider anything in the world is free, why did you bother saying Lemmy isn’t free?

Plus this argument is rubbish, it’s like saying “my car isn’t free, nor is the road, nor is my petrol, so the beach isn’t free”.

Just because you have to buy clothes to go out for a walk, it doesn’t make it any less free.

What are you trying to argue here? That the term “free” shouldn’t exist because in a capitalist society everything has dependencies? (I still don’t get how that relates to my original post which was purely about doing business with corporations).

Then fine, Lemmy isn’t free, neither is the sun, or going for a walk. You win. Good day sir.

Don’t run it on a raspberry pi, run it on the same computer you use to access the Google search you are happy to call “free”.

Edit: Actually yes, both this and the healthcare need to be free - otherwise you’re grossly misunderstanding one of the key parts of the mission of open source. I pay for this so that whoever can’t afford it can access for exactly zero. Same for the healthcare - you might say it’s “not free” and everyone should contribute but what to you or me is nothing, could mean that grandma doesn’t get to eat. So yeah, free access needs to be a possibility. That’s the mission. I contribute to open source software and donate where I can so others who don’t have the knowledge or money can access it for free. There can’t be a price.

Uh, what a weird message. It’s not only unrelated to what I said but it reads like an attempt to twist my words. On top of it, it’s totally wrong: Lemmy is free. I can self host Lemmy on a raspberry pi for exactly 0€.

The instance I use… Is also free. I donate because I choose to, but if my friend can’t afford to donate they can still use the instance. Nobody is profiting from it.

What I did talk about is products and doing business with corporations. With Lemmy there’s no product, whether you pay or not. With SearxNG (which many people self host, and again, is free) you’re not the product, regardless of how much you pay.

That’s what I was replying to - your comment is way off the mark and very condescending: I don’t need to be mansplained that I should donate to the software I already donate to. Note donate rather than pay for.

That’s only when doing business with corporations, but there’s also the option of open source (e.g. SearxNG).

Or do you consider yourself the product when using Lemmy?

Need more storage for windows bloat…

There’s a lot of context we’re missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided “free money” that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas “free meals” are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

What I won’t defend is firing people for this reason. I don’t see how that can be ethically acceptable…

Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a “visible” level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn’t been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It’s in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is “visibly” good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.

Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it’s still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

It’s entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon’s data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.

They were comparable to the rest of the phones at the time. Not great, not terrible. Compared to anything in 2024 they were obviously trash, but that’s mostly because we’ve made 10 years of progress since then.

Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.

The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it’s “easy”, and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.

Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.

For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.

So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn’t do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

I’m obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don’t have much time for that and there’s no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I’ve usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.

What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.

I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?

The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.

My point to all of this - “middle manager” is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of “middle manager” hoping they’ll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.

Yes, but they’re making people quit instead. They don’t need to pay severance to employees who quit because of RTO.