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Comment Re:Will this end brigading and bots? (Score 1) 89

Yeah, I hear you. I've questioned myself more than once if I'm just being paranoid. And perhaps I am.

That particular subreddit is a discussion forum for a specific host app, both my app and this other app are just plugins for that host app, so discussions about plugins are frequent. Thing is, those bots never attack my other unrelated posts in the same forum, nor do they attack other peoples posts about their own plugins. These bots trigger off of keywords specifically related to my app - if you mention my app name your comment will get down voted too. The fact that a superfan(s) would do all this for their favorite open source plugin is just so juvenile, but all signs indicate that's exactly what's going on.

I know it's hopeless to expect nothing but juvenile behavior on Reddit, but Reddit could immediately put a stop to this stuff if they wanted. I hope they do.

Comment Will this end brigading and bots? (Score 2) 89

I'm a open source developer who created an application which eliminates the need for another, competing, but far more popular open-source application - beats it hands down on every benchmark. It's a very niche application for a small hobbyist community, so like, nobody should even care that it exists. I barely care myself - it's just a hobby.

Yet, whenever I mention my app on Reddit, every one of my posts are systematically down-voted to zero, and my comments down voted deep into negative territory. The only engagement I do get are from their users calling my app AI slop and questioning my four decades as a professional software developer. More recently they've unleashed their own bots to try to trick people into thinking I'm running my own bots to artificially improve engagement - with the objective to get me banned. And they have yet another set of bots which try to question whether I'm even a real person. BTW, I've observed they also run their own bots to promote their app, triggered off certain keywords, and they have been very successful at it. It's absolutely madness, especially considering this niche has always been a very welcoming open-source community. I hope and wish Reddit will at least make API access non-free and with far tighter restrictions.

Comment I was banned after buying a Meta Quest 3 headset (Score 1) 24

Bought the headset for my 16 year old, I set it up for him and bought a few games, just so that he could immediately start playing with it on his birthday.

He doesn't have FB so I created a new Meta account, and somewhere along the line it also created a FB profile for that account. No big deal, no one's ever gonna use that anyway.

Just a few weeks later my personal FB and IG accounts were suspended, as well as a couple rarely active business pages I run.

Their claim was "I violated the rules", although not saying specifically which rules. They gave me no opportunity to appeal, and stated that my account would be deleted in 30 days.

I literally open FB like once a week for sending happy birthday messages to friends or browse those "what's happening in your city" types of groups. I'm in my 60s and have no motivation for doing anything "against the rules".

If the reason was because I inadvertently created a new FB account, why not ban THAT new account, instead of my old one? It's ridiculous.

I'm kinda bummed I lost 20 years of FB friends all around the world, who now probably think I'm dead.

Comment Sadly, Americans have a very limited range of EVs (Score 2) 137

Out here in the real world EVs are everywhere. This is the future, you just need to leave America to experience it. Mostly Chinese, or locally-built Chinese EVs, and a handful of Chinese-built Teslas. I own an AIO UT sedan hatchback which blows away all others in its category and it cost under US$15,000! And I'll bet you've never heard of it if you live in the USA.

ICE car dealers including Mazda, Toyota, and Honda are closing down and reopen selling XPENG and ZEEKR and MG and BYD. Petrol stations are disappearing all over the city and many are being replaced by EV charging stations. There will soon be a tipping point where petrol stations are going to be more difficult to find than EV stations. I charge my car for free with excess power from my 20Kwh solar panels.

Sadly, special interests in America will ensure that the future (which the rest of the world already enjoys) never arrives in the US.

Comment Re:Technoluddites. (Score 1) 323

A reasonable argument. EV charger stations are not everywhere. Yet.

There will definitely be a tipping point, in the not too distant future, where finding a petrol station could become more difficult that an EV charging station. Where I live in SE Asia we are seeing petrol stations closing frequently. Some are being replaced with LPG stations, some are turning into EV charge stations, and some just turn into other businesses.

Comment Re: Technoluddites. (Score 1) 323

Who's nervous? I'm not. Car batteries are similar to phone batteries, you typically shouldn't charge them to 100%, at least not regularly. That last 20% does take a bit longer to charge, so you'll see most EVs are spec'd at "80% charge". So just consider 80% == "100%".

Ford Focus gets 300 miles (conservatively) on a full tank. Toyota Corolla does better at about 435 miles.

My Xpeng G6 goes 370 miles at 80% charge, not including regenerative braking. Plenty of other EVs go even farther.

Today, EVs are generally on a par with ICE vehicles in terms of range. In just a couple years with newer battery tech you'll have lighter and longer range EVs that will put all ICE vehicles to shame. You can debate people online all you want, but the world will just move on without you.

Comment Re:The US is the *least* interesting EV market (Score 2) 323

100%. I live in SE Asia where the car market and all the associated infrastructure has been turned upside down by EVs in just the past 4 or 5 years. It's such a shame that Americans are being denied the opportunity to purchase such a wide variety of EVs as we have here, worse yet, they probably don't even have a clue how good these vehicles actually are. Teslas are fine, but they are not by any means the best you can buy these days. Go pull up some random Youtube EV reviews from Europe or Australia or Asia and you'll get a taste.

Comment Re:Technoluddites. (Score 1, Insightful) 323

"How am I supposed to charge it, have a cable going from my house across the road?"

Perhaps stop at an EV charge station? New EVs have fast charging and you can charge 10% to 80% in 30 minutes (or less). If you're pressed for time, just top up for a couple minutes and you will still have enough charge for several days. It's not all that different an experience to a petrol station.

Comment Why the complaints? This is a better deal... (Score 1) 10

I am legacy user going back to GAFYD, I transitioned to the free version of Business Starter a couple years back. I'm a single user for my domain, and was stuck with only 17GB storage. When they migrated my account to pooled storage I went into the admin panel and added 100 new "users" and Google instantly gave me another 1.5TB free storage, which I'm now making good use of. Thanks Google~!

Comment Re:Hybrids (Score 1) 113

While that strategy might work for the domestic Japanese market at the moment, long-term it's a terrible strategy, as Japan automakers are losing significant market share to Chinese EVs in the EU, UK, Australia, Mexico, and SE Asia. Last month Honda and Nissan and Mitsubishi merged in an effort to save themselves. EVs from Honda, Toyota and Mazda are some of the dullest and least innovative EVs on the market, and way too expensive to boot. Their CEOs are arrogantly (and quite wrongly) claiming hydrogen and PHEV are the real future.

I live in SE Asia, I've only ever owned Japanese cars, my family has only ever owned Japanese cars for as long as I can remember - that is no longer the case. Japanese car dealerships are closing down countrywide and being replaced by dealers for Zeeker, Xpeng, MG, BYD and Neto. Even Japanese car factories in Thailand are closing down, only to be replaced by Chinese EV factories. Everyone is seeing the benefits of EVs and could care less whether the car comes from Japan or China - they want affordability, slick design, and an innovative and exciting driving experience - and Japanese cars are not offering any of that.

China will decimate the Japanese auto industry within this decade. Japan's economy relies heavily on auto exports. Japan is in for a world of hurt.

Comment Just change your DNS (Score 1) 71

I recently visited Indonesia for 6 weeks. Couldn't access Reddit so I opened a VPN, which worked. However I discovered that all Indonesia are doing is redirecting DNS queries for these banned sites. So I used the free Cloudflare app "1.1.1.1", which allows you to change your carrier's DNS on an iPhone, and this worked just as well as a VPN, if not faster.

Comment Re:The Google Play purchases are the serious probl (Score 2) 46

You may be surprised to learn that Google Voice accounts under Workspace will now become paid only, even if you already chose to pay monthly to continue using your Workspace account. So you'll now be paying for Workspace + GVoice. There is discussions on Reddit of people transferring their accounts to a free gmail account in order to save the GVoice number. But you will need to act quickly because at the end of January GVoice gets an overhaul and the legacy interface which allows transfers will be removed entirely.

This is a complete clusterfuck, but a more and more typical move from Google.

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