Hi fellow rats, While i was looking outside on my balcony this summer. I wonder, why do we need so many street lights? It's absurd. The sky is orange, and those light are slowly being replaced with white LED's. Entire streets are fully lit with blinding LED's and there are almost no people or cars around.

My question is?: Why do we need them in the first place? Whats the point? There's this thing called a "flashlight". You know, those small torches you hold in your hand.

And vehicles have headlights, which i'm sure is more than enough to see what's infront of you.

Why spend billions illuminating space just for a false sense of safety?

Hi, I want to self-study some pure math. I have a TI-84 CE from high school. But that thing is like 8-bit and it graphs quite slow. Even the python editions are 8-bit. When i think of 8-bit, i think of the old atari game consoles from the 80's.

Are graphing calculators obsolete in this day and age?

There are only 2 good 32-bit calculators that are not ancient dinosaurs and those are the hp prime g2 and the TI-Inspire cas editions.

Should i buy one of those or skip them all together for R / Julia programming languages?

Apart from quick and one-off calculations, they don't seem very usefull.

hi, i was interested if perl is still relevant in this day and age. Perl has been on the decline for a very long time now. Perl 6 (now named 'raku) not being backwards compatible with perl 5 code made the already small perl community even smaller by splitting it in half. A good example is lisp with it's thousands of different dialects.

Is it still worth using or is it bound to legacy software forever? Like cobol.

Hi, i have been using smart lamps from aliexpress for awhile now. But these lamps force me to connect to an android app that phones-home to Beijing. Without the chinese yeelight app, i cannot change the color of the lamps. I find that kind of creepy.

Is there a good smart lamp system that is privacy respecting and hopefully opensource?

One that is locked to my local lan instead of a chinese trojan horse that spy's on me 24/7.

I'm an arch linux user and i know some basic python scripting.

Hi, I would be interested in people's opinion on the future of social media. Would activitypub ever become mainstream among "normies" that lack technical literacy?

How would monetisation work on a decentralized platform? Would the creator be limited with merchandise and promotions without ads?

Big tech walled gardens have made the internet worse. The only way you can find something on google is by appending the term "reddit" at the end of the search query. To many AI generated SEO clickbait wordpress pages.

All of the good content is locked behind a login screen.