Id happily give up my truck if there was legislation that prevented people from drinking and driving. Doesn't have to be invasive either like mandatory breathalyzer to start car, it can be something like a mandatory key check in places requiring a breathalyzer to get your key back
The featured article today on Wikipedia's Main Page is "Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons," iD's pre-DOOM side-scroller. I like when Wikipedia editors land on subtle topicality with featured articles and images; it makes it more fun to check the page everyday.
One of the "I wish I'd paid for premium sooner" services I use is Newsblur. The UI is not the most modern, but it centralizes, organizes, offlines, etc with enough power features to handle edge cases that I can feel like I "read everything today" the way I used to with Google Reader.
I've used Win 11 for years and never had an MS account. If you just get the right European/enterprise/education image the first time you don't even have to do anything to skip OOBE. But it feels like the walls are closing in, and the day I finally can't do anything without an MS account, I'll finally daily drive Linux. Hopefully the part of my Steam library that will still need Proton will run smoothly--that's the main thing I'm scared of.
Proton runs like a dream these days. I can't think of a game that I couldn't run under it that I really wanted to. The biggest incompatibility seems to be caused by multiplayer games or live service games with hyper aggressive DRM or anti-cheat measures (Destiny, PUBG, etc). If you typically avoid these kinds of games I think you'll be alright.
There's a Group Policy setting in Windows: Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\File Explorer\Turn off numerical sorting in File Explorer
Group Policy has so many essential settings I hurry to change with every isntall. I wish Windows would expose more of them to the user in ordinary settings.
Not to overly praise Valve which does have a profit motive, but their ecosystem + the Steam Deck + the openness of SteamOS really changes the landscape to where the "gaming on linux" punch line could really clear the hump and reach critical mass for developers. Something to fantasize about with each Windows update that adds new privacy converns and nothing else.
Brown University team uses motion blur as a tool to construct super-resolution images (sensor motion data is combined with the "blurry" image to produce an image with higher resolution than the sensor itself)
At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
In the 70s there were massive protests in the Netherlands called "Stop the Child Murder". Note that these protests were based on conservatism. People were used to safe streets where children could cycle independently to school, go to sports clubs and hang out with their friends around the city. Then cars came and started killing their children.
At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
I can certainly attest that cycling around the Netherlands was a joy during the late 70s and 80s. I lived in West Germany on and off, mostly in the north and close to the border. A lot of German roads had very decent cycle lanes too.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
I think the bigger scandal in NYC isn't the removal (it was a single lane removed as part of a 15+ year back-and-forth beef), but the fact that the city isn't even close to meeting its legal obligations around constructing new lanes[1].
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
This is a great reason to have snap elections instead of scheduled elections. Mayor Adams will scorch the earth to get the votes of a handful of extremists in his quixotic reelection attempt, and will harm lots of people in doing so.
How does snap elections solve this problem? You'd have less information if it happened in the next week, especially about less well known candidates. You are suggesting that elections coming in a few months leads to tricking people?
It creates conditions for more direct accountability. There's a pretty standard pattern of getting elected, doing the more extreme things, and then giving the voters time to cool off before the election happens.
The pattern in the US seems to be to leave time bombs running that only detonate if you don't get re-elected, something that snap elections wouldn't help with.
When I see someone violating cycling traffic code, nine times out of ten it's an electric skateboard, rental city bike or a food delivery guy on an electric moped (legally bicycles when limited to 25 km/h).
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
With no numbers offered. Lots of cities "expanded" cycling infrastructure but can't boast that level of safety. By far the strongest distinguising factor is the speed limit. That is a mere policy that doesnt cost taxpayers billions, it works, and therefore is politically viable.
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
I might say that of unprotected bike lanes, but how are well protected lanes a detriment?
As a driver and biker alike I’d much prefer there to be a thick barrier between the cyclist and traffic. It reduces the chances of drivers bumping into or hitting cyclists and ensures that the cyclists cannot unexpectedly swerve into traffic.
Ah yeah. It's no wonder people keep mentioning Copenhagen without telling its dirty little secret. It stayed liveable _despite_ the scourge of urbanism because a third of its population was forcibly (via economic forces) displaced during 1970-s, and it _still_ has not reached the 1969 peak: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...
So it was able to avoid the effects of the density-misery spiral. But it'll get to experience them soon. The transit will become more crowded, traffic more jammed, the crime will go up, and the housing costs (of course) will skyrocket.
And pedestrians that then don't get cyclists on the pavements. And drivers getting less congestion. Someone seriously claiming cycle lanes is bad for a city knows little about urban planning.
> And pedestrians that then don't get cyclists on the pavements
If only. Here roads with bike lanes (protected lanes!) get even more cyclists on the sidewalk. I've asked a few and they seem to trust the sidewalk to be better quality and the obstacles on sidewalk don't need them to slow down often, because people tend to jump out of the way.
Second-order effects. Bikes are nothing but misery generators. They are the absolute WORST commute mode, so people (on average) choose literally anything else when they have that option. We have plenty of proof for that. There are cities with great bike _and_ car infrastructure, and the percentage of bike commutes is about the same as everywhere else.
So the only thing that bike lanes do is sabotage cars and other ground transit.
As a double whammy, bikes are inconvenient (or illegal) to take onto the most rapid and ground transit. And bikeshares are not reliable enough for daily commutes.
All these factors motivate people to move closer to the downtowns, because it becomes inconvenient to live afar. This in turn increases the price of real estate near downtowns, resulting in real estate developers building denser housing. This in turn results in higher rents, smaller units, more crime, etc.
Yes, I have researched this, and I have numbers to back up my words.
Really? because I live somewhere where this works quite well: cycling is on average the best way to get around, especially in terms of door-to-door time, and it's something that a huge fraction of people use. I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.
(And, to a large extent, the biggest contributor to it being a good place to cycle is the fact that everyone does it: a whole city's worth of protected bike lanes can't make up for a driver who's not used to driving around cyclists. But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that)
So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.
Do an experiment, drop 10 points randomly within your city. Now plot routes between them using various transport modes. I bet that transit will be 3-4 times slower than bikes.
> I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.
I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population? The absolutely telling metric is the number of families with two or more kids, because it's the point where bikes become utterly inconvenient.
> But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that
Oh yeah. I know that firsthand.
My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
But good news, everyone. Our new housing units are the smallest in the nation and our housing prices are growing fast despite the slowing economy!
> So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.
No, most cities worldwide are designed to make using anything but a car to get around extremely inconvenient. Best seen in the US.
> I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population?
Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?
The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
> My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes.
A narrowing of a single traffic lane on a 30m stretch causes all that? That's obviously untrue.
> And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
> Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?
Time and inconvenience if you're not using a car. It more-or-less requires a full-time commitment from at least one parent. That's why you see a sharp drop in large families in cities.
> The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
Try that with 2 or 3 children.
> Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
It is connected. We literally buried about 200 million dollars into building a bike network that spans the city. It sits unused, not even replacing the traffic that it displaced. The percentage of bike commutes is around 2-5% depending on the survey, almost identical to 10 years ago.
But the good news is that our downtown is now full of shuttered storefronts, with most commercial blocks having at least one available for lease.
I wouldn’t think of rare American cyclists being comparable to more common European cyclists. Especially if we are talking about a bike messenger in NYC vs a commuter in Amsterdam.
I’d argue that neither set of rules is made for them, so it’s not surprising that they take the most convenient of the two. Plus, it’s not out of the question to have laws in which red lights act like stop signs and stop signs act like yield signs specifically for cyclists[1]. It’s also likely less dangerous if that’s the case[2].
What I've noticed is that everybody skirts rules for convenience, but the offenses are different because the conditions are different.
Cars break the speed limit, look at their phones (easy to see from a cyclist's vantage point) and roll through stop signs, because those things are possible and convenient. Very few drivers are fully in control of their cars in fast, congested traffic, which is why "rear enders" seem to happen frequently.
Bikes roll through stop signs and invent their own shortcuts because those are convenient, but exceeding the speed limit is impossible for most of us.
> At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
You've sort of given it away with the "smaller cities" thing. People who live in NYC don't want to live in a smaller American-style city with suburban sprawl.
(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
I mean, I don't hide my despair at large cities. They're destroying the fabric of the Western civilization by acting as black holes for population.
> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.
Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.
> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.
> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.
Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.
This framing that commute time matters more than anything else about a city seems facially incorrect. And once again, it glosses over the actual reality here: people living in dense cities want the benefits of dense living, and there’s no tractable way to maintain that while designing a city primarily for car traffic.
No, you didn't. You googled the first numbers you could find and threw them over the wall.
The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.
And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.
So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.
Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
Not sure about the law, but if you memorize and quote bits of a book and fail to attribute them, you could be accused of plagiarism. If for example you were a journalist or researcher, this could have professional consequences. Anthropic is building tools to do the same at immense scale with no concept of what plagiarism or attribution even is, let alone any method to track sourcing--and they're still willing to sell these tools. So even if your meat model and the trained model do something similar, you have a notably different understanding of what you're doing. Responsibility might ultimately fall to the end user, but it seems like something is getting laundered here.
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