admiralteal

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This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.

Outside of the US, you can get a 10k or less electric mini-van, mini-truck, or mini-car which would serve 90% of most peoples’ needs. Most US trips are under 3 miles after all and giant fast luxurious vehicles for those bike-range trips is just totally silly.

Meanwhile the cheapest new car in the US is what, a Mitsubishi hatchback for $18k? It’s ridiculous. The US Automakers are in a tacit conspiracy to squeeze us as hard as they can by refusing to sell anything affordable – by inflating sizes and bloating features to justify way higher MSRPs. Meanwhile the French have access to cheap ICEs like the Skoda Citygo and even ultralight city EVs like the Citroen Ami for half that price while still being easily 90% as capable for most people.

Or for roughly the same price as that bottom-of-the-market US ICE car you can get a totally workable EV like the Dacia Spring.

The US subsidizes huge vehicles in a million pointless ways. I absolutely refuse to believe that vehicle inflation is just caused by some cultural woo. It’s mostly just that we create giant roads, giant parking spots, giant highways, and have automakers that intentionally go as big as the market can bear because bigger means more money. And sprinkle on some bullshit tax loopholes and state agencies/NHSTA being ultra-conservative and you have a disaster. Smaller cars thrive in the old world because the old world doesn’t make it as convenient as possible to have a goddamn road yacht. They’d go big too, but it would just be a nightmare dealing with those huge cars because their governments don’t prioritize making way for them in every way possible.

And that’s not even getting into the frankly fine $2-3k EVs you can get in China. This is all just Europe.

All of those headings are single words.

Taste is subjective, but mine says either color the whole heading or don’t color it at all.

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The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that – though honestly, I don’t see who the possible customer is for those features either. It’s a waste of time, but it doesn’t undermine the application.

What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don’t get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I’ve lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.

I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That’s the thing to really like about Rust – you can be pretty much fearless in it. It’s just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.

I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally… but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It’s mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

I still think it’s a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it’s incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.

If they’re culturally or historically important, why are they in a private collection?

That’s a really, really crap argument that is permissive of all kinds of cultural genocide. A LOT of artwork is in private collections that by no right should be. I make no claims about this guy’s collection, but the mere fact that it is being bought and sold has no bearing. After all, I live in country that used to “legally” buy and sell people.

It’s real-time chat. That’s fundamentally different, philosophically, from the way a forum/wiki works.

You can cludge forum-like features into it with stickies and bots and yada yada yada… or you could just use a platform that is designed from the ground up to be a permanent knowledge store instead of extended, glorified AOL chatrooms.

The children do not yet know how much they yearn for the mines of listservs.

A new, novel solution to an already-solved problem that is worse in pretty much every way. But at least it is anathema to retention of institutional knowledge.

In short: just do a fucking PHPBB forum, it’s better than this shit.

Nor will Hamas release all of theirs, frankly.

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How long until the inevitable posts of “Oh I respect WHAT they’re protesting but I hate the WAY they’re protesting” shows up on this like it does for all the other anti-fossil political activism?

Oh wait, it won’t, because this kind of protest has minimal impact and is easily ignored by the average person.

And those same people will act like these directs protest were never even considered. “Why don’t they just take it to the oil companies”, they’ll say, ignoring that it is entirely ineffective to do so.

I’m thinking the disobedience around fossil fuel protests is still quite a bit too civil.

Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They’ve created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.

irs.gov/freefile

There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it’s totally free.

Lockdown doesn’t require password unless your device settings require password – it normally just kicks it back to requiring pin. Which is still quite secure. I don’t know what you mean saying it is disabled by default – it is available by default if you long press the power button and click Lockdown.

Even better is to reboot the device. Then it will be in lockdown mode – pin required – and also encrypted awaiting the pin. A modern device fresh from a restart should be quite hard indeed to crack without some alternate access to the person’s Google account.

I still like Fira Code better. These are really nice and if there was a fast and easy way to implement fonts to my syntax highlighting maybe I’d give it more of a spin, but that seems really annoying to set up and baseline I don’t find any of these easier to read than Fira.

Here is the comprehensive editor compatibility list for Fira Code. Should be the same.

…what do you think is going on here, in this thread?

It’s talking about taking peoples’ money based on your (fraudulent) ability to predict the outcome. There will be victims in the form of the people whose money was taken. Some of those people will see that the result didn’t match. The fraud will be evident to the defrauded victims.

There’s really little question it was intentional sabotage. Most sensible theories show Russia had means and opportunity. Including a well-equipped vessel detected near the pipelines shortly before the explosions. The motive is a bit strange, though, since it seems like Russia really wanted to be selling that oil… But it’s also not hard to believe that Russia would do stupid, self-harmful things that make no sense, given the whole war in Ukraine is such a thing. Especially when there’s a compelling chain of events that connect to Putin.

The Russians claim it was the US (or occasionally the UK), but they do so essentially without evidence. At least at the time of the attacks, the talk was that it would hurt NATO allies FAR more than it would hurt Russia, so it is a bit absurd. Also, when it comes to Russia, false flags are the playbook and accusations smell like confession.

There’s also theories that it was a Ukrainian sapper mission. There’s some evidence for establishing an opportunity, and the ‘motive’ of ‘fuck Russia’ is hardly insane. But those theories have never convincingly established means (the vessel accused was simply not capable of doing the thing and no other vessels were ever identified) and it would still not be in Ukraine’s interest to hurt European allies / NATO members given their intense need to maintain that relationship. It’s a bit far fetched, in my opinion. But maybe there’s a logic to “this pipeline is creating an unnecessary relationship and severing it will further isolate Putin.” I dunno, if the Ukrainians had wetworks logistics like that I feel like we’d see a lot more shit going wrong deep in Russia right now.

The reality is, we may never know what really happened with those bombings. It’s hard to establish fact at the bottom of the sea and all investigations are almost necessary state-led ones, meaning it’s easy to dismiss the evidence you don’t like and stick with only the evidence that supports you. Which creates an environment full of conspiratorial speculation. And the Russians have a very effective disinformation network that captivates both the extreme left and extreme right that enjoys the chaos and uncertainty.