304 karma · joined January 7, 2020
Apple didn’t come out with USB support for the iPod until USB 2.0 became a common feature on PCs, with it’s theoretical speed of 480 Mb/s (in my experience of real-world use it was actually still slower than FireWire 400) and sufficient power.
"Had I gone to Spain with no political affiliation at all I should probably have joined the International Column and should no doubt by this time have had a bullet in the back for being "politically unreliable", or at least have been in jail. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
– George Orwell, "Letter to Jack Common [October? 1937]", in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcournt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 289.
I also highly recommend Michael W Lucas’s book Relayd & Httpd Mastery.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/b-traven-sierra-ma...
It was one of the experiences that led him to his hypothesis that coöperation was a survival trait that would be preserved and spread by natural selection.
He also wrote Absolute FreeBSD and PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid, among many others.
https://lobste.rs/s/sh2kcf/buffer_overruns_license_violation...
"And there, the Finnish capital is fortunate. Helsinki owns 60,000 social housing units; one in seven residents live in city-owned housing. It also owns 70% of the land within the city limits, runs its own construction company, and has a current target of building 7,000 more new homes – of all categories – a year"
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
70% of land is not 70% of housing.
The game rewarded strategies that were not backed up by empirical study, or even common sense: You could lace a city with rail from residential to industrial and commercial zones, and the people would still clamor for more and wider roads; There were no mixed use zoning (You cannot shop in your neighborhood?); Your people would demand more police and if you didn't give it to them, they'd riot!
The game rewarded you if you tried to make a California town. (But not Davis — no bike paths!) The city government could not build public housing … (The majority of housing in Helsinki is publicly owned).
I wanted to be able to twiddle the parameters based on the way real people and cities have been observed to behave. New study comes out that says that people seek out 15 minute walkable neighborhood? Go to the settings panel adjust the parameters accordingly … The people should riot if you give them too many cops.
When Yannis Varoufakis took a job as house economist at Valve (before he was appointed as Finance Minister of Greece), I thought it might be a good time to pitch the idea to them, but he left soon after.