gfaster

cheap is not a license to lie. I don't understand why people are defending this, if these companies weren't lying about what they're selling then nobody would be complaining. "1gbps for 250TB" or whatever it is simply the honest way to sell a product.

To give some adjacent channels:

- Adam Something (https://www.youtube.com/c/AdamSomething) - urban planning and eviscerations of transportation grifts with a leftist bent

- Oh The Urbanity! (https://www.youtube.com/c/OhTheUrbanity) - urban planning with a focus on biking in Ottawa, CA

- Alan Fisher (https://www.youtube.com/c/AlanFisher1337) - urban planning with a focus on trains and Philadelphia

- Eco Gecko (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJZV6sai-juDs4zAbAMVhfA) - particularly his "The Suburban Wasteland" series - video essays about the negative impacts of suburbanization (video "essay" as in it's much closer to academic essays read aloud)

- RMTransit (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf4iKXL_SJQ5d0qsKkboRRQ) - Public transportation - primarily Canadian rail

- WorldwideRailfan (https://www.youtube.com/c/WorldwideRailfan) - An incredible repository of information about primarily American trains

> roads already exist

The implication in this is that railroads don't already exist, which is simply false. In fact, nearly every town in the Midwest established before 1950 were built on a railroad line. A few notable examples are Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Birmingham, Chicago, St. Louis, and Portland Oregon. Moreover, many suburbs were formed around a streetcar line, which were later torn up to let cars drive there instead.

> maintenance is extremely cheap. It’s paid for with gasoline taxes

That is demonstrably false. Gas taxes as of 2011 do not cover road maintenance (at most it's RI with almost 80% and median of about 45% [1]). Furthermore, the federal gas tax (which is supposed to pay for the interstate system) hasn't been increased since 1993, and isn't indexed to inflation. The United States Highway Trust Fund has been relying on non-fuel tax revenue since 2008, and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon [2]. Of course, regardless of the actual costs of effective maintenance, you can make any public works project much cheaper by simply not maintaining it. If maintenance was actually "extremely cheap," then it stands to reason that the US would be getting more than a 'D' on roads [3]. Even after all of that, it still doesn't factor in the legal requirements for private expenditure on roads, such as minimum parking requirements and extensive R1 zoning. It also doesn't factor in the vast negative externalities of cars (yes, even electric cars).

> Whereas rail is unbelievably expensive

I'm going to ignore that you chose the MTA, a famously corrupt organization that is responsible for tunneling under the densest metro area in the country, as a baseline for the cost of rail. Instead I'm going to point out that car roads have nearly every bureaucratic advantage in the US, for a multitude of reasons. There is a lot of nuance to this, but for anything short of HSR, the expense in railroads is not engineering. If you're interested in a jumping off point for learning more here, check out [4].

[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

[2]: https://www.enotrans.org/article/ten-years-of-highway-trust-...

[3]: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads-infrastr... (The Infrastructure Report Card is published by the ASCE, which does have an incentive to create more work for civil engineers, so it's worth taking it with a grain of salt)

[4]: https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-build/

Worth noting that up to a point, removing obstructions makes roads more dangerous. When the street is a complex environment with many obstructions, trees, and/or points of conflict, people drive slow because it feels dangerous to go fast and are therefore less likely to kill or maim.

The most dangerous roadways are what Strong Towns (article source) refers to as a stroad, which are characterized by many, wide lanes, with frequent turnoffs and other points of conflict. They make drivers feel safe, and so they go fast (regardless of speed limit) and kill people. There is a lot more nuance there that is valuable to learn about, but at the moment, it is really difficult to build safe streets, and even fix unsafe streets, in North America.

imo it's more crazy that people thought of tracking users by using a font in the first place. The level of human ingenuity that has gone into spying on people is staggering.

Ignoring the folly of the automobile being the only way to travel, and that independent mobility is all but dead in the United States, you are not the target of regulations like this. The target is needlessly large vehicles that do little but to stoke the ego of the owner, or maybe simply being another step up in the SUV safety arms race.

The conflict here is that while bigger vehicles are often safer for the occupants, they are way more dangerous for anyone not inside a vehicle that big, especially pedestrians. Namely, if you get hit by a larger vehicle, you're less likely to tumble over the roof like what would happen with a sedan and instead you get knocked over and crushed.

And of course, "the fact that this makes it into an arms race of weight and size" is absolutely not something that we can ignore. This is a perfect example of a situation where everyone acting in their own rational self interest is way worse for everyone, and is why the government should be regulating the size of cars.

On the flip side, I find that opening links in isolated sessions very valuable, if not just because I don't want links sent by others to affect the Algorithm's perception of me. 80% of the time, I want to be a blank slate when interacting with in-app browsers.

Anyone who knows or is learning another language can easily tell you that the "warping" methodology of MTL is insufficient. There was a really good video by Tom Scott [1] that talked about this but the short version is that there is critical bits of language in context and inferred by speakers. Any accurate MTL needs nearly full context both on the page and in the cultural moment, in addition to probably needing to ask questions of the author.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAgp7nXdkLU

I can't imagine with the added scrutiny the internet has gotten since then, especially from foreign governments, that NIST will be able to get away with anything like that again.

But then again I may be completely ignorant as to the scope of NSA meddling.

or even better spend next to nothing and just ban cars in cities and save billions of miles travelled while revitalizing our urban cores

The pessimism here is because there is no real money to be made in carbon capture without significant and expensive policy change. Put simply, carbon capture is a public good, which will require significant public expense even in the most optimistic of cases. If we're willing to go that far, we're better off just implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme for emissions.

Our problem is that this is a technological solution for a problem that needs a policy solution.

But then who does the copyright belong to? Does it belong to every artist who's input was used for training? Was it the user who set up the conditions and chose the image? Or was it OpenAI who developed the model?

Given the court ruling I linked earlier OpenAI almost definitely does not have ownership over the output of the AI, which is what they claim.

It doesn't? What am I missing from the article then? I think it says pretty clearly that human artistry is a necessary component of a copyrightable work.

Wasn't there a decision in the US that said AI generated artwork has no copyright? Something along the lines of it has to be made by a human?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off...

Another way to make resources more abundant that sounds less like the start of a 1960s dystopian novel is simply using resources more efficiently.

So much of society in western nations and especially the US is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere, and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.

In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation to be more efficient because the past couple of generations have been raised on perpetual abundance.

> I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight the positives and generally should be banned in college

That's a... strong opinion.

I'm genuinely at a loss of how you can think that. If studying in groups was harmful enough to be banned by colleges, then shouldn't online classes have been tremendous boons to learning? On a personal level, I can barely straighten out two thoughts in my head unless I have someone I can talk it over with, I couldn't imagine collaborative study being outright banned.

Am I missing something here?

Try the new Rebel Galaxy game. It does blue collar space game quite well, even if it didn't end up being my cup of tea

Yup, and the law applies to vehicles built after 1985. Also the law isn't new, the only thing new introduced here is automated enforcement

From how I see it, if your bike is loud enough that it is in violation of noise ordinances then you should take it to a shop and mod it if you expect to be driving around other people.

Also, if I had to guess, the reasoning for the limit for cars being higher is that past about 20(?)mph the tire noise makes up for the majority of the noise (which is proportional to weight)

I'm really happy to see governments finally waking up to the problems caused by noise pollution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_from_noise).

Another thing that I have maintained for quite some time is that car horns should be at as loud inside the car as out. It's kinda crazy to me that we're ok with people making such loud noises while being completely isolated from them.

I know Paris is doing something similar as well, which is definitely in line with their recent efforts to cut back on cars in the city

I also wrote an alternative solution (not a public repo), but I found that relying on site maps and other link lists generally gave unsatisfactory results. Instead, my solution navigated as a user and actually used next chapter links. While that slowed it down (+ 10 seconds between requests to be polite), it could handle very large books, with the largest I used being 700+ chapters at the time (5000 pages).

I got "Gas prices" which is really just as good

That can only happen when those other OSs match the level of functionality, reliability, and support that windows enjoys. I would love to switch my main OS to a Linux distro but it is still unstable enough and not supported enough that I can't reasonably switch.

As far as I can tell, our best hope is for Linux to improve at the same rate or faster as it has over the last 5 years for at least the next 5. Only then will Microsoft start to face any meaningful competition in operating systems.

Sorry to reply to an old thread but I am just finishing "Planet of Slums" and one of my main takeaways is that neoliberal reforms in third-world countries are absolutely not helping (and in fact hurting) the vast majority of people in urban environments. It is our policies that are putting them in this situation and now it's our responsibility to help them out of it.

Of course this is partially a domestic policy thing, but how we view foreign labor now is not working.

From what I understand what YouTube does is super super difficult to do at scale as well as they do, I do not envy their competitors. Given that, I don't believe ever hoping for an actual competitor to pop up is reasonable, instead we should start thinking about how we can ensure fairness, inclusivity, and democracy(?) on what exists.

I'm not sure what the best way to go about it is, but I know that advertiser and corporate pressure being the only thing that matters is not working (see: dislike count removal). I would not be surprised that if YouTube continues to be unable to regulate itself we'll see governments stepping in and regulating it for them.

I'm trying to imagine how that could work, would we need to encode the English language to a has or something?

I am personally convinced that the only way we can do globalization in a way that makes sense is enforcing labor rights overseas. If our $5 T-shirt can only exist with the exploitation of poor workers in Vietnam then I don't believe we deserve $5 T-shirts. The United States is in a somewhat unique position where we can uplift most of the world if we chose to just stop exploiting their poverty.

So much of TikTok seems firmly in what might be considered the uncanny valley. Lots of just slightly speed up footage, advanced (but not perfect) tts, and video effects and filters are everywhere. I think we might just be getting better at tuning out the imperfections than anything else.

Something to think about is what would you ten years ago think of that video? Would your brain smooth over the imperfections like you do today, or would it jump out and be nearly unwatchable?