idreyn

> there should be roving vans throughout the city moving and balancing the slots based on usage

There are, and the system does rely in part on this rebalancing act to be functional. (Also to bring the E-bikes in for charging — sadly the stations won't be able to charge those for some time yet.)

There was a recent article on a software-mediated version of (A) that seems to be happening all over the US: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

Roads are free at the point of use, so this analogy doesn't hold (and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find empirical evidence of what you're describing)

You might be interested in the S-process: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWivz6KidkI

Increasingly I think the screenreader/ARIA proposition of navigating a (linearized ordering of) elements on a 2D page is fundamentally limiting for blind users. The web needs a more robust model of application state from which text, audio, and GUI representations can be derived. Our applications clearly structure "objects" and their "methods" under the hood, and it should be possible to present these more directly to users in whatever format makes sense to them.

I tried it again and was able to use it this time!

Check the Graphics folder! (It crashed immediately for me in Firefox, though)

Glad to see they never exceed 20 mph in this video. If AVs can stick to city speeds that prioritize pedestrian safety over travel time, they'll have a huge head start over human drivers in safety and "human decency" metrics. Hopefully have a traffic calming effect on the rest of us, too.

> The previews are clearly marked when they open in a lightbox.

Oh, I didn't realize that because I was on mobile.

> on click you get the content right away, not a website in a tab where you need to find the content

This is quite nifty for sites like Soundcloud and YouTube that offer an embeddable version of their content

> Separately, you can always do, CMD+Click

This isn't working for me (Firefox, MacOS)

The rich previews on hover are great. I was referring to the "Immersive Previews", and for the things demoed on your landing page like short forms and Youtube videos, they're a nice experience. I worry about a world where every "sticky" web platform gets caught in an iterated prisoner's dilemma and all decide it's in their best interest to do this. In this world, whenever I want to click a link off of Instagram or Twitter or NYT I end up in an "Immersive Preview" iframe of the site I expected to navigate to. Google AMP everywhere.

I would _love_ a world where this kind of thing is closer to a first-class feature of the web -- thinking of Xanadu-style transclusions or even Google's abandoned(?) <portal> element. I would love deep-linking from Github->Jira->Github in the same tab, and this points the way towards that. But if there are a dozen implementations of it floating around, and users have no control or warning over when a link behaves this way, it's just another way to wrest control of the browsing experience away from them.

Please be mindful about how you advertise this, is what I'm saying.

This has some neat use cases but I dearly hope it doesn't become the norm...

The skyways! They're fun and iconic, but in some ways they're the worst thing about downtown Minneapolis. Since so many office workers use them to get around, the streets feel dead and car-dominated even by the standards of American cities.

I'd like to see more discussion about the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure of web3: the servers, file hosting and streaming, the caching layers. All of these slick websites are probably running on the same old cloud platforms and using the blockchain as an (admittedly powerful) identity or transactions layer.

I know it's early days, but the rhetoric about freedom from FAANG is outpacing the reality. I worry about a new generation of services that lure in and capture users with a thin veneer of decentralization ("oh, your identity is on ENS, but uh we actually host your videos") or those services suddenly finding they have huge cloud infrastructure bills to pay, leading to governance catastrophes, broken promises, and rug pulls/shutdowns.

A potential small step in the right direction: it would be super cool to see a blogging platform like mirror.xyz host its user-uploaded image assets on IPFS. It would be super super cool to see a DAO engineered to put money in trust to keep these assets pinned past the lifetime of the service itself, with as little human intervention as possible.

Many people have deep ties to a place — as caregivers to aging parents, as members of diaspora enclaves, or as young people willing to struggle through a few years of hardship for the chance of success. Many others have seen the writing on the wall and moved elsewhere, and more power to them. It's a question of whether individual solutions (people can just move somewhere else) compose into societal solutions (we need lots of "unskilled" labor or our cities will collapse into chaos within days).

- The basic geography of the Bay Area: it's big, it's polycentric, it's hilly, there's a huge body of water on the direct route between many origin/destination pairs. The train ride can take hours and can actually cost quite a bit.

- America's inability to build mass transit cost-effectively. At this point train rides along BART are mostly between high-cost areas, and discussions of expanding the system even a little more have price tags in the tens of billions, and timelines of a decade or more. Besides, the radius of BART is about as wide as it ought to be — it should be filling in, not sprawling out, and that requires upzoning the areas along the train to be effective.

Others are free to do the same, except that they have to continue to commute to where the jobs are. If they're lucky they might live on the fringes of BART but increasingly people are just condemned to hours-long gridlocked freeway commutes to get to their $17/hr job in SF. To recover any kind of decent quality of life you're talking about moving to a different region/state.

> Shaun has joked that “brute force creativity” is the attitude to take when solving a problem in Pulp. This simple toolbox gives you just enough flexibility to expand the game’s featureset beyond what seems possible at first.

I learned to program using Scratch and I loved this about the language community that developed around it. For the first few years it didn't even have arrays, procedures, or text input, and people (kids!) worked around these things by encoding state using the powerful graphics tools, clever math, and brute force.

People in the forums would clamor for more powerful features, but they were rolled out slowly and carefully. Later on I had a brief internship with the Scratch team and got a sense for why. The dev team was small, but more importantly they thought very carefully about how to whittle a language feature to its essence to enable maximum creativity with minimum cognitive overhead. I really appreciated that.

Of course I also quickly developed an appreciation for Snap[0] (née BYOB) which veered off from Scratch with a more "f*ck it, have everything" philosophy towards language design :)

[0] https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html

Totally. I don't think Google is necessarily doing anything as blatant as directly selling your browsing history to third parties.

Since I went to go check, I might as well share what I found: in my Google account "Activity controls" there is a toggle (off for me, not sure what the default is) that grants them permission to use Chrome history for "faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences". As I understand it, this is not selling away your data so much as letting them use it to auction your attention to advertisers.

> Oh, and we don't sell your data

> Wondering why browsers are usually free?

There's a heavy implication here that most browser vendors sell your browsing data, but you don't state it outright because (aside from Chrome, arguably) I don't think it's actually true. Let's look at the others:

- Edge is probably sending all kinds of invasive telemetry to Microsoft

- Firefox is maybe(?) sending your email address to Pocket if you have an account with them

- Safari is a product that you pay through the nose for

None of these things are the same thing as selling data the browser collects. If you have any evidence that this is happening, you should put it on your website, because I'd love to hear about it! If you don't, you should probably not prey on people's deep confusion about who is tracking them on the web, and how.

Let's not shift established expectations away from the idea that there ought to be a browser that's both free to use and free of spyware when we already have such a browser in Firefox.

If you're referring to the Driver's Cooperative in New York City, they'll take you up on that offer for $72k: https://drivers.coop/jobs

I like the perspective offered here but I don't really think the author's perspective on the "leftward end of the climate activist movement" comports with my own experience. Most people I know that I'd bucket as such are eating ~vegan, driving less, stretching the lifespan of their built-to-break consumer goods and (this is the real litmus test in my opinion for upwardly mobile techies) seriously limiting when and why they fly.

Or maybe he's talking about "climate envoy" John Kerry and his private jet. At any rate I hope he meets some climate activists that he likes someday because this is a valuable addition to their conversation and a good antidote to some of the worst doom-and-gloom tendencies in those circles.

In case you haven't seen it: https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/

But it's worth clarifying that the number is correct — Bitcoin is currently using 1 Mwh per transaction.

I dunno if this is really some high modernist plot to assimilate all of these quirky little polities into a single transportation regime. If New Mexico or Montana don't want trains I really couldn't care less. But the actual power dynamic is the inverse of what you're positing: the western states elect senators with frontier mindsets who value austerity and self-reliance (nevermind who is paying for the interstates that crisscross their states) and they exert an outsize influence on policy for the rest of the country. "Santa Fe therefore Jamestown" is actually a fantastic summary of how federal transportation policy has been standardized over the last seventy years, using the sparsest and least geometrically constrained places as a yardstick for what should be built (freeways) and for whom (people making 20+ mile city-suburb or suburb-suburb commutes).

> The problem is that geography and history make the US unsustainable over the long term.

Here we agree, which is why the US should build several dense intercity rail networks within its borders which will eventually serve as skeletons for its balkanized successor states :)

The federal government is the issuer of our currency and is well-positioned to fund intercity rail in a way that states and cities just aren't. It's bad that, as you suggested, the senators from large and sparsely populated western states could shoot the idea down because it doesn't happen to work for their states, even though it could be a great solution for 200+ million people on the coasts (California included) in the South, and in the Great Lakes region. If the United States can't mobilize to build infrastructure because a minority of the country doesn't want to, that's an existential threat to the country.

Not in terms of population density, which is what matters when it comes to intercity rail. I know this isn't convincing to senators from big western states — but we've gotta draw a line in the sand in allocating decision making power to big empty spaces in this country, it's becoming an existential concern at this point.

> I would rather suffer the environmental damage that Bitcoin incentivizes over having central banking control our currency

What multiplier do you have to add to the environmental damage to get to the point where Bitcoin meaningfully supersedes central banking instead of providing a funky niche alternative to it, and how do you feel about it then?

> No government can print Bitcoin at will to fund military spending

I can think of a few state actors that could take control of 51% of the network, and one with rather capricious views on private property rights that could do so just by seizing the mining hardware already operating on its soil.

I just saw another interesting whitepaper the other day from the World Sudoku Society suggesting that we tile the Mojave with solar panels to generate more Sudoku puzzles!

The ad infrastructure can still exist -- it would just have a restricted set of data (IP, device fingerprint, the surrounding content, and whatever info the first-party publisher voluntarily submits about you) to decide what ad to serve. Small, niche websites may do better than big news sites under this regime since you can infer more about their visitors by the fact that they chose to visit.

I could see bigger sites expending a lot of energy trying to bring the tracking and inference in-house, and even federating these efforts, creating a kind of soft-paywall that requires you to "pay" by validating an email address or some other stable identity marker in exchange for temporary access to content, so they can watch what you browse and build a shared model of you that they can feed back into the ad networks. I could see the NYT continuing to manipulate and fine-tune its headlines and graphics, trying to sort its visitors into cohorts based on what appeals to them to squeeze every last cent out of a pageview.

At the same time, so much content discovery and consumption happens in the belly of the beast (Facebook, Google, Youtube) that most ads will continue to be targeted based on the considerable information those websites have about you, regardless of what browsers do or what happens to third-party tracker networks.

I used paged.js in production and while it's definitely not fast enough to run during an HTTP request, it can render a 300 page document reasonably quickly, definitely within the 120 second TTL of our worker tasks. It can be quite finicky though and sometimes stalls on things like images that are taller than a single page.