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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 4th, 2023

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  • Im mostly pro congestion pricing but there are two things that make me sympathetic to some of the detractors.

    One issue is that well, the New York metro area as a whole is better than the rest of the country when it comes to public transit and getting people into the city. It is still has big gaps and holes. For example if you live west of the Hudson the metro north is not as complete as east and then you have towns in nj also not on the rail line. These people don’t have the means to be able to take public transit in a way that doesn’t add a significant, significant amount of time to their already long commute. And on top of that, they’re already paying pretty hefty tolls to get to and into the city on top of the car maintenance and the gas. And a lot of these people live in the far fringes of the metro area, not just because they are priced out of the closer, better connected suburbs, as well as the city itself.

    The other side of the argument is that the MTA is genuinely dysfunctional. Like it was only a few years ago that the governor decided to try and do a surprise visit to see the workers working overtime and found that nobody was there.The MTA is mismanaged in all facets. I don’t blame people for being skeptical that this money will be well utilized.

    That said, a large majority of people who are anti- congestion are just car-brained and do live near a convenient rail or park and ride and Would probably improve their own quality of life if they just took public transit instead of sitting in traffic every day.






  • The weirdos crusading against bloat helped keep distros light weight and performant decades on. It allowed a linux distro to fly on older hardware that was bogged down by newer linux versions. The legacy to this day is that WMs like KDE can actually be fairly light weight and there is still attention paid to not using a lot of resources.

    Nowadays I feel like the complainers dont even have a consistent definition of what bloat is and it ranges from command line only users who know theyre crazy and niche but speak up anyway, to people who are just upset if a distros ships with basic default tools like an image viewer or something that opens text files or videos, or drivers.

    The whole thing is also silly with how much cheaper ram and storage have gotten. Even moreso because the distro and WM isnt the limiting issue. Yes you can still run a KDE based distro with 2gigs of ram, but as soon as you open your web browser and visit the modern internet the dozen high definition images that load in and videos and javascript.


  • Roe getting gutted was the result of conservative judges that got appointed to the supreme court and the states that have taken further steps to restrict are republican run states. The majority that the Dems had was very slim not enough to get a lot passed especially when the “majority” included “moderates” like Manchin and Sinema.

    I agree the Dems and libs suck. If they werent so smugly sure that clinton would win 2016 they would have not played politics and forced in their supreme court pick and we would have less of a minority.

    Roe getting gutted is the result of a decades long plan by the republican party and letting them them win a majority again will only make things worse.




  • Hardware is a big factor in this. Mint in particular is a stable distro based on the ubuntu LTS so it’s slow to get new kernels and you need a ppa to get a fresher mesa install and this is essential for newer amd hardware. Conversely if you’re on a rolling bleeding edge distro and you rely on nvidia and their closed drivers then you’re often one update away from breaking them.







  • Yeah I dont think I’ll ever understand these weird 5g skepticism threads. I do get better battery life on lte than 5g and building penetration means a lot more switching between bands(an issue specifically with my pixel’s radio) but similar issues existed with with lte and 3g when they launched. I guess the difference is LTE already has speeds and latency enough for people to get by.

    And yeah on lte you’re already getting 10-60mbps down so for most use cases you probably dont notice a huge difference in speed while browsing social media, and watching youtube. But having a network with higher speeds and more bandwidth is better for handling congestion. If you live in an area where the 5g is unreliable or your phone has poor support for it then you can just switch to lte while things keep cooking.



  • Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.

    Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.

    In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).

    Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.



  • Yeah the way they treat the creators on their platform, the way they handle copyright claims, the way they handle flase copyright claims, the way their algorithm radicalized a populace, their child feed is unmanaged and feeds children exploited by the worst of content farms, and the fact that they have a monopoly over the online video market.

    I understand the web has a problem with monetizing content and its killing things like journalism and a lot of the third party internet, but I will continue to not feel bad about the expenses that the billion dollar company has to spend on server costs.