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grue,

I also use AnySoftKeyboard (installed from F-Droid, BTW) but IMO it kinda sucks. In particular, it often tries to autocorrect things to capitalized proper nouns, which is almost always exactly the wrong thing to do.

Frankly, I’m reading this thread in hopes of finding something else to replace it.

grue,

People are capable of making their own choice in privacy and tech.

Frankly, they often really fucking aren’t, which is why consumer protection laws are supposed to exist.

Nobody is forcing any of this in homes.

Note the weasel-words “in homes.” That’s because they are forcing it literally everywhere else.

grue,

Fixed rate has ended

After only two years? Doesn’t sound very “fixed” to me.

grue,

You could say the Internet and this meme will be together forever.

How do y'all deal with programs not supported on Linux?

I’ve been seeing all these posts about Linux lately, and looking at them, I can honestly see the appeal. I’d love having so much autonomy over the OS I use, and customize it however I like, even having so many options to choose from when it comes to distros. The only thing holding me back, however, is incompatibility issues....

grue,

Any company that doesn’t support Linux doesn’t deserve my patronage.

grue,

I hate rebooting to play games (or even just closing my other software, for that matter), so I choose to reject games I’d have to reboot for.

grue,

I don’t even have a single computer in my house with Windows on it anymore, and haven’t for years. Even the disused Windows 7 install I had sitting on an SSD gathering dust in a drawer has now been relegated to a disk image file.

grue,

Deciding how much wage theft to do is not valid “company policy.” The law is not arbitrary.

grue,

A lot of inexpensive direct-to-consumer (as opposed to local-bike-shop or no-name-Ebay-garbage) e-bikes are legitimately on sale. These sale prices aren’t necessarily much better than other sales throughout the year, but they are a little bit better.

The best deals in my opinion are from Lectric. Lectric typically puts bikes “on sale” by bundling free accessories but without actually discounting the price of the bike itself, but right now they’re doing both for most of their models. (Note that the real normal prices aren’t what the website claims: for example, the XP Lite is really discounted from $799 to $749, not $999 to $749, the XP 3.0 long range is discounted from $1199 to $1139, not $1505 to $1139, and the regular XP isn’t actually discounted. I like this brand and think its generally a good company – I bought an XPedition from them in February and preordered an XPeak two days ago – but I admit it’s not immune to fake MSRPs.)

Aventon also stood out in my recent shopping. In particular, their cargo bike is a pretty screaming deal with all the free accessories they’re giving you at the moment. (In fact, I’d recommend it as the better value even vs. the Lectric XPedition, which is normally not the case).

Rad Power Bikes also deserve a mention since they’re one of the biggest brands in this category (especially for the RadWagon cargo bike, which is definitely the most common ebike at the school drop-off in my neck of the woods, although the XPedition is gaining on it). Their bikes are on real discounts, and they stand out for advertising a “low price promise” guaranteeing that if you buy a bike now and it gets discounted even further before New Year’s Day, they’ll refund the difference. IMO they’re not quite as price-competitive as they used to be (as I mentioned in a comment elsewhere), but if the bike you want is a Rad bike, now’s the best time of the year to get it.

There are a bunch of other brands that I’m less familiar with on sale, too. I found this Youtube video useful (no affiliation, by the way): “The very BEST Electric Bike Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals for 2023” by Ebike Escape

grue,

Switch to Linux at home now. In six months, you’ll have a much better idea if you want to use it at work.

grue,

I’m getting fed up with the bullshit

Frankly, that’s the reason – the original reason, and the most important – to use Free Software. With very few exceptions, the origin story of every Free Software project was somebody getting fed up with a piece of proprietary software either abusing them or just not doing what they wanted it to do. In fact, the entire Free Software movement itself was invented in the first place because Richard Stallman got fed up with Xerox’s bullshit back in the day!

So yeah, there you go: that’s the only reason you need, and you already knew it.

grue,
grue, (edited )

I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture.

On the contrary, doing anything other than blaming cars misses the bigger picture that car-dependent development is what drives, directly or indirectly, almost all the pollution except for industry and agriculture:

  1. The emissions of the cars themselves, of course.
  2. The emissions associated with producing all the extra concrete you need to build places to store the cars, as well as wider roads to fit all the traffic. (EDIT: and longer roads, for that matter, because inserting all the space for car storage forces your destinations to be further apart!)
  3. The emissions associated with restrictive low-density zoning codes forcing 90% of the population to live in single-family homes exposed to the environment on all six sides, instead of giving them the freedom to choose to live in denser housing where shared walls increase thermal efficiency.
grue,
grue,

Why are you trying to rebut an argument I didn’t make?

grue,

Fedora is basically Debian

ಠ_ಠ

Lots of things are “basically Debian” (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.). Similarly, lots of things are “basically Fedora” (Red Hat, CentOS, etc.). But Fedora and Debian are themselves separate base branches of the Linux distro family multitree and thus couldn’t be further apart!

grue, (edited )

Turbolinux, mainly because it’s the first distro I tried (obtained in the '90s on physical disks bought at a Ham Fest, no less!) and I never got it to install/run correctly.

Scratch that; this guy is right. Android loses by a mile for being the most popular subversion of what Free Software is supposed to be.

grue,

I’m just used to thinking of Fedora and Debian as the two major different kinds of Linux (with smaller distro families like Slackware and Gentoo being kinda off to the side). I mean, yeah, they’re both general-purpose and community-maintained, but that applies to most distros. Also, if apt and yum are similar, then so is every other package manager. They don’t even use the same package format, after all.

I get what you’re saying, but I just don’t categorize distros that way.

grue,

But how can you really be sure?

By refusing to own any car manufactured after the technology became available. That’s my strategy, anyway.

(It’s also 'cause I like things like manual transmissions that are harder to find on newer vehicles.)

grue,

…And when your rich parents have connections to other rich people who might want your art.

grue,

Yeah, “millionaire” just means “having $40k/year to spend in retirement.” Nowadays, literally every American should become a millionaire by the time they retire. It is very much no longer the flex it was a century ago.

grue,

That’s the neat part: my diesel car (I’m not the guy you replied to; I just also own one) is old.

In fact, old diesels are actually better because the common-rail fuel pump and “clean diesel” bullshit on the newer ones makes them incompatible with >10% biodiesel. My car can actually be carbon-neutral (simply by putting B100 in it) because it’s old!

grue,

B100 smells like food, too (the stuff I typically buy is a byproduct of chicken rendering plants, so it smells like fried chicken).

WVO vs. biodiesel is kind of a “six of one, half a dozen of the other” kind of thing: either you modify the car to run the unmodified biofuel, or you modify the biofuel to run in an unmodified car. I prefer the latter since it’s simpler and I can just buy it.

grue,

The development’s buildings… are clustered together intimately to create inviting courtyards for social gatherings and paved – not asphalt – “paseos”, a word used in Spanish-speaking parts of the US south-west to denote plazas or walkways for strolling.

Importantly, such an arrangement provides relieving shade from the scorching sun – temperatures in these walkways have been measured at 90F (32C) on days when the pavement outside Culdesac is 120F (48C)

TL;DR: shade is a thing.

grue,

Or maybe just stake it to the ground?

grue,

Sigh… you just had to post this after Halloween, didn’t you?

grue,

Makes me miss Reddit’s RemindMe bot.

grue,

Lots of places have maple trees, you know. Various maple species grow all the way down to Florida, not to mention Europe and eastern Asia.

And even if you’re talking about the sugar maple specifically, most of its range is in the US, not Canada:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Acer_saccharum_range_map_1.png/480px-Acer_saccharum_range_map_1.png

The only thing special about Canada is that that’s where it gets cold enough for the sap to run so it can be collected for syrup.

grue,

I think you meant “Thank you, Mr. Data.”

And you’re welcome!

grue,

Doesn’t the great firewall mostly censor access within the country?

Yeah, I was gonna say this meme has got the labels backwards.

grue,

And if you’re too slow, Bigfoot shows up like the Yeti in SkiFree.

grue,

It’s management’s own damn fault for trying to use butt time in seats as a proxy for productivity.

grue,

Use it as a Q-ship to attack a Russian port somewhere under the guise of returning it.

grue,

As Elon and the Saudis intended.

grue, (edited )

I’m amused at the notion of engineers putting up signs warning everybody that they’re shit at their jobs.

Edit: I’m a former traffic engineer myself, so I’m entitled to say things like that. Frankly, our entire profession is doing it wrong and needs to be reformed.

grue,

Or better yet, if only engineers did their fucking jobs and fixed negligently-designed areas to be less dangerous.

Edit: I say that as an engineer criticizing my own profession from the inside, by the way.

grue, (edited )

Sure, but a lot more crashes are caused by poor design (including design that facilititates law-breaking) than mechanical failures or lack of enforcement.

In particular, I want to address the latter: trying to stop people from speeding by having more police patrols simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does work is physically changing the design of the street (narrowing lanes, etc.) to make it scarier and less comfortable for drivers to go too fast. That’s the engineers’ responsibility, not law enforcement’s.

grue,
grue,

Not on freeways, no. The design principles appropriate for freeways are entirely different than the ones appropriate for city streets. It’s the latter where I suspect most of these Waze “dangerous hotspots” will be, and so it’s the latter that I had in mind when writing my previous comment.

grue,

Could you point out an example on Google Maps? Maybe there’s something else wrong with it.

Also, instead of focusing on there still being some speeding despite the street being narrow, consider how much worse the speeding might be if it weren’t.

grue,

the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on were in Texas where there were 12 lane highways

I understand why you feel like those were the most dangerous, but statistically, freeways are the safest kind of road. It’s places like stroads that you should really be scared of.

grue,

How does something so endemic like this get fixed?

That’s a very good question. Ultimately, the standards of practice in traffic engineering need to change. Speaking of which: to put a finer point on just how much of an uphill battle that is, consider the fact that even the name itself^1^ – “traffic engineering” – is biased towards narrow concern for the routing of cars at the expense of holistic consideration of the street as a place. (See also: confessions #2, , and ) There’s a huge amount of institutional inertia supporting the bad status quo, including everything from university curriculum, to standards documents like the AASHTO Green Book and the MUTCD, to the fact that young Engineers-In-Training (EITs) are required to work under existing licensed Professional Engineers (PEs) for about half a decade (it varies depending on circumstances) before being allowed by law to strike out on their own – which on balance is almost certainly a good thing because we definitely don’t want unqualified people stamping plans, but also could lead to being inculcated into old ways of thinking and having latent new urbanist inclinations beaten out of them.

Fun fact: the biggest US traffic engineering research group, one which has an outsize influence in writing those standards documents, is none other than the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI). In Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but https://files.catbox.moe/5gawd7.png.

Anyway, one way for non-engineers to try to help that happen faster – other than bitching about it on social media like I’m doing right now – would be to educate yourself on New Urbanist/Strong Towns/Fuck Cars/etc. ideas, then get involved with your local politics and lobby for said ideas to be implemented. More concretely, read Jane Jacobs and Shoup and watch a bunch of Not Just Bikes videos, then call up your city councilperson, county commissioner and state rep, join whatever citizen planning groups happen to be around (e.g. my city has “NPUs”), and start bitching at those people about it. You can also go to public hearings for road projects and bitch at the engineers directly (they love that sort of thing, LOL).


^1^ It’s a totally different subject – albeit one I’m also passionate about – but I like to cite this article as a good demonstration of how framing matters. It really can’t just be dismissed as “mere semantics.”

grue,

From Microsoft’s perspective, the bloat is the point because that’s where their profit comes from.

grue,

Four thousand Martian days

Apparently it is measured in sols, and it was just the headline that was ambiguous.

grue,

I concur with you, but I’d phrase it in a different way: if your budget is $200 for a bike, you should be shopping for a used bike-shop/reputable-brand bike on Craigslist or whatever.

Also, agreed about fixies, except that switching the flip-flop hub to single-speed mode and adding brakes makes it fine.

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