scabbycakes's comments

I get what you're saying, in effect a chicken and egg paradox with cars vs public transit. I think that's a fair argument when it comes to commuter transit, but ultimately the horses have already left the barn. The vast majority of the country is now set up for car dependency (except in about 4 cities), and considering the climate it's going to be almost impossible to compel our fat aging population to stand in -20 degree weather waiting for a bus or train to get groceries unless you're 25 years old and have an abundance of time and energy.

To your other point, the hub and spoke trigonometry doesn't apply to Canada, the population's not laid out in that way. It's already for the most part a linear layout produced by a set of parallel competing rail lines running a couple hundred km from the US border. The rail was the factor that made the majority of the country's settlements. In America or other countries I think your point is absolutely fair though, because there's actually vertical girth to the nation that makes an actual hub and spoke system feasible.

Ultimately though I just don't believe anyone would use a train to spend 15-20 hours to get from Toronto to Calgary on high speed rail. Or even 4-6 hours to get from Vancouver to Calgary (likely not possible anyway considering the terrain). They're going to fly.

And almost no one is going to take a train from Regina to Winnipeg when they absolutely need a car at their destination to do anything anyway. Even the proposition of connecting Calgary to Edmonton is massively ridiculed because people understand how exceptionally light-weight your trip must be to forgo a vehicle at either end for the sake of saving maybe an hour by taking a train. It just seems silly considering the realities.

Mass transit sounds utopian but is mostly nonsensical to Canadians who live outside of the few big cities and understand how goofy it would be to put thought into it. Toronto and Ottawa and Montreal don't represent the rest of the country, but unfortunately their voices steer policy in ways that don't serve the rest of the country very well.

Buses are a thing of the past in Canada, they're far too slow and the countryside is too spread out to make feasible routes. They also used to cost almost as much as a plane ticket and take 10x the time. When intercity lines outside dense population centers DID exist they were pretty much empty all the time, hence their extinction.

High speed rail could only serve major centers across the country. Other than the Toronto to Montreal corridor, population centers along the rail lines are too far apart. For example the distance between Toronto Ontario and Kenora Ontario is roughly 1500+km, so a high speed rail trip would still take 6-8 hours between them at best. The train would be mostly empty too because there's just not a lot of people going between non-major cities. It's not like just because a rail line appears between places people are going to start going between those places all that much more. There's just no way the operation costs for high speed rail would be covered by fares from a handful of people.

Air transportation is only good for longer trips between two major centers in Canada. If you're going to/from smaller regional centers for most of Canada the commercial airports don't even exist, and if they do the flights are infrequent and the costs to fly in/out of them are absurd and the flights might even take far longer than just driving. For example to fly between Kelowna BC and Kamloops BC, a 150km drive, costs $300-$500+ for the ticket and takes about 5 hours (not including travel to/from the airport, check-in time + waiting at the gate + waiting for luggage) due to a stop in distant Vancouver. It's just not feasible to airlines to have short direct routes, so they don't. But again you're not going to find airports with commercial flights for about 90% of the towns in the country because the towns are small and don't have airports (except if they don't have roads to connect them like in the north).

To summarize, unless you don't go anywhere or you're only going between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal by train or flying between distant cities or in a remote village, you're likely going to want to use a car otherwise the alternatives can be absurd.

I was writing code for a Raspberry Pico and a beginner at it. The Pico is hooked up to a little display with no documentation other than a few horrible convoluted and broken-english examples with hundred line functions, and I had no idea what to do to just display some things on this little screen.

So I simply dumped the code examples into ChatGPT and said "Given these examples that display text and boxes on a screen, can we write a simpler interface and straightforward small functions for the display code?"

And it was done.

This wasn't code I wanted to mess with, I really just wanted to build my application rather than spend any time messing with the code to interact with this proprietary display. It was fantastic!

I've been in the web development industry for roughly 17 years and loved most of it until Agile took over.

Now everything is reduced to ticking off tasks and almost zero room for creativity. Meetings after meetings. Overcomplicated development workflows, or really just everything is overcomplicated. Twenty people to do the job of two, checkups, check-ins, checkouts, checkboxes. Gratuitous positivity makes any genuine gratitude hollow and meaningless.

I've taken the last two years off aside from a little bit of contracting to pay the bills and serves to remind me of how awful it's become. The only times I'm happy is when I can work on weekends or holidays and no one will be pinging me haha.

I've always seen this as a weird argument. Are people just opening and quitting their IDE/editors constantly all day?

So what if it takes 30 seconds to start if it's done once or twice a day (or once a week or less in my case). What the heck kind of environment are people working in or mindset are people in when they can't tolerate 8 seconds for their IDE to open? (And then use that as an argument why the IDE is inferior.)

It sounds like I had a similar experience as you, I'm also 6'4". I had the largest Aeron and it was terrible, especially the hard plastic sides that pressed/cut into my outer thighs. The seat hurt after an hour or two without any real support under, and there was just no configuration that could be done to make any of it comfortable.

I'm not really capable of not-manspreading in order to minimize the Aeron seat side lip pain so one day I brought a belt to the office to tie my legs together so I could relax ... which helped but was just as ridiculous as it sounds. So I just went and bought my own chair instead for my home office and never went back to the office again.

Thanks for mentioning the Titan, it looks like my next chair!

Yeah I had been issued an Aeron at my office and although it wasn't the worst chair I've ever had, it did cause me a lot of soft tissue pain.

After about eight months with the HM, I couldn't take one more day of it so I bought my own generic chair and have been happy ever since.

What's more likely though: military experts who can't possibly know everything going in all aspects of not just the entire US military but also all of the world's militaries AND the private sector - OR - things are extraterrestrial in origin

I'm sure the are aliens out there, but I think jumping to the conclusion that all of these reports are alien technology leaps right over a ton of possible reasonable explanations.

I call it Made-By-A-Macitis because it's so common in this industry since MBP's are issued by default almost in web dev companies, which inevitably leads to weird scrollbars here and there on their startup websites until someone else finally reports it or a dev finally breaks down and tests it on any other non-Apple device.

I imagine Trump's installed someone in charge of the USPS to destabilize it in a hurry in order to erode confidence in the USPS to be able to handle mail-in voting.

Perhaps he'll get the public behind him enough to somehow stop mail-in voting if the next few months the mail system falls apart. Or if not and he loses the election, he'll blame it on the incompetent mail service and demand an election redo or whatever Trumpy things he normally does when he loses.

It seems to me that it's everything to do with the election, nothing to do with improving the USPS.

Oooh, good question! Anyone able to answer this?

Seconded - the code integration is fantastic as well. Intellij magically complains when I'm typing a SQL query in a string and get a column name wrong and all sorts of weird little things I miss when I don't have them, IJ is unbelievable.

I can agree on the points you made about the system not having any need to be efficient, a government ran system is just not able to be lean - but as far as people just getting whatever they can for the heck of it, that's probably not the case.

Just from personal experience, I don't have copays or much in the way of direct monetary costs (I'm not American) and it's not like I'm out there grabbing free drugs and surgeries. There's a cost other than money to everything, time and effort and rehabilitation and fear of the unknown and so on. As another example my retired parents have messed up knees and hips but they don't feel it warrants the hassle/risk even though it'd not cost them anything to have surgeries, there's more to it than just financial consideration.

Health savings accounts doesn't seem that great though - I don't know if I'll ever have health issues so if I'm socking away $x00/month I'm removing that from the economy betting against my health. Assuming a somewhat capable health care system I'd rather pay that amount to the government in taxes so they can leverage it now for someone else and if my time comes, then I don't have to worry about dollars and cents and what I can afford.

Also if the government had the money from everyone now in the form of taxes instead of individuals socking it away, it'd be more able to purchase equipment and hire doctors well in advance and the local hospital may have better capacity to cater to my needs.

Just my two cents.

Looks like it's scraped or coming from https://weworkremotely.com/

Whoah, Scrollbars abound!

Feedback: Have a look on a Windows PC once before soliciting a million eyeballs.

I suppose as a user you could definitely look at it that way.

As an investor I'd be worried about losing their churned-out merchants to other platforms like Etsy and Woocommerce and Weebly and about ten other platforms hacking away at their knees. To be fair to Shopify though, I think they know they've already lost the battle for the little merchants and have fixated on other things.

REALLY hard.

What you might be seeing a lot of these days is that app dev companies go around buying up other well-established apps and/or their development companies just because they can't find an app to make or get traction with apps they make at this point in the game. Even with great teams and money coming out their ears, they're having a hard time getting established with new apps.

There are 20 apps all doing the same thing competing with each other and all of them have had years head start, so having zero reviews compared to hundreds of favourable reviews can almost be insurmountable for a newcomer. Having said that, if you have 50 subscribers for your possibly obscure app, you can still eke out a good living.

Keep in mind there's a review process though, so just because you make it doesn't mean it will be published in their marketplace. Shopify tries hard to maintain an air of fairness but a large part of getting visibility with your app is who you know, too.

As someone who worked developing Shopify apps (NOT a Shopifyt employee to be clear), I can attest to the incredibly high percentage of shops that evaporate from the platform on a nonstop basis.

Something like 80% of the people that would install our apps in their shops would be gone or in limbo after a couple months. (Not an app uninstall, their shops actually no longer existed.)

The charts we see from Shopify like this always say "Number of merchants" and the number climbs up towards a million, but at what point do they start excluding their delinquent/disappearing merchants? I'm not convinced they're factoring in churn.

Great comment, your one paragraph really changed the way I think about East Asia. Thanks!

Mnn 360 years of United States coleslaw.