solson4's comments

I lived in Seattle from 2016-2020 and didn't have a car for about half that time. If your house and work are near a link stop you certainly don't need it, everything you'll need is in walking distance or a train ride away. Other than link and the rapid buses, there's good bus coverage, but it's slow, wouldn't want to rely on it IMO.

Biking is not great. I did it a lot, but I'm comfortable riding through heavy traffic on steep hills, if you're not, probably would be hard to rely on.

Finally, I'm big into climbing/mountaineering and lack of a car was never a big problem. I'd rent one the few times I had too (way cheaper than parking and insurance), but otherwise could usually carpool with someone else who was going. Sorta' puts you on someone else's schedule, but if you need a belay partner anyway...

On the other hand, I gave thunderbird a try after switching to linux and found their UI so bad that it was harming usability. After the app had finished taking up the screen with various controls, settings and the list of messages, there was a tiny window left over to read the email itself, and it seemed like the threading of messages was basically broken. It wasn't that it looked old exactly that bothered me (although it did), but that I was buried in a mountain of jank from the start.

I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.

It looks like this could change soon with the city allowing “metroplexs” everywhere in city limits[1]. It’s not law yet, but the city has been doing a lot of upzoning, so we’ll see.

1. https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-fumano-the-e...

I think the excitement is that it would give us another data point for what life can possibly be like. So far (AFAIK) the best evidence is that life evolved once on earth, and so everything we see comes from that basic blue print. But does it have to be that way? Would alien life also be carbon based, or something else? Is DNA/RNA (or a close equivalent) a universal feature of life? If not what do they use instead? If so, that's also very interesting. There's just so many questions we can't answer when the sample size is one. I guess my belief (hope?) is that that curiosity would spur further exploration, not kill it.

As for the great filter, yeah, it's a bit scary if we rule out bio-genesis as an option, but that still leaves the single to multi cell jump behind us (and arguably development of human level cooperation/problem solving, but I'm less sold on that one).

Very cool. I’m working on an interactive fiction engine in my spare time, and it’s interesting to see how someone else chose to manage the complexity that exponential branching starts to cause. Their concept of knots makes a lot of sense for a video game with narrative “hubs”. Definitely like the text based approach, the flow graphs that other engines use look like they get really messy really fast.

In my spare time over the fall I put together a CRUD app to learn rust. Yew frontend and an actix/diesel backend. I must say, I actually really liked working with actix. There was a bit of a learning curve, but after I'd figured out the rust workflow, I felt very productive. Sure, could have gotten up and running faster in Django, but the rust app felt much more solid, like the compiler had my back. If there was something like Phoenix to help with the initial setup as others here have suggested, it would probably be my goto for this sort of thing. Yew on the other hand... it's got a ways to go before I would recommend it.

Just started a new job, so had to take a break while I get my routines sorted out, but before that was making semi-interactive sites for my short stories to live in. The latest one was a trio of short stories embedded in a... html puzzle box I guess? Anyway, it's up here: https://3ai.highvoltageclouds.com/

But everyone who's drinking alcohol is doing it at least in part for the effect. Non-alcoholic beer is a thing and there are plenty of wine replacements and mocktails, but they're nowhere near as popular as the real thing. Obviously there's a difference in a glass of wine with dinner and being roaring drunk, but that's true of any drug. You can micro-dose LSD, or you can take it until you're seeing pink elephants on the ceiling.

Yes, it is quite different. Twitter is one of many platforms. If it begins to censor content it’s relatively straightforward to move to telegram or signal of matrix. The App Store on the other hand is a platform of platforms so its decisions affect all platforms on it. if you’re on an iPhone, there’s nowhere else to go. And Belarus has a gdp per capita of 6300. I imagine for most citizens getting a new phone is not trivial.

Yeah, having a similar issue. Catalina, American keyboard, Firefox. Halfway through the second sentence it started flagging everything as incorrect no matter what I typed.

Because they'd file the same suit if a Democratic president took similar actions. In fact, they already did[1]. They're not working for the benefit of either party, but rather for the general protection of the civil liberties of people in America, regardless of politics. They've historically represented many different viewpoints, up to and including literal Nazis [2].

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-sues-obama-administ...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

Or maybe even have those sort of features be broken out as modules. Can have a flag that says you’re using this JavaScript library or that css layout module at compile time and not ship with anything else.

> There are 10 rivers that cause 90% of plastic pollution

Except, that's not true. The study you're referring to found that those 10 rivers account for 90% of plastic waste going into the ocean from rivers, not all sources[1]. Rivers contribute only 10% or so of the plastic found in the ocean. So not nothing, but far from 90% of all plastic pollution.

Also, probably worth pointing out that quite a bit of that plastic probably originated in the west and was shipped to developing nations to be processed cheaply[2]. Often that amounts to little more than having it burned or dumped into those rivers mentioned.

I personally agree that plastic, when properly stored in a well managed landfill is harmless. But the fact is, that's not happening for far too much waste. Even waste that's used and properly disposed of in developed countries.

[1] https://factcheck.afp.com/widely-cited-study-did-not-show-95...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-plastic-polluti...

The only upside to this is that at least it’s just one city trying it out. If there’s going to be a “total collapse of some election” better there than on a state or national level.

Wow, cool coincidence. I’m reading ZAMM right now. Inspired me to write a blog post about fixing my camp stove while living on the road. https://blog.highvoltageclouds.com/index.php/2019/11/24/vans...