potatoz2

I grew up in Paris and that’s where I’m raising my son right now. I think there couldn’t be a kid-friendlier place (other than cost):

- I can walk to a gigantic park with many playgrounds in 5 minutes - I can walk to a small little park with a few swings and a slide in 1 minute - I can walk to a pool in 15 minutes - I can walk to my son’s future kindergarten and elementary school in 2 minutes - I can take public transportation to a gigantic zoo in a bit over 30 minutes (also a gigantic aquarium, playgrounds, etc. in the same area) - I can take public transportation to a world-class kid science museum in under 30 minutes (also a kid-centered movie theater, indoor skydiving, bowling, many more play areas, etc. in the same spot) - I can take public transportation to an amusement park in 45 minutes (1h to a second one, Disneyland Paris) - There are tons of indoor play areas for days it rains I can walk to or take public transportation - I have pediatrician and world-class pediatric hospitals walking distance, or a 5 minute wait away for EMS

And all of that much more safely than if I had to drive my kid everywhere (leading cause of death from 4 year onward IIRC. Once my son is old enough, he'll also be able to independently go to all that (say when he’s 12), which would be completely impossible in suburbia.

The only thing you can do in the suburbs is try to privatize all these resources, which is what a backyard is more-or-less (and a private pool, a home theater, buying tons of toys, etc.), but you inevitably get lesser versions as a result.

I can’t speak for other cities, but Paris absolutely does not fit that mold: the highest density of people is in the very center of the city (or immediately adjacent cities), where the tourists are. Suburban areas can’t possibly house “most people” because they’re way sparser.

You can leave the newborn in the stroller and lower the whole thing yourself or with someone’s help. You can hold the newborn and ask someone to fold the stroller. You can take the bus or the tramway if you really want to avoid the subway.

I live in outer Paris (19th) and have the exact same experience. I’ve taken strollers on the subway without an issue and people are eager to help you (it should be easier, of course, but it’s doable). I've also taken the bus, the tramway, the RER. These days I’ll carry my son (almost 2) or take a baby carrier to go faster on the subway.

Bus are slow because of cars.

I’ve never seen a drug addict on the subway (you do see homeless people though certainly).

> Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.

This is simply false. I just mapped it from place des Fêtes to place de la Catalogne and selected only wheelchair-accessible options (note that this trip is _not_ easy to do because it goes from one end of Paris to the other). Driving it's 15 km, 45 minutes, using the ring road; public transportation takes 47 minutes (48, RER B, 59/88). You’ll notice the same pattern for, e.g. Parc Monceau to Place d’Italie, a 9 km trip (30 minute drive at 11:47am on a weekday, 45 minutes on public transportation).

Buses are slow _because of cars_. Fewer cars means faster buses. The subway is inaccessible except for line 14, but RER A and B, all tramways, and of course buses are all accessible. You can also use a baby carrier.

Are they very dangerous for children? Are there statistics?

It doesn’t really freeze in Paris anymore so it's a moot point, but you can ride bikes when it does (you need different tires, just like cars, and a city that clears the roads, just like for cars).

I live in the 19th district of Paris—probably the cheapest district within city bounds, with the 20th, and not in the center—and I have no issue living with an under 2-year-old. Hell I even decide to go all the way to the 14th for his pediatrician appointments, on the subway. I can walk to something like 5 supermarkets and bodega-like markets, take the subway to a bunch more including specialized, I can walk to see a generalist, we walk to his daycare, etc. all < 10 minutes. I can’t imagine what you can’t do honestly.

It’s false that cyclists routinely ride on the sidewalk in Paris, let alone at full speed. They ride on the road (car and bus lanes) and in bike lanes. It’s true, however, that on some very popular bike routes (rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Michel/Sébastopol), there are enough cyclists that don’t stop at lights that pedestrians can’t easily safely cross. This is a solvable issue that’s independent from the modal share or infrastructure.

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. A blind outside is just like a curtain, except that to whatever extent it heated up it is heating up directly outside (via radiation or convection). A curtain that's hot in the insulated enveloppe is strictly worse, everything else being equal (color, etc.)

The radiation of the sun has to go somewhere. More of it will be reflected back by shutters, and whatever is absorbed can more readily be dissipated outside than inside.

I'd be interested in a link about low E coatings that depend on the sun angle, a quick search doesn't yield anything.

Either way it's not a sufficient solution because AFAIK even the best solar protection glass will let 1/3 of the sun's heat in, which is an enormous amount when you have long summer days.

Curtains work poorly at keeping heat out, in large part because the temperature differential can be extreme if you let sunlight hit the curtain (that and air convection behind the curtain).

The alternative to awnings are shutters or, like you said, plants, but not curtains.

Of course they help in those climates too. It's better if it's 100F inside than 120F, which is what you'll get if you let the sun in with no shade-making device. You'll find ways to get shade in every hot climate, whether arid or humid and no matter what the night temperatures are.

The opposite would be a more interesting example to argue against the original statement.

If you don’t trust yourself to have backup keys, you use the Google or Apple ecosystem. As long as you can get back into your Google or iCloud account, you can get back into every other passkey-protected website. You can also use third-party “cloud” password managers if you prefer.

WebAuthn lets you dial the convenience/security tradeoff exactly however you prefer. I’ll be using hardware tokens, but I’ll be telling non-technical people to use their existing smartphones.

That’s not a technical advantage over Yubikeys/SoloKeys, since they also use WebAuthn and are also unphishable.

It’s not that difficult: you use a PIN/passphrase protected hardware token. Done.

Imagine your doctor or pilot eschewing “best practices” and what your reaction would be. There’s a reason knowledge communities build consensus.

Best practice doesn’t mean you’re at the mercy of the consensus, it just means you have to justify why you should stray from it.

The benefit of React is that it’s declarative. Vanilla JS is imperative/procedural.

If you build anything semi-complicated, you’ll build your own declarative framework.

The inaccessible to non-sighted users, non-computer interpretable canvas? The one where we’d need to reinvent text flowing, resizability, the box model, etc? That’s what you think we should use to build our Web apps?

I don’t understand your comment completely. The “traditional” SSR frameworks (PHP, Rails, Express) didn’t make it easy to componentize things, instead trying to divide logic by broad category (MVC, etc.). I don’t know whether it’s orthogonal to Web development or caused by its complexity, but the emergence of components as a primary unit of abstraction is meaningful IMHO.

I don’t think JS is much worse than other dynamically typed languages to be honest. In Ruby you’d get an exception instead, which is mildly better than `NaN` in your user-visible text, but not much.

The DOM though is definitely complex and built of accretion over time. The Web resists refactoring because we can’t break websites from the 90s.

React is orders of magnitudes simpler than K8s. You can write your own React in a day probably.

I hope these succeed, but we still need transpilation/bundling:

- TypeScript needs transpilation and it’s very popular

- Bundling is still beneficial with H2/H3, if only so that compression can work well

Looks like local storage has a max size of 5MB and cookies 180 * 4KB = 0.7MB, so a similar order of magnitude. AFAIK, cookies can be set to expire in hundreds of years by sites and local storage can be cleared the same way as cookies.

It’s trivial to emulate cookies with other Web APIs (storage + service worker, for one). You’re focusing on the label of the toggle and not user intent. If a website can send information about my visit 2 days ago to an upstream server, clearly my expectation of “Disable cookies” is broken.

That’s a distinction without a difference IMHO.

Local storage (or Cache API, IndexedDB) + Service Worker = Cookies (simply add a header to every request)

Local storage + DOM manipulation to add search params with the stored content = Cookies (apart from first navigation)

And on the flip side

Cookies set using JS + Ignore cookies server side = Local storage

It’s almost like the object/closure equivalence.

I see what you’re saying, but it seems impossible to prove it literally cannot happen if you just assume every safety system we put in place all fail at once, which is _possible_ I guess.

We live with worse tail risks daily though: we have nuclear weapons in the center of Europe (could be misused, there could be an accident, etc.), we have labs that handle or create deadly pathogens (there could be a leak, etc.), we live near volcanoes or in earthquake/tsunami prone areas, and of course we are living through climate change with unknown tail risk (to crops, to temperatures, etc.).

If you accept that sort of question with no real probability of happening (“what if 5G renders us all infertile because we misunderstand high frequency radio waves?”, “what if the flu vaccine produced this year kills us all?”), you can’t really do anything. It’s impossible to prove a negative, we have to deal with expected values given our knowledge.

Isn’t this like comparing the safety of a motorcycle to that of an A380? The “tail risk” of the latter is 800+ dead versus a single rider, but the expected value is way lower in the plane’s case.

You need a way to deal with the scarcity. Pricing is the default way to do that. If you want to avoid pricing, you need to think through what alternative you’ll use, otherwise pricing happens anyway.

There are many many things in the world that grow slower than US money supply but nonetheless see their price go down or plateau.