zanny

This is what bikes and busses are for, or just walking because the metro system is comprehensive enough you are at most four blocks away from a station.

It's worth mentioning most European cities didn't skip cars entirely. Amsterdam in the 70s was as much a traffic sewer as Detroit. They just realized they fucked up in the 80s and spent 30+ years correcting course.

Most rebuilt postwar European cities were built for cars. Then the people realized that sucked, often quicker cuz their legs y built environments accommodated cars poorly, and instead we got effective metro systems instead.

There are mini nuc like computers that use mobile chips and those tend to go down to 15w.

I think trying to retrofit existing single family into urbanism is kind of a lost cause. Everything is built for it, and nothing is built for urban density and transit, at some point you might as well just stake a new city in the middle of nowhere (preferably off a major interstate and rail line that has water access) and build from scratch rather than having to bulldoze everything thats already there.

The Northeast US cities have the bones of urbanism still. Their grids were often laid before the car, so you have the narrow streets, housing without setbacks, capacity for mixed use and density to justify good transit infrastructure. The problem is outside New York the cities proper all depopulated - Baltimore and Philly peaked decades ago and have seen mostly population decline since mid last century. The problem is turning these places around requires a lot of investment to rebuild the decayed urbanism that is there and they both (the whole corridor) needs more transit that what it already has to support real urbanism growth when it starts up again.

These are places that have been systemically paracitized for a long time. Taxes are higher in Boston, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, etc than anywhere else in their respective states, and the actual cities are some of the only property tax revenue positive places anywhere - all that suburban sprawl is dependent on outside money to sustain all the roads and infrastructure in ways these cities are not. But that outside money often came from these cities, and we saw huge white flight last century as wealth fled to sprawling suburbs.

None of these places can really turn around the economic sackings they have endured on their own. Even NYC has huge budget problems supporting its metro. But good luck getting the broader fed to reinvest in cities in the 21st century... there are defense contractors pocketbooks to pad, companies to bailout, and techbros to give tax exemptions to.

It should be doable to take each floor and put a kitchen / bathrooms / storage in the middle with living space around the exterior windows with connecting hallways. On larger buildings split it in half or quarters (the only issue then becomes stair access, which is often along the edge of a building and would need a hallway from a central elevator). You might have some odd bedroom arrangements with long narrow rooms to get some outside light in each, but I don't think its unworkable.

What is more efficient than all the cars is electrified rail. That is an order of magnitude more energy efficient, more if you can manage to get near capacity high frequency trains.

A lot of our energy expenditure is lifestyle satisfying. Asia and the better cities in Europe demonstrate you can build dense cities with excellent transit as an alternative to car dependency, but the US fairly universally rejects it from both sides - white flight to suburbs and their perpetual expansion and the inability to actually build dense and transit oriented housing, hell most places use zoning codes to actively prevent its development.

We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything, but the willpower is very much not there, largely because of corporate interference that bred this climate that transit is for poor people and to own a car is to "succeed" in life. Its such an awful, backwards culture perpetuated by the profit motive over possibly the survival of the society.

I've been self hosting my own email on a Dell Poweredge for just over a year now, if you want my smtpd, dovecot, and rspamd confs I'll share them :x

I graduated in 3 years and also at 20 (so one more semester) and was way less inspirational in doing it.

I took 5 AP classes in high school that got me out of 5 classes and took 4 CLEP tests the summer before my last year so it would be my last (those tests are a very easy way to get credit requirements you don't care for filled). Then I dropped analytic geometry my last semester and only did 3 classes including the CS capstone because I just wanted to code at that point.

That seems like a cq based encode. Try av1an in its target quality mode - I've gotten some movies to a tenth the Blu-ray size with 98 vmafs and with only smudged detail at pixel level scrutiny.

The trick is if your encoder can adapt the quantizer based off a metric to compare the encode quality you can save a ton more space without visual degradation.

I self host headscale as my control node of my tailscale vpn so no sign ins required, I just give keys out to anyone I want in my vpn.

My problem is the client doesn't support multiple servers, so I can't have a work vpn and a home vpn, not even with an easy toggle - you have to run tailscale with different conf options for both. Changing namespaces also isn't easy, so having friends and family segregated even on one server is also a pain point.

Theres a generational rift that will stop a lot of decaying areas from seeing repopulatin from newer generations.

My wife and I saving to house shop soonish, but one of the primary requirements of our residency will be transit access. We don't like driving, don't like having to own a car, and definitely do not want to have to drive up and down the east coast to visit friends and family. Amtrak access is thus basically required, and anywhere we can avoid buying a car to live is valued dramatically higher than alternatives.

Its a growing sentiment the younger you get, where the veneer of the 50s American dream is more and more eroded and we are realizing humans in the 21st century should be living denser, with public transit, and walkable access to day to day needs, than to live in gated communities without a sidewalk or any human contact.

And 99.9% of US real estate is built up totally in antithesis of this, largely on racist fundamentals dating to the early 20th century.

Like we legit were looking at areas and when talking about just over the DC border into MD the conversation always immediately goes to "yes the properties are a third cheaper, but theres no metro access" and its just off the radar. Pittsburgh is our joke city since it has no usable Amtrak routes out of it (and yes, I know its urban core is nice, but its also tiny and unable to grow).

None of these decaying places can afford the capital investment to redevelop to be walkable and sustainably dense. They already are burdened to maintain a million acres of suburbia that is all tax negative. And nobody wants a "top down" solution that involves displacing millions to redevelop cities so the demographic trends going forward want to live there.

For anyone looking, Philly is actually pretty affordable. Its combined income tax is 6% in the state, the sales tax isn't outrageous, and property costs are a fraction of NYC or DC. Its definitely near the top of our list considering how unaffordable the parts of Portland, Seattle, and Baltimore with transit are.

All the modern media formats are unsupported by Apple. We could be using avif for images and webm av1 streaming and video if not for Apple products.

Its intentional sabotage by Apple at this point on behalf of MPEG-LA, it seems.

I have no affiliation with Netflix, I just like using av1an which supports vmaf quality targets.

If Netflix wants to hire me, dm me, lol.

I use either aom for trying to make "optimized" encodes of things to get quality at the smallest file size or svt for fast encodes that aren't really any more efficient than h265, just with the better codec.

I just transcoded some movies with vmaf of 98% from 4k hdr blurays this last week. Takes about two days of mostly single core work with cpu-used=4 on a 5950x but they get average bitrates of around 4400 kbps. Which is like, really, really good for hitting that quality target.

The trick is that since its mostly single core I just do 16 movies at a time, or 24 on my server.

It feels like newfound indignity and the realization is that most of us are actually victims - capitalist exploitation of the working class is codified into the societies we live in, it just took people taking a break from the grind, a step back to see what they were subjected to, to realize what the exploitation is and what it feels like.

Its not popular on HN but most of the libertarian tenants that belay picking yourself up by your bootstraps are not applicable to a supermajority of labor. There is no change of attitude within the framing of the economic system as it exists that individual actors take on a collective scale to suddenly stop being exploited systemically.

If XMPP and Matrix were based on the same protocol stack arguments to keeping XMPP this whole time would have made sense.

But they aren't. Matrix is http and json while XMPP is tcp and xml. Protocol extensions to xmpp have added http transports - but thats just wrapping non-http requests in http and making processing harder.

I think a good comparison is X11 vs Wayland. X11 was retrofitted with all the functionality Wayland has natively - "why switch" is a legitimate question. But we will see in the next 20-30 years how the maintenance burden of X protocol legacy means we will see any new development using Wayland because its so much easier to do. In the same sense, chat apps will probably favor Matrix over XMPP because of the protocol maintenance burden - even when drop in libraries exist that implement XMPP, the inherent complexity makes them buggier, slower, and requires a lot of developer nuance to get right and its all due to legacy cruft you have to accommodate on an old standard.

Its also like how more modern kernels stopped trying to be Unix compatible. Trying to meet the POSIX standard in the 21st century is kinda a waste of effort when a lot of it is unnecessary. The model is sound, its just adhering strictly to the eccentricities of it is just unnecessary headache.

Its still really convenient. It is really starting to pick up - I can use my phone to pay fares in a lot of metros now, have real time transit tracking, and use it for navigation even when walking.

Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.

I've been in Portland the past month and have managed pretty fine on the public transit here. Its also quite affordable.

They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.

I definitely think doing openid logins is way easier than any home rolled auth scheme.

Delegate responsibility where you can, which includes use authentication. It sucks that Persona died all those years ago because web browsers really could use an identity system for users to authenticate themselves against sites with their browser accounts.

The problem is then ofc getting browsers to cooperatively allow cross sign in. If messengers are anything to go by, siloed products really do not want to interoperate, particularly I imagine Edge and Safari.

> to use code for good with commercial interests

You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.

Have you ever actually had someone on medicare navigate healthcare?

Its only partial coverage and the supplemental plans also are partial. Retirees regularly rake up thousands a year in medical expenses on medicare.

If anything we need medicaid for all. Its a total mess with the piecemeal systems that exist, but in PA at least (where I live) medicaid recipients pay like a dollar for basically any service. None of the copay nickle and diming (to the tune of $30 a pop) my grandmother is hounded with constantly.

And even that is a bitter pill. Its giving private insurance companies all the money and power still. The single payer has strong negotiating power but they still have to get someone to insure the citizenry and the cartel of insurers that exist can predate off that and do so eagerly.

Matrix / Element should have a comparable feature set to signal for almost all use cases and supports traditional username/password.

I've picked up drawing in the last few years, probably because it occupies enough overlap with the centers of my brain I trained to code but also is outside the envelope enough to still feel like something different from my day job.

Its basically the same thing there too. Honestly you need both structured learning and lived experience in both, and probably in most skills in life. If you don't have the structure you will meander aimlessly solving "problems" and "getting better" (at code or art) but never actually getting anywhere with it. If you only have the structure you will never be able to actually make anything truly new because you can't solve the novel problems in the trenches.

Start something new with structure but rapidly push yourself to start using that regimented curriculum to make new stuff. And then when you enter a new problem domain (you learned Python and want to start doing networking or you know how to draw but want to paint) you switch back to a regimented curriculum to start till you get that 20% baseline knowledge to build off of again.

A lot of people seem to be making private instances that can talk out but aren't public which means you are stuck making new accounts for each such instance.

It's not that hard to find a list of the largest ones in the US, they collectively represent about 200bn in revenue: https://www.thenews.coop/122959/sector/usas-top-100-co-opera...

There's a wealth of statistical data that shows that cooperatives are more resilient and stable than classical owner run enterprise, here's a Stanford paper citing a lot of good sources on it[1].

Largely the reason so few businesses are cooperatives is because if you are an active participant in the founding of a business its in your own self interest to retain as much power over it as possible, which leads you to want to establish a dictatorship rather than a democracy - even if you aren't the founder / owner / CEO, being a first generation "lord" of the company will net you much greater bounty if it succeeds than if your compensation was dictated by a majority of your peerage.

That and absolutely nobody knows what cooperatives even are. Establishing a complex managerial democracy is way excessive for mom and pop shops or businesses with less than a half dozen employees and then those dictatorships scale up into larger and larger enterprises with no incentive to transition away from top down power structures. The benefits are largely for those who, under the current regime, have no power or say anyway, and thus the utility of more stable, productive, or resilient businesses is lost when it would cost the founders and owners their potential for ludicrous wealth and unquestionable power.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...

I eat this stuff up as a constantly lonely person, not in the "I wish I had a boyfriend" sense, in the "theres nobody to talk to, ever" sense. Like you get up, you work, you consume entertainment, maybe you go on HN or Reddit or Twitter or whatever and you throw words out that other people filter through like junk food, maybe you even go so far to join a fan community for something for a week or two and talk about it a bit and then... move on, because none of this is building a meaningful relationship with another human being at all. Its just consumptive, but even trying to be creative nobody has the time or interest to see whatever "ideas you have". Everyone is stuck in their own silos of consumption at this point and it leaves a lot of us just stuck on an isolated island by themselves.

It doesn't hurt that from this position almost anyone you would find to interact with is in some way predatory. Like anyone who didn't fail at socializing has their closed off peer group they spend their time with by now. The doors closed and all that is left is this perpetual limbo of fluctuating between distracting from the sadness and being overwhelmed by it. In the same way corporate social media, entertainment, and trying to bond with others over that or the total inability to form creative bonds with others to actually make stuff are all vacuous and unfulfilling. In the same vein paying someone to keep you company ultimately cannot fill that missing piece in a person that wants others to just want them to be there for themselves. You can't commodify that.

So uh, I can highly relate to what the Japanese are going through with how even more regimented and structured their society is pressed upon them as being. Its stifling enough in the US culture of hyper-consumerism. It seems like a stifling nightmare over there. Welcome to the NHK is a great anime on this subject if anyone is interested in getting into a, to be fair romanticized, version of these kinds of experiences. It touches well on the psychological hole you get yourself in though.

Its kind of absurdist to think about, how capitalism is trying to respond to the endemic loneliness that if you really get into it can kind of be attributed to the way modern life is commodified and made competitive and consumptive. People are lonely because nobody has the time, patience, or desire left to be communal. At least not comprehensively for those of us on the social fringes. But there is no community because it isn't economically efficient to capital for one to exist. It gets eaten away to be replaced with more consumption for more profit and its leaving growing segments of society hollow husks. So you end up with rent a girlfriends and companionship bars instead of actual friends.

At the same time, nobody has accumulated a billion dollars in personal wealth with a totally clean conscience. Millionaires, sure, thats an order of magnitude less wealth though. Billionaires are such a distortion of economic allotment that just to be one necessitates having such a profound influence on so much of their economic sphere that to have gotten into that position required someone else being taken advantage of at some point, and in practice its a lot of someones and a lot of harm caused. Its no different than diverting a river into a reservoir - you can make a small lake with minimal ecological damage, but when you divert into a sea or an ocean the entire environment shifts around it for some good and some ill with there always being some consequences for it happening.

For a lot of people (myself included) it is not mainly about the ethics of individual billionaires, its about the ethics of the existence of billionaires to begin with.

Signal and Telegram at least have something to do with communication, Element probably makes most people think about rocks.

Its going to see adoption is widely distributed content first - its why Google and Netflix are so gung-ho on it, they see the same file downloaded millions of times and in those circumstances bandwidth savings are huge over the encode times.

Eventually the ubiquity of hardware acceleration plus Moore's Law should make even lackluster hardware encoders generally available so average joes can use AV1 without needing to wait a day for a half hour of footage.