• 117 Posts
  • 91 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 25th, 2024

help-circle



  • That’s not a dumb headline at all.

    • America’s car centrism is so bad that other options often functionally don’t exist in a lot of areas, completely disenfranchising those who don’t drive. 33% is a staggering amount when you consider how awful micromobility and public transit are in the US.
    • “2/3 of Americans do” isn’t the entire picture. If we start with “33% of Americans don’t drive”, logically we know there’s an additional chunk hidden in that 66% who wouldn’t drive if decent alternatives existed. We can see from countries in Europe and East Asia where those alternatives exist that that’s a very sizable chunk of people.
    • Treating “drive/don’t drive” as a binary also doesn’t reveal the whole picture. For instance, there would surely be people who would still drive with decent alternatives but would prefer public transit when they go out drinking, bicycling when they go to the park or to their nearby job, etc. 1/3 of people don’t drive at all, but guess what? Most people still walk places in some capacity, and car-centric infrastructure hurts their ability to do that.


  • Duels? No clue, honestly. They definitely happened, but their frequency could definitely be overstated. As for meeting at noon? I think it sounds like the most reasonable time and would’ve been common if duels were common. This is pure, complete speculation on my part, so don’t repeat it without doing your own research, but I think the existing facts support my conclusion:

    • Home clocks at the time were only seen among rich folks, often as a status symbol.
    • Even if you did have one of these, they often lost quite a few minutes per day.
    • Towns often had a clock for the church.
    • This clock would’ve been more accurate than a home clock.
    • This clock often rang at noon.
    • Noon is (approximately) pretty easily verifiable by the position of the Sun being the highest in the sky.
    • Noon means that neither party should have an advantage based on where the Sun is facing if you line up east–west.
    • Noon is around a time most people are most likely to be the most awake.













  • I couldn’t really get into StreetComplete when I tried it, but I think that’s mainly because I’m used to the iD editor’s UI and because it isn’t fully featured. Vespucci solved both of those things for me and gave me a fantastic editing experience. That said, for all I know, recommending Vespucci could leave a newcomer completely overwhelmed with options. So I would say that it’s worth starting with StreetComplete if you want a highly gamified experience for stuff like tag editing for existing objects or starting with Vespucci if you feel like you want something extremely powerful, then trying the other one if your first choice’s UI doesn’t suit you or doesn’t do what you want it to do. (StreetComplete and Vespucci are both available on F-Droid.)


  • OSM has a ways to go to be entirely competitive with GMaps as a navigation tool in most regions (although it gets the upper hand in other areas). OSM’s major advantages are four-fold:

    • It’s open to be used by anyone for any reason for free.
    • It can be contributed to by anyone.
    • (Crucially) It has a way higher ceiling than GMaps could ever hope to have. The level of potential granularity in OSM is absolutely insane. You can mark fire hydrants down to the color, diameter, pressure, and number of couplings. You can mark power lines down to the voltage, shape and material of each individual pole, etc. Individual trees can be marked down to the species. Every street crossing can be marked as having tactile pavings, a type of curb, a material, signals, refuge island, elevated or not, etc. Individual entrances to buildings can be marked as different types and with different door mechanisms. Heights of buildings in meters, whether they have air conditioning, etc., can be marked. This is barely scratching the surface. For navigation, things like this can be superfluous (I would argue that for people with disabilities like blindness, some of these things like the crossing types could be useful), but for research and specific applications, it can in theory crush GMaps rather than just being brought into parity with it.
    • The non-satellite map is just way, way better. If I look at my neighborhood which is reasonably well-mapped on OSM and then compare it to GMaps and Bing Maps, the latter two look like an absolute joke and rely heavily on satellite imagery to fill in the gaps. The problem with that of course is that not everything is visible from space, and it often gets fuzzy with minute details.