Further reading

ODT supremacy.

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they’re trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

I don’t actually watch wrestling, but I wanted to appeal to a specific audience instead of going for the easy Dateline NBC joke. (Here you go btw)

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.

Except you, Arizona Ranger and Texas Red. I didn’t forget about you.

That’s really gross of you. I, for one, am more than willing to pay for these brave American heroes. The funds will ensure they can be housed collectively, be given three square meals a day, be given new clothes, be looked after by caretakers who motivate them to stay on a schedule, and be kept in a secure facility to keep them safe from all those liberal communists who’d want to hurt them.

Why are we censoring “communism”?

Wouldn’t have known to look at a clearly delineated 1/3 of the image instead of the pretty picture if it weren’t for the yellow circle. Thanks for that.

It’s not irony; it’s projection. Moreover, falsely accusing the center and the left of doing the things you’re doing or about to do is part of the far-right playbook to muddy the waters. Because to anyone not interested, now everything looks like incomprehensible mud slinging where nobody is really correct.

As a fellow pedant, I forgot that; corrected.

This is my worst one yet. I’m so sorry.

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.

I contribute to OpenStreetMap through surveying and tracing. It’s given me some perspective on how wasteful our infrastructure is and how colossally unusable it is on foot.

(If anyone’s interested, please, please ask me about it; I highly recommend it as a way to have more fun on walks and hyper-familiarize yourself with where you live. The built-in, web-based iD editor is great on desktop, and the third-party Vespucci editor is great on Android. Unfortunately, the appearance of Go Map!! on iOS seems possibly lackluster, but it seems just as functional.)

The roads are in such bad shape because sprawling road (read: car) infrastructure is unsustainable and bankrupts cities. What we need is economically sustainable micromobility and public transit infrastructure.

I really don’t think this is true. It might push some politically engaged users to Firefox, but unlike Musk, most people don’t know who Thiel is, and as long as he keeps it that way, nobody will care.

Justice Department is 100% lobbing this over to JD Vance’s buddy Peter Thiel who’s going to enshittify it even further and turn it with its massive install base into a tool for techno-fascism.

Making a meta post today because oh my god this line is so emblematic of how hilariously awful this film’s writing is, and I need to point it out to other people.