The Soviets tried something similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)

Fixed

I don’t like the notion that if “being yourself” means people don’t like you, you must be acting like an asshole.

A lot of autistic people, for example, have to put on a mask just to function at all in society. Which is something that can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When someone like that hears “just be yourself” it can be really frustrating, and the conflation of social skill with mortality I think causes a lot of harm.

Car engines, for probably the past 100 years, have always been advertised based on their peak power rating, not what they can produce continuously. Cars are not designed to have their accelerator pedals floored for hours on end, nor is this even possible to do, as you’d eventually hit a curve and need to slow down.

This is especially the case for high performance vehicles, which usually have more demanding maintenance requirements just from normal operation, let alone from being abused like that.

I thought you were talking about just opening the drive to use it from the file browser.

I do actually have a drive I use for automated backups, but I just used the GUI to change the automount setting:

I guess that’s a little bit inconvenient, but its like 3 clicks, adding a step to something I had to do to set up some other software. Its not any more complicated than disabling sticky keys in Windows.

Except we’re not comparing it to disabling sticky keys, we’re comparing it to needing needing to follow an entire page’s worth of instructions, pressing secret key combinations and entering commands into the terminal, just so you can use your computer without it phoning home to the mothership. And that’s on top of the fact that the instructions are probably going to be different in a year since microsoft is deliberately fucking with you.

I just click on it and it mounts and opens

This is Linux Mint btw

I just plugged in an old drive to make sure I’m not going crazy, and I didn’t do anything besides hit the power button, log in, and open the file explorer:

And its right there.

The Line is very stupid.

At 200 meters across and 170 km long it has a surface area of 34 square kilometers.

Let’s assume that instead of building a giant line, we build a bunch of highrises next to each other with the same height and same combined building footprint (so, same internal area). To account for the fact that we would need streets between the buildings we’ll just double the required area to 68 sq km (the line’s design already has internal streets, so this is a high ball estimate).

The resulting city, if it were a circle, would have a diameter of 9.3 km. Which means it would take you about 23 minutes to get from one edge to the other (worst case trip) by riding a bike, or ~12 minutes to get from the center to the edge.

As you can see stretching a city out into a giant ribbon makes things very far away from each other for little benefit. Water pipes are lines too, and while building your city like that would mean that you’d only need one big pipe it certainly wouldn’t make it easier to distribute water if you had to pump it a hundred km.

Yep, instead of a single address you should be able to issue keys that let people message you, and when you receive a message you should be able to see what key was used to send it.

And of course you should be able to revoke keys (tell your mail server to no longer accept messages signed with it).

Its terrible because it is geometrically impossible for a form of transit to simultaneously have high capacity and to carry people directly to their destination.

Cars average an occupancy of about 1.5, while trains routinely carry hundreds of people. A bit of thought about the implications of everyone arriving directly at their destination should reveal why the average occupancy of such a transit mode can never be much higher than 1.5. This is something that many many advocates of PRT (personal rapid transit) systems fail to understand.

By the way, a pedestrian oriented space can be made to accommodate people that have difficulty walking, but it is virtually impossible to make a city safe and accessible for people with difficulty seeing if the expectation is that everyone is driving a car to their destination.

Its possible for every urban area everywhere across the globe, because the laws of geometry are the same across the entire globe.

In many cities in many countries the conscious choice was made to destroy transit infrastructure and radically alter the urban fabric to accommodate cars (and in so doing hamper every other form of transportation). But nothing about this has anything at all to do with the city’s location, and its not an accident that public transportation just ‘happens’ to be better in some places than in others.

Its not possible for the majority of uninhabited land on the planet, but its possible for the majority of people globally that live in urban areas.

Its a good thing that busses and trains don’t take you directly to your destination.

deleted by creator

I was trying to resolve the ambiguity between “this account” (which is indeed an object) and “the people here”.

I try not to misgender, so I have edited it to “they”. Not because I respect anything an advertiser says though.

Everyone arguing with this account needs to realize that they might as well be talking to an LLM. Look at how advertisers think:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf

Just like an LLM can’t distinguish between truth and fiction they can’t distinguish between meaningful information and advertising BS. The people here will never win their argument against them because they classify all human communication as an act of manipulation, so the definition of advertising will be made more and more broad until they say “look, you were swayed”.

You joke, but it has been successfully argued in court that advertisers can lie to you because no reasonable person would believe that advertisements are truthful.

Thanks

“Fine” might be overselling it a little bit.

I would say its ‘comprehensible’ if you’ve read the book, but its still not great.