Dude I love the new PDF features in Firefox! Only thing that’s missing is to make them a little more obvious so that people realize they’re there

What was the value of the Lego collection in this scandal? 200k? It’s wild just how far people are willing to go over what’s ultimately not even enough money to retire off of, and only a couple of years’ living expenses in some cities

Was it ever actually confirmed that Bezos was a prominent investor in that startup?

On some vehicles that’s the same speaker which makes the turn signal clicks and any kind of beeps or dings the car might make to alert that something’s wrong. I had that speaker go out on my vehicle not too long ago and it was actually harder to drive without being able to hear the turn signals and not getting the alert if i forgot to disengage the parking break (it seems to electronically disengage when you put it in drive so there’s no change in driving characteristics with this car when you drive with the parking break on)

I fckn hate these laws that force so much tech into new cars under the guise of safety.

Well you see, if we force car companies to invent magical safety technology to paper over bad road design and too many cars on the road, then we can avoid addressing the bad road design and too many cars on the road!

I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.

Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things

I mean this is generally a sign of growth by the content creator, shifting from whatever “personalized” ads the ad network decides to show, to having their own relationships with advertisers and doing their own ads. Honestly its a good thing because it means that the people making the content also have full control over who they sell ad space to and how that ad space is used, and if viable platforms other than Youtube existed, they would be able to to run their videos profitably without excessive user tracking

I’ve heard advice to initially release a demo on Itch, encourage those who enjoy the demo to join your org’s discord, then blast discord to go buy the game on steam on launch day to help boost your day 1 numbers on Steam.

I’d also check various gaming communities on as many social media platforms as possible to see if they allow indie devs to announce releases

Have you tried reaching out to YouTubers who review/play through similar games to yours? Can you buy an ad read from some youtubers as a less intrusive style of ad? Do you have a demo at all that you can point people to right now?

Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car

I made it a habit to always glance in my side mirrors to confirm there’s nothing unexpected around me (including open doors or connected gas nozzles) before shifting out of park every time. Granted best practice is to walk around the car once as an inspection before even starting it every time, but that’s more than I often can be bothered to do

The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don’t magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere

Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn’t a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you’ve got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that’s not taken by car

So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you’re barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.

Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday

And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines

The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.

I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators

This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough

It’s funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term

Usually they “save you money” by giving you a shittier policy and relying on the buyer not understanding what coverage they need and why

Seriously going through an insurance broker is awesome. Best dang way to deal with insurance because I can just call up the broker and have them do it all for me, plus they get paid on commission by the insurance companies (which are mostly smaller B2B companies that don’t spend millions on advertising) so it’s not even like you pay more for your insurnace

Which of HaGeZi’s blocklists are you using specifically?

I remember pushing my mom to install one that had a black and white cat wander around the desktop and on top of windows one time when she had to take me to work.

I found a video of a newer version (with bonus Bonzi Buddy), but it doesn’t appear to do the walking along the tops of your windows that I remember.

Appropriately for the topic of this thread, it was all an advertisement for Purina Pet Food

It’s becoming best practice in IT to install uBlock Origin on browsers to help prevent scareware

Would a safety deposit box at a bank be an appropriate option for your off-site backups?

My understanding is their economic model has every creator being a part owner of the platform