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Joined 24 days ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2024

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  • This is kinda three different problems, or three effects from one problem:

    1. Being stuck in traffic has a negative impact on health, quality of life in general
    2. Being stuck in traffic has a monetary cost for deliveries and others who have travel as a significant part of their work, e.g. how easy it is for plumbers to get around to customers and warehouses and the like
    3. Being stuck in traffic can have terrible consequences for emergency services

    The solutions, of course, are a mix of negative incentives to drive like congestion and parking pricing, and positive incentives to not drive, like investing in transit, cycling, mixed use and at least a certain level of urban density to be able to support transit, services and not have biking and walking be unfeasible or undesirable because of long distances.



  • Yeah, the manpages for systemd are large but also informative. Most of us only use a small subset of the features—much like we never explored everything possible with separate init programs.

    Having used Linux on the desktop for some two decades and worked as a Linux sysadmin for a good while I don’t miss the init scripts. My impression is more that a certain cohort wants to pretend that service management is easy by ignoring large amounts of it. It’s easy to write a bad init script that breaks when you really need it, or be out of your depth with more complex cases.

    Not to mention the whole conformity by convention thing. Systemd unit files are descriptive and predictable by their nature. So-called init scripts didn’t really have to be scripts, they just usually were, and their arguments and output and behaviour was also unenforced—there’s nothing really stopping you from writing a compiled program that self-daemonizes and place the binary with the init scripts rather than in /bin. Ultimately people who make programs also have to be good at writing init programs with that setup.

    So we’d have people doing dumb shit themselves and getting angry at others doing dumb shit. PHP was also pretty popular and full of dumb shit. Lots of “worse is better” to go around.

    Ultimately it’s more of the stuff covered in Bryan Cantrill’s Platform as a reflection of values. Some of us value predictability and correctness, others feel it’s a straitjacket. There’s no way of pleasing everyone with the same platform.

    And currently the people who want to distribute their own riced-out init programs in bash, perl, php, node.js and so on are SOL. (They can still use them on their own machines.)


  • By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars.

    Most of us would be using our feet and transit (and possibly bikes); both our households and our economies would be better off financially and bodily if car use was restricted to goods hauling and some few other uses (not to mention the environment). Mass motorism has turned out to be mostly a way to enrich the auto industry, not our societies, with North America as a warning to the rest of us. (See [email protected] for more.)

    There are plenty of times where humanity has chased the latest fad without considering the costs & benefits properly. The amount of energy and hardware being blown away on LLMs are another example; same goes for creepto and NFTs.

    That said, having a look around for various applications, including terminals, is generally good. If someone finds something that covers their needs but with lower costs, that’s good. And if they find something with a shiny new bell or whistle at exorbitant cost, eh, maybe think twice before choosing it.





  • Or at the very least avoid car ownership and overuse:

    When you use a 3500-pound car to transport your 150-pound self around, 96 percent of the weight of that clump of matter is the car. You’re moving 25 times more junk around than you need to, and thus using 25 times more energy to do it.

    Imagine that you’re hungry for lunch, so you go to a restaurant. But you don’t just order yourself a blackened salmon salad for $15.00. You order twenty five salads for $375.00! Then, you eat one of them, and leave the other 24 blackened salmon salads, $360.00 worth of food, to get collected by the waiter and slopped unceremoniously into a big black garbage bag. All that fine wild-caught Alaskan Salmon, lovingly seasoned and grilled. All the fine crumbles of feta cheese, the mango salsa, diced green onion, shaved peppers, rich zingy dressing, and everything else the chef worked on for hours – plopped into the slimy garbage bag. This is exactly what you are doing, every time you drive!

    Of course, a lot of people, especially in North America, don’t really have an alternative, and they’ll be financially and bodily worse off for it.


  • You can get the home delivery, but the common thing is to get it delivered to the post office, which is usually in the grocery store closest to you. (The dedicated post offices died a few decades back afaik.)

    So I get a notification in the post app, or by mail or sms, depending, and then I just pick it up wherever I’m getting groceries. Same thing happens if someone tries to mail me something that doesn’t fit in the mail box.




  • Also a lot of people who put a space before punctuation, as in “really ?”, which I’ve been told may be a tell that the writer is french or studied french.

    (A lack of capitalization for country/demonym-ish nouns and adjectives may be a tell that the writer is norwegian—we just capitalize the proper country name, the rest comes off as random capitalization we’ll often get wrong, with or without autocorrect.)





  • We have a mostly electric car market now

    Financed with oil sales and you know it. Join the EU, pay your dues, and you get to say such shit but not before.

    Increase your car taxes to our levels and then you get to say shit like that. :)

    The postal service in Norway is on the verge of being functionally ended, and all letters might get treated as parcels that you pick up at a hub in the near future.

    Yeah, no. The reason is that when a letter arrives in your post box it’s legally assumed that you read it and administration relies on that. If you get rid of the postal office the work would shift over to bailiffs which is overall less efficient.

    There are no letters any more. The important stuff that the government sends us we only get electronically at altinn.no (some stuff at skatteetaten.no), and reception is acknowledged that way too.

    We currently have mail service every other weekday (so mon-wed-fri, tue-thu, repeat) and there’s nothing really to deliver except physical spam. At this point the people who relied on paper out of habit are mostly dead of old age, and there’s not a lot of public sentiment for subsidizing a handful of anti-computer cranks.

    Blame the Greens and their general bourgeoisness.

    Of course it’s DIE GRÜÜÜÜNEN, not, you know, the conservatives that ran the country for ages under Merkel, and the people who want to be “technologieoffen” just in case the country’s horse-and-buggy industry can actually compete against a modern auto industry.