> The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods.
Every climber I meet is lovely, but there is your standard sports equipment elitism at play as well, not to be confused with the very real brand loyalism that comes out of trusting something with your life.
I think if you are bringing a product into the climbing space you would do well to lead with a low risk product for brand reputation, something like a hangboard or training equipment perhaps.
The chip tends to be earned when you try and interact with particularly bad cities, with anything but a car and a short walk.
I also didn't have the chip on my shoulder in my early 20s when I used to drive everywhere, including parking right next to work in the CBD. Back then I really lamented anything that didn't further my goal of driving directly to work from my house.
But I get it now, driving in traffic day in day out in car centric city sucks, and being a pedestrian or cyclists in a car centric city sucks. Conclusion, car centric cities eventually suck for everyone, but at least a walkable city is nice for some people.
Second that.
Been hit on purpose, twice by cars while biking.
Doored a guy once, but even though he got hurt a bit, could see just how horrified I was, and couldn't quite get angry.
And whole car free zones, meshed in with universitys and entertainment/art districts, staidiums,resturaunts,museiums, etc, major underground parking and access for cars, and above ground, pedestrian and bike routes, and perhaps ultra mini electric "city cars" , but bollards designed to stop a semi truck
on all access routes.
And expliset bans on financial and legal service, insurance,business, mega corp anything.
Financial district is ......(hand waving)....over there....(blank look)....somewhere.
People places, the whole gamut, red light and drug district, etc, but limited by bieng pedestrian and bike access, and untra mini cars/trucks for deliveries, keeps a lid on
heavy crime, as ganksters ain't going for a walk,
now are they!
It's clear "the guy" did the majority of the creative work, so whilst it's "not difficult to understand" the law, it is a nuanced situation. Pretending it is not because of the letter of the law is just sidestepping the conversation we are trying to have.
For example, consider a photograph of a painting. The photographer owns the copyright to the photo, but the artist retains copyright over the painting contained within the photo, which is derivative of the original artwork.
It is less obvious that simply setting up a scene and camera where anybody (including a monkey) can use it meets that threshold for an original work. After all, the scene was outdoors and completely natural.
I actually think this decline will have a positive impact on more local issues. Here is my reasoning:
Software Developers (and I am one) are too expensive for most companies. This caused a brain drain into "Big Tech" which while a valuable bubble of technologists, is only a niche in the greater community.
If software wages come down, more local, non-tech, smaller scale companies will be able to afford to have in house developers, and the world needs way more bespoke software to truly capitalize on the power of small software.
I would rather see software developers be on par with your local machinist or trade specialist rather than a tool to upper-echelon companies in big tech.
I don't see why all software roles are seen as in the same category. There is a huge difference between the difficulty level and experience requirements in different tasks and roles.
No, failing to build enough housing and apartments over the last 30 years made homes unaffordable. Software developers were just lucky enough to be making above average income, enough to afford a house even while prices rose.
Which is crazy. Where I live, even upper-middle class can't afford a house, so what is going on? Who is actually participating in the market to keep prices so high, and who ultimately benefits from all this imaginary value on non-productive asset speculation?
Please - not another us vs them blame game between the lower classes, it distracts from the govt policies and financial industries that got us into this mess.
There is no one cause that leads to housing shortages, but tech salaries are a huge issue in and around tech hubs like the SF Bay and Seattle. And especially during covid, with remote work, the rich spread out to towns nearby and bought up all the housing there too and pushed out the locals.
That's not the government's fault (besides lockdown), it's because tech workers were way overpaid (and hence all the layoffs and salary deflation now).
sure, in silicon valley. The rest of the US? Nope…that would be due to a variety of factors:
- allowing corporations to “own” homes.
- allowing individuals to personally own more than 1 home, EVEN if those other homes were vacant for 95% of the year. (this encourages the rich to “invest” in 2nd homes, or make them AirBnb’s)
- allowing foreign buyers at all (this encourages wasteful ultra-luxury real estate in places like manhattan)
- not building _enough_ housing, especially starter homes.
- corporations and billionaires taking a larger piece of the pie, which has cause stagnating income growth (except for a minor bump post-covid) for decades.
i could go on. Most of this problem was “manufactured” by the US govt via greedy (or in some case shortsighted) laws and policies. In other words, there are almost no strict policies on housing in the US. It’s a free for all, and the rich win. How surprising.
For context i own a home so im not personally affected. But i’m bitter because the people “at the top” in the US seem to hate everyone else. It’s an “i got mine attitude”. Shameful.
I am fascinated by the idea of being 50 years from now, and doing digital archaeology more or less. So much of our actual output is now digital and stored digitally.
Given how I have experienced technology up until this point, my assumption is that everything I will create for work or for pleasure, is more or less ephemeral. It has certainly proven true for work.
I think we (or our descendants) will be surprised by the longevity of some of the file formats in use today. I would wager that it will be possible and not too unusual for regular users to open files in formats like PDF, zip or jpeg 100 years after their inception.
I've recently had to open some installer files from the mid-90s that were in a proprietary format (I forgot the name... Inno? InstallShield?) and was surprised to see that the current go-to solution is open source.
As long as an open source (or at least open specification) exist, these files will remain being openable. ...or at least until curious minds are able to crack them!
I'm not sure whether these file formats will still be in common use, but I'm fairly sure it will be trivial to find software that can read them.
Just like it's fairly easy for us to even run software from 50 years ago thanks to emulation. As long as your software run on a platform popular enough to have a good emulator. But for PDF and zip and jpeg reading software that will definitely be the case.
Yes I do think we will still have files (whatever they will be called) at some level for some purposes.
I.e, we will still be able to store and transfer sequences of bytes conforming to some specification (file format), and we will be able to attach names to those blobs in some namespace. The concept is too general to ever lose its usefulness.
There are a few key things I have learned in the third of a century that I've been working with data: Data lives longer than apps and longer than people. We will always need units of data that have their own life cycle and are reasonably self describing and self contained (i.e meaningful without resolving external references).
100 years after their inception isn’t very far from now. There are plenty of people here who will be alive in the 2080s.
Everybody has a different idea of what long term means, but I think of it as millennia from now. The kind of time frame that the Long Now Foundation talks about.
I suspect you won’t be allowed to do archeology, because the company that bought the rights to it won’t let you. If we continue the path we’re on basically nothing will be owned by us or kept safe by us. Just look at the difference from the PC era to the smartphone era. It’s all cloud based now.
I've self-hosted email on and off since the mid 2000s and my impression is that with the widespread adoption of DKIM/DMARC, the large providers have toned down the spam-by-default treatment of small/unknown email servers. Even Microsoft a bit, though you still have to get your IP whitelisted to send to outlook.com addresses usually.
That's perhaps because you have been self-hosting that long. One of the advises given to new self-hosters these days is to start sending mail to your your friends' email accounts that are hosted by the bigtech. Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam, so that some day your mails will go to their inboxes, rather than the spam folder.
Honestly, I don't think that DKIM/DMARC has made the situation any better. In fact, spamassassin and rspamd often seems to work better than their spam filters in identifying actual spam.
Microsoft is absolutely hell to deal with. Especially if you are hosted on Linode. They frequently ban entire linode subnets. I’ve had to resort to routing all send mail via Amazon AWS SES just because of Microsoft’s IP range bans. It’s not what I’m doing, but my neighbours.
It's funny because throughout Q1 2024 a huge range of Microsoft's own IP addresses were blacklisted by Spamcop and other blacklist providers spam/phishing attacks coming from outlook.com addresses. (Google "EX703958" (MS's issue#) for some fun reading.) They (and their enterprise customers) have been on the receiving end of the same thing they do to others.
Allegedly, Microsoft subscribes to random spam checklists like UCEProtect.
uceprotect bans entire subnets & ASNs if just one IP is suspected of sending spam.Apparently, you can pay to get your IP whitelisted for some time but it will be back on the list again. Its probably a scam/shakedown operation.
As these lists discourage self-hosting and benefit large email providers, they take their own time for fixing these issues.
I haven't tried sending to Outlook, but so far I'm getting through Google with just a strict SPF and a DNSSEC domain. Very low volume, to the point I assume reputation isn't being tracked. Just an observation
Definitely got worse since 2015 before seeming to get better the last year or two. At least with Gmail. So many variables though, so this is more an impression based on my own experience.
This doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. What is a problem, though, is big tech companies spamming us incessantly and doing almost nothing to prevent that.
I get 10-20 spam E-mails a day from AWS, Google and Microsoft. Forwarding spam to their abuse@ contacts doesn't seem to do anything. And I can't block them, like I would a smaller spammer.
Outlook is extra bad. It is apparently possible to put your email(to/recipient) in BCC, so if you have aliases, it is impossible to tell, which one was leaked and being abused, as to is marked as “undisclosed recipients”. There is no mass domain/pattern block rules, so if I block “spammer.1@hotmail.com”, then next day it arrives from “spammer.01@hotmail.com”, then blocking that, next day it arrives from “spammer.001@hotmail.com”. Outlook is actively hostile to blocking spams yet happy to quickly block small self-hosted operators.
Cities shouldn't have to mandate carparks, let alone charging in them. Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that.
Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term. Or some other personal transportation method. Static routes and stations are not really up to the job.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
> Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term.
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
In my regional UK city, most of my trips look something like: X minutes by car/taxi (although driving you need to park, and taxi you need to wait), 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk), and 2-4X to use public transport (total time, door-to-door, need to rush to get the thing and wait outdoors for 5-10 minutes) (2X being the ideal case of home to centre, 4X for point-to-point two places outside the centre).
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
> 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk)
I think a lot of what you're saying can be solved with cheaper ebikes and better bike infrastructure. Even the rain :-)
If it rains a lot you put on a big bike poncho, which turns you into a big sail and slows you down, and that's where the <<e>>bike part of ebike comes in, since you pump up the assist and still go fast.
Your experience matches mine here in Australia, and it's fine justification for why we don't take public transport, but not why there shouldn't be more and better public transport. I would much much prefer to be taking a train from nearby into the CBD as it is faster point to point, more predictable and less stressful. The trouble is I live too far away from a station so every train journy starts with 30 minutes of car travel in the wrong direction.
The consensus seems to be on my side in spite of lower share of total commutes, because housing near stations is significantly more expensive. From that I infer two things, public transport is desired, and there's not enough of it to support demand.
I agree it's something that would be nice, but it's so far away - decades at the current rate. We can't even build housing in the UK, never mind infrastructure or industry.
"Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that."
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
Tokyo has a great subway system (for the most part--there are locations that aren't that well served) and there's good train service between many moderate-sized cities in Japan. But my experience is that, once you get to a city outside of Tokyo, the public transportation options aren't great.
You don't need a car, but you won't be able to reach everything outside the cities. It's fine since everything you need is in the cities, and you would never run out of stuff to see, do, survive with. So "need" is a strong word, but certainly if you explore further out you will want a car.
Not really a bad experience but I was able to walk as a tourist to where I wanted to go because the areas were pretty centrally located. The one time I took a bus to somewhere--don't remember location--it wasn't that convenient.
Kyoto has a lot of buses, so maybe that’s where it was. I’ve found that they’re usually on time and not too crowded, but maybe you had a different experience.
See: the Netherlands. Or Switzerland, for counterexamples.
If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Heck, everyone talks about self-driving taxis. Self-driving trains and buses, that's where it's at, actually. A decent chunk of the cost (and limitations) for public transit is the need for human drivers. Self-driving buses could have longer routes, could drive around the clock, etc, etc.
Ah, forgot, they could also be much smaller, but still cost effective. Think 10-15 places for smaller routes. That would do wonders for connectivity in more remote places.
> If anything, properly built small cities and towns are actually even better for public transit, since they're small. You don't need to cover a lot of ground.
Agreed, with the caveat that everything is crazy expensive now so smaller cities struggle to afford to build even a small amount of rail. We had excellent public transport in the 1900s, it was torn up for the automotive revolution, and now we can't afford to put even a 10th of it back. We struggle to put an extra station into an existing line, let alone new lines.
One of the big issues is that property is so expensive in the modern west that buying up the land to build is prohibitively expensive. The old game of private rail companies making money off property around public transit stops isn't working here at least, because property is already so unaffordable, there's no room for price growth.
What they could do, if the political will is there, would be just to build lots of bus lines. The lanes for sure are there and buses are much cheaper. You can run a lot of bus lines for 1 tram/light rail/metro line.
Not related to your main point, but I am happy to see we are in somewhat of a resurgence of innovation in keyboards. There are some innovative new designs, entirely novel approaches to key inputs, and personalisation and craftsmanship has never been more impressive or achievable.
I agree. Getting a split keyboard with tenting so my wrists can be in a neutral position made my low-grade RSI vanish completely, and the trend toward increased programmability with macros and layers has been a wonderful thing for my productivity. The Cherry patents expiring mean switches have been getting better and better too. And while I myself am happy with the UHK I bought, it's also great to see that it's now easier than ever to design and build your own keyboard in whatever shape you want: there are YouTube tutorials and PCB companies for it that practically hold your hand from start to finish. Right now is the golden age of keyboards.
Yes, even if you don't go full custom, now you can get pretty good keyboards with light key action and good switches.
I have a couple of mechanical keyboards, but my workhorse keyboard is a Logitech MX Keys Mini, which has scissor switches, and while it's not crisp as a good mechanical, it's a great keyboard which you can type all day without any problems. Considering it has lighting, hall and ambient sensors, you can charge it every couple of months and type all day long.
I also don't fancy multi-layer layouts, but I use text expanders for boilerplate, and that's good enough for me, for now.
> If you could suddenly flip a switch and make 'bad people' turn into nice, agreeable, conscientious neighbors, wouldn't that instantly solve the housing crisis?
I don't see how, the core issue is supply of housing close to work and amenities not niceness of neighbourhood.
However maybe you are thinking further along, because indeed playing nice with your neighbours is important for increased density. But the US may never bump into that problem if it never lets citizens build densely in the first place.
Every climber I meet is lovely, but there is your standard sports equipment elitism at play as well, not to be confused with the very real brand loyalism that comes out of trusting something with your life.
I think if you are bringing a product into the climbing space you would do well to lead with a low risk product for brand reputation, something like a hangboard or training equipment perhaps.
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