Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 13 Posts
  • 440 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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    • Pros: Cheaper to install as you don’t have to rip up the whole road, capable of cornering at around 15kph. Low initial cost.
    • Cons: Battery powered, with a 70km range, with a max capacity of 60 people. Driven by humans.

    This does not sound like something anyone needs and it appears to be designed to share the road with private vehicles (hence the focus on speed and cornering) which means it will get such in traffic.

    When you’re paying humans to drive something, the benefit comes not in how fast it corners but in how many people can be transported at once. Even if it’s a straight line at 20kph, it’s still better to have big LRTs hauling upwards of 2000 people, stopping at intersections to let them switch to another LRT going in another direction.

    The one benefit I can see here is the low cost of installing these tracks, it could be used to trial a route served by a tram (negating the cornering feature), but even then, a bus has near zero infrastructure requirements and can move more people than this for the same price.



  • I have much the same:

    • Files on the network with NFS
    • Kodi on an old laptop under the TV so we can watch said files.
    • Syncthing on our phones and laptops to pull films from there onto that file server.

    The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.









  • That’s the thing, Trakata isn’t making the case that it’s in our best interest to be able to understand legislation. They’re making the claim that they read a document they did not read to show support for legislation that’s both authoritarian and supporting of government surveillance in a time when our biggest problems will be solved by neither.

    Understanding complex legislation is a difficult, time-consuming job that requires experts in the field. Experts like those who work with the CCLA and professional journalists that parse this complexity and make it easier to consume for the rest of the nation. In the same way that while it’s in every citizen’s interest to have clean water, we’re not expected to source and boil our own: we have experts who maintain water treatment facilities. Trakata’s smug “I read the bill and I think it’s great” line is both (a) a lie, and (b) a deception intended to distract from the dangers of the bill.



  • Because you didn’t. You’re lying and I’m 100% sure of it.

    For those interested, this is the bill, an absolutely monstrous document which when read on its own doesn’t even convey the full extent of the changes because much of it is a series of paragraph amendments to other laws made out of context. To really understand what’s being proposed, one must first understand the current state of all laws being amended, so it’s really this giant document ×20 or so.

    So unless it’s your job to parse these documents, or you wrote it yourself, you did not read it.

    I also did not read it, but at least I’m being honest about that. I did however skim through it looking for confirmations of what was mentioned in the video. What I found was enough to convince me that the video is accurate. What’s more, the author has done the work of a responsible journalist: he cited his sources in the video description. Sources which were in turn written by responsible people whose literal jobs are to understand these massive changes and compile them into documents the public understand. You know, journalism.

    Maybe you read the summary, which is much easier to parse, though still ridiculously long, lacking context and glazing over important details. Even in there though, there are clear mentions of allowing the opening of your mail, so if you read that and are still somehow cool with it then… well I guess it’s true that we’re all condemned to repeat history 'cause some people just refuse to learn.