2024 LC Thread

how long would it take to drive from where the picture is being taken to the tall buildings?

I spent a few hours getting Chrome desktop installed and to try to diagnose why my Dad was getting a copy-edited Word file from his book publisher, editing the file himself, saving the file, and then his changes would just ā€œdisappearā€. (I got a 17-paragraph email explaining how this kept happening no matter how many times he edited and saved the files.)

He couldnā€™t figure out how to install Chrome desktop (surprisingly confusing for whatā€™s supposed to be a simple tool), so I had to set up a zoom meeting to see his screen.

But of course his emails werenā€™t coming in to get my zoom link (his email provider occasionally blocks me for a few hours).

So I finally published the zoom link to my blog and directed him there.

All the while I know the clock is ticking and heā€™ll be too exhausted/frazzled/brain-drained to continue, which means we have to do it all over again in a few days.

Then the real fun started of trying to explain to him how when he opens a Word document as an attachment from Outlook, it actually lives in a ridiculous temp folder deep within the bowels of Outlook, and to get it to his My Documents folder, he has to do Save As and pick a different folder. Iā€™m sure he never understood what was happening.

The really annoying part is when you double click a Word doc as an Outlook attachment, it opens as read-only, which would be perfect because that would force My Dad to eventually figure out how to save it somewhere else. But instead of forcing you to save somewhere else like it used to do, now it asks if you want to convert to non-read-only, then happily lets you save your newly edited file to C:\Program Files\Outlook\Files\Data\Temp\Attachments\12k23jh4kweu88888\adso8i2uuu or whatever it is.

Awesome behavior Microsoft, totally wonā€™t confuse old people at all.

I got the speech several times about how heā€™s not left-brained like me, heā€™s a right-brained poet.

Fun five hours! I look forward to doing it all over again soon.

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hahahahah

At my current job I started with my old PC and installed a Linux subsystem. The PC I have was very low-end (like $350 new), so this may have something to do with it, but the experience with that was not as good as my experience with the Mac. There are occasional issues where something doesnā€™t work exactly the same on MacOS in the dev environment as on the *nix servers (one solvable problem I had was with a docker image), but generally I have had less hassle dealing with *nix server stuff at the same time as a common GUI frontend (Windows or Mac and I donā€™t think just a Linux machine is really there, but Iā€™m not sure) with the Mac.

And itā€™s not just that I love Unix, which I do, but I need to run a dev version of server stuff and thatā€™s all running on *nix in production and, old as Unix is, thatā€™s the way I think almost everything is on the internet.

Probably the average time would be like 40 minutes, but it could be half with no traffic or double with a lot of traffic.

I mostly agree, WSL seems pretty clunky to me, idk why people like it

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Say what you will about america the nation, america the landscape is in the A tier for sure.

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Is that above or below S-tier? Iā€™m really confused by all of this tiering.

In any case, Iā€™d vote for the higher one.

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I think a big part of the DUI problem is connected to the garbage public transit in this country. When everything is a 20 minute drive away it makes it much more likely that people make the bad decision to drive drunk. When everything is walkable, or at worst you can hop on a bus or light rail or subway / etc, it becomes a different calculation.

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Nah theres too much filler copy paste corn fields in the middle for that.

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More lenient relative to what their punishment is now. Dwi penalties are out of whack with pretty much anything else, except maybe some white collar crimes. But those donā€™t carry the threat of murder, normally.

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Or take the train from DC to New Yorkā€¦

The good ole days before big government.

https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1756749762370359494?s=20

Right. There are so many places like Metro Detroit where bars are literally on 4-lane divided highways. They donā€™t even pretend thereā€™s a way to get there other than driving

Ok that makes sense.

North American cities are completely trapped in a cycle of escalating car dependency. The design of our cities makes our lives objectively worse on multiple fronts, but any municipal proposal to make cities more livable makes people panic about everything from having to take a bus to being in close proximity to black people.

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I wrote another one:

https://twitter.com/HardDriveMag/status/1757033347841479138?t=kdnsrVp5ddsm_RuRhnqeTA&s=19

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I this context, to some extent I understand the NIMBYs because new housing never comes with public transportation. Itā€™s just another X cars on the road and less green space in our race to cut down every tree on planet Earth.

I was going to make a 15-minute city conspiracy theory post but theyā€™re so incoherent I canā€™t even begin.