Texting while driving isn’t that dangerous, I alw

I’m still waiting for 600pH water to be sold online.

Relevant (watch to 2:33)

The correct answer is sleep. Brain will disagree with that too.

I have a nature reserve near my house and I walk there quite frequently. It’s nice to get away from the noice of the cars, and enjoy the quiet sounds of tree, birds, and the wind.

Unfortunately for many people in this country, the only places within walking distance of home are paved urban sprawl. It is not particularly safe to walk there, and neither is it pleasant with the lack of shade, constant vehicle noise, and urban heat in the summer.

In my experience, areas with good public transport have safer walking paths that are often surrounded with nature (even if it’s sometimes just a short distance on each side), but areas with poor public transport just have roads with minimal plants or safe walking paths.

I don’t want to drive for 2 hours to the countryside every time I want some peace and quiet, I want to live there all the time. I also shouldn’t have to give up the benefits of living in a city to get away from car dependent suburbia.
There are many countries with quiet safe cities, all because they have adequate alternatives to driving.

My point is that all cars are contributing to cities that are hostile to humans, and adequate public transport (including walking and cycling paths) is far better than an electric car.

I absolutely love Factorio. I even bought the DLC the moment it came out.

I’m also absolutely rubbish at the game. I’ve never managed to finish the game on my own, and usually struggle to get blue science producing at all, much less at the correct ratio.

I do have fun with trains though, so I’ll often jump into friends’ games and just optimize (replace) their train networks.

I often use LLMs to give me code snippets in a language I don’t know.

When I started programming (back in the dark days when StackOverflow was helpful), it took me months to learn a language well enough to do what I wanted, and I had several weeks where I would be frustrated that I just couldn’t find what I was doing wrong, or what was the name for what I wanted so I could search for it.

AI has allowed me to drastically speed up my learning time for new languages, at the expense of me not really understanding much. I’ll accept that compromise if I just want one script, but it’s a hard habbit to drop when actual understanding is needed.

Aside from telling me what language features exist, or showing me the correct syntax (exactly what a language model is designed for), I have found AI is mostly just confidently wrong.

One of the main problems I found was that AI would sometimes write code that looked good, was well documented and even worked flawlessly. But it would take 15-20 complicated lines to perform a task that happened to be a language feature and could have been done with a single function call.

Other times it would write code that appeared to work at first glance, and after a reasonable inspection also seemed good. Only after trying to re-write that task myself did I realize the AI had missed a critical but subtle edge case. I wouldn’t have even thought to test for that edge case if I hadn’t tried to design the function myself.

I’ve also heard someone else mention that AI will often rewrite code (often with subtle differences) instead of writing a function once and calling it several times. The AI code may look clean, but it’s not nearly as maintainable as well written code by humans.
I do have to admit that it is significantly better than poorly written code by overworked and underpaid humans.

All of this is ignoring the many times the code just didn’t compile, or had basic logic errors that were easy to find, but very difficult to get the AI to fix. It was often quicker to write everything myself than try to fix AI code.

My 94yo friend is still going strong. His advice is to keep moving. Even just going for a short walk does more than you realise.

Look after your eyes, ears, and back, and always wear the recommended protective gear. People who say you look stupid using the correct technique or wearing protective gear will either die first, or regret their decision after it’s too late to do anything about it.

Most of all, learn from other peoples mistakes. You don’t have enough time or luck to make them all yourself.

Renewables are the best way forward, they just break that specific analogy.

Depending on your experiences, this could either make you happy or angry.

Cities aren’t loud: cars are loud - Not Just Bikes

Power plants have efficiency on the order of 50%.
Combustion engines have an efficiency on the order of 20%.
EVs have an efficiency on the order of 90%.

Even 100% fossil fuel powered, EVs are significantly more energy efficient than a combustion vehicle.

There are always counter examples (Hummer EV, F1 engine), but it holds true when comparing like for like.

Funding car infrastructure while blocking public transport funding is like subsidizing individual diesel generators while preventing power plants from being built (ignore renewables, they don’t fit in this analogy).

Electric is certainly better than fossil fuels.

I’d still rather live in a place that’s pleasant and safe to walk around, and has adequate public transport for the days when I’m too tired to drive safely.

Yeah, I really should have labeled Trackmania as luck too.

• Meme Mayhem luck
• Slay strategy
• Luck be a Landlord luck
• Backpack Hero luck
• Mini Airways - ATC simulator fast paced
• Peglin luck
• Trackmania skill
• Papers, Please fast paced
• Turing Complete learning
• Balatro luck
• Bloons TD 6 simple
• Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal simple
• Nodebuster level up
• SNKRX level up
• Oaken Tower Demo luck
• Vampire Survivors level up
• To the Moon story

Relevant song

Then they’ll need another “out group” to oppress. It’ll be disabled people, homeless, trans, gay, brown eyes, dark hair, owns less than $1B…

That’s one reason why we really need right to repair. A screen shouldn’t be the same price as the entire device.

I replaced a damaged USB C port (module) and degraded battery instead of replacing the whole device.

Those people must have a lot of disposable income.