Got a bidet as a joke gift for Christmas a few years ago, it has been an absolute game changer. Hate pooping anywhere but home now, I actually feel clean, and use much less toilet paper.

Great video from Not Just Bikes on third places.

Main issue is how we are/have been building towns/communities. More often than not, you'll see new builds on land solely for single family homes or only residential apartments instead of mixed used (commercial first floor, residential/office second+ floors) buildings. These all feed onto higher speed roads/highways where you have to drive to shop/eat/work/etc. Many older/pre-suburb towns may still have good third places, we just don't build towns like that anymore.

Transportation comes in 3 simplified steps. It needs to start near where you currently are, it needs to connect to where you need to go, and it needs to stop near where you need to go. For drivers, as long as there is parking at both places and roads to take you between, you can go at any time. From a USA perspective, poorly funded transit may have 15-30 minute waits and you may not even have the option depending on where you live and are going. The political and social will isn't necessarily there in most cases to drive transit frequency down to say 5 minutes and building out robust rail networks. I would love to take transit to work for example, but it would be a 4 mile bike ride crossing a main highway/stroad so its not very feasible for me to get there except via car or if I am brave enough on an ebike. And if am driving anyway, it becomes a choice between faster car travel or less stressful train travel (and cost of more driving vs the train).

From my perspective, cars are the jack of all trades, master of none of the transportation world. They can do everything you need them to, which is likely why they became so popular. But they don't inherently do anything you need better than other options, they just might be your best option depending on the infrastructure around you.

Also started a Transit community @transit

@selfhosted may be a good place to ask. Can run your own "cloud" photo backup on a computer so photos taken on phones can automatically be saved. Would also recommend a second drive at friend/family house so you can back-up off-site to follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 different types of storage, 1 offsite) for backups. For even better redundancy for drive failures you could run a NAS running multiple drives in RAID. Basically, RAID combines multiple physical drives into a single "logical" drive with different speed, capacity, and redundancy capability and the NAS allows you to access that over your local network or internet.

It depends on which other smart home stuff you are using also. I use Apple Homekit, and Schlage Encode Plus has been perfect. Keypad, key backup, and uses Thread instead of WiFi for quicker performance and better battery. It doesn't require Apple products, but does have Apple Homekey function which is nice.

It’s almost become an arms race of sorts. Cars getting bigger and more dangerous so people have to buy even bigger cars to feel safe.

Shameless plug for @transit

Insane how anyone could see this and think its the best/only way people should travel.

CS2 Feature Highlights
CS2 Dev Highlights

They have videos on the road building tools, and from what we have seen so far road building will be much better than CS1.

The same people who wish it was safer for their kids to walk to school if it wasn’t for all those other dangerous drivers and SUVs. Also SUVs are more likely to run over your own kid in the driveway due to worse visibility if I recall correctly.

1. Reddit could have gotten ad revenue from third party apps by requiring them to display ads they deliver as part of the API, but never did so. Third Party Apps were never able to deliver Reddit's ads. Most people are just using the official app anyway.
2. Don't really see a way they could charge for Reddit without it being useless (as it is now), or detrimental to the experience (like a subscription for posting). They could have increased the amount of ads or preroll ads before opening posts. Worse user experience, but not any worse than what is happening anyway.
3. LLMs can just use web scraping to get data from Reddit without access to the API, which is even more costly to Reddit.

The only way their move makes sense to me is to push people into using the official app so that they can collect usage metrics and sell that data or use it to better position/sell ads.

Also see the blog post here if you can't watch the video yet.

Everything about this looks so much more fluid and dynamic than in CS1. Better road building and easier grids, parallel mode, much better looking highway exits, roundabouts, etc all look incredible.

Only issue I see here is wide sidewalks can't also have street parking. Would be nice if you can just have a wider road that uses both. Or to make it asymmetric, have only wide sidewalks on one side, or only street parking on one side.

Had it in there because its such a common phrase and forgot about it. Will remove it because I agree with the opinion piece.

You could use the Steam link app on your phone and basically any Bluetooth controller.

As far as I can tell you can't necessarily reach an arbitrary destination since per the article - "the robovehicles exclusively run on dedicated roads about five feet wide". Though I suppose it could stop at an arbitrary point along those roads.

Haven’t heard that before, will need to look into it. Big one I’ve heard is CAFE standards (fuel economy) are more lenient for light trucks vs passenger cars. I think this was mainly for shipping/work vehicles, but companies took advantage to sell bigger cars for better profit.

Cannot wait for this to come out. It is interesting that it is airing during what is typically a movie slot.

Recycle is the last part of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Recycling shouldn't be the primary thought in designing around plastic/other materials. The primary design goal should be to eliminate or minimize the amount used.

Have to leave something out for the DLC.

If I understand right, posts are only synced from the point someone on your same server subscribed to them? So you aren’t seeing his posts on mastodon, you are seeing his posts that have been synced to your instance.

Worth noting that there is a huge difference between being hit at 20 or 40 mph. This study showed risk of severe injury of 25% at 23mph vs 75% at 39mph and risk of death of 10% at 23mph and 50% at 42mph. There is also the impact zone/characteristics, F150 with the tall & flat front will be much more dangerous in an impact than if it had a shorter height and was sloped which could roll someone over the hood. And other considerations like trucks are heavier and have worse visibility. But I agree stopping speed isn't the end all be all for road safety, but one factor of many that need to be taken into account.