Aw darn it. Now I’m reading your posts with an Australian accent in my head.

I’ve been accused of being a bot in online games due to my robust vocabulary, resistance to abbreviation and slang, as well as pedantic punctuation use. It has been happening for decades.

Note: rarely have I been accused of a being a bot for my skill at gameplay. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Now, if you wish to truly delve the depths of linguistic proclivities, one should peruse the works of Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld novels. Any and all of his works are wonderful prose and deep storytelling.

You’re spot on.

With about 10% overhead on the travel time, a pretty mainline high speed rail line would take about 15 hours to go from DC to San Fransisco. Each train (assuming Japanese trains like Amtrak is buying for Texas) can carry about 1323 seats, plus standing room. They can run 16 trains per line per hour. So, that’s 21,168 people per hour passing on the rail.

Assuming the 15 hour lead time (and no loading time of note because Sergents are really good at yelling people onto trains), within 24 hours, the Pentagon could move about 211,680 soldiers coast to cost from time t=0 to t=24 hours. That’s coast to coast, mind. If you do it from say the middle of the country to SF, it’s only a 4.7 hour trip, so now you can get 19.3 hours of soldiers moving (and arrived) around 408,542 people delivered by t=24hrs. Then, it’s another 508,032 every 24 hours after that.

Now, while it’s not particularly feasible to have commercially driving HSR across the empty center of the US, the military has a whole different set of priorities, and damn, that’s a lot of equipment & people that could be moved really fast. Yes, planes are faster, but there’s no way they’ll keep up with HSR once the train pipeline fills. This is a latency vs carrying throughput load equation and trains will win it big time. Always have, always will.

The US way way way behind on building infrastructure. Our infrastructure deficit is trillions of dollars, and our transit modality is decades behind Europe, China, India, japan, and even starting to slip behind sections of Africa. We’re failing as a developed nation because we refuse to invest in modern transit (and many other issues like healthcare, usurious education costs, and losing our democracy to dictator thinking). We’re flailing hard right now. HSR should be a massive investment for our country, along with regional/city rail (trams, metros, heavy regional), but since our population mostly has never ever seen a modern city like Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, or Rome so they have no idea what it can even be like to live somewhere well designed for people instead for for cars.

Though, watching the military test the rails by moving a half million people in 24 hours would be hilarious for those of us not trying to coordinate it.

I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.

I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured “fine it can’t be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication” but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.

Oh, and they’ve completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn’t look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.

I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don’t have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I’ll just go to a conference that doesn’t torture us to participate.

How about when peoples websites would put the sizes of linked images and files so you could estimate how long it would take to download a given image and such? Basically anything 30KB and above would have a size warning attached.

The major roads are already nigh impossible to walk across. Finding a way to raise the speed just makes it harder to be a pedestrian in yet more places.

I, too, love the idea of networked autonomous swarm agents behaving in an even more efficient setup. The problem is that if the only focus is on moving cars faster at the cost of people’s comfort, access, energy, and walkable anything we lose out on reasons to ever be outside of the car at all.

More cars and faster cars in our cities makes the city worse, even if they’re self driving.

My city’s solution to that is just to not have bike paths and tell people to “share the road” on 45 MPH streets.

You can do set it up to detect a windows exe format and launch it in wine without any extra intervention.

Make sure to chown it to root first with that suid bit to make sure it can get the library and hardware access that needs every time.

I love to use trains to get around. I don’t need to do the work of driving, which puts every aspect of safety, navigation, and stress on me the whole trip. On the train I can sleep, do computer work, eat in a relaxed space, or talk with my kids without having to yell in each other’s ears to be heard.

Driving is a huge energy, stress, and time sink. It’s a plague upon our society. I’d rather have a train style space, but at least a self driving car would give a few of the benefits of the train. It’s a over technical inefficient and halfway there option compared to real transit, but it’s better than making me do it all myself.

I don’t usually speed much. It barely saves much time at the cost.of safety and mental stress. I’m also often tusing trains that usually go much faster than a car anyway, and sometimes up to 200+ mph. A self driving car (or any reasonable car) can’t even begin to touch real transit.

My Linux machine goes… no permission to execute. I go “dang, not what I was looking for.”

I often usually post the chapters we use for my classes in case students haven’t bought the book yet. I also have a hard $60 limit for books that I use.

You’re probably correct. It’s the Internet. The Internet is for porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or literally any other preference voting system has mathematically and demonstrably better outcomes than the First Past the Post system most of the US uses today.

If We the People want to keep having a democratic republic that even remotely represents us, we need to keep fighting for better access to voting rights, fair districting, and improved voting systems like RCV.

Consider joining up and helping out: fairvote.org

I had the same arc with MarioKart. The first years were all fun, then they started rolling and I had to start pushing to keep up. Now? They’re almost all adults so it’s a real fight to pull wins and I couldn’t be prouder!

I’m holding that saw and waiting while the fascist right continues to boil itself to death. It’s a question of whether we boil with it or not.

The Dems are a center right party and we’re stuck with a (mostly) two party system because of our First Past the Post voting system. That means I vote for the one of two choices closest to me, so Dems it is in the general election.

Give me a Ranked Choice Vote and Dems move to my #2 slot under an actual progressive party candidate.

Fairvote.org

More like phat

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phat

We’ve had a ton of debates in my object oriented programming classes about the cube rule of food. Representing it using classes and inheritance with varying food types can be fun:

https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/cube-rule-food-01.jpg

Who let George Santos onto Lemmy?

I value having good tools. I bring a small flashlight when I travel. How often have I needed it? Not often, but when your in some hotel and the power goes out, it’s my time to shine!