fpslem

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fpslem ,

I appreciate when ads say "Free to Play" up front so I know not to play it. (There may be a few exceptions here and there, but as a general rule, that has served me pretty well.)

fpslem ,

Wait, do I actually agree with Aaron Rogers on something?

(Reads AngryCommieKender's clarification.)

Nope, false alarm!

fpslem ,

Another truck with a flat hood that hides anyone shorter than 5 feet tall? Thanks, I hate it. No wonder we have so many road deaths in America when manufactures are allowed to make vehicles with such poor visibility.

fpslem ,

Yep. sigh I guess I'll go replay Portal 2 again. It really is fantastic, I should be happy that we got it when we did.

fpslem ,

I think anyone who thinks otherwise either curated it to be awful or didn’t really use it at all.

. . . or was targeted by harassment campaigns that the company did a poor job of protecting against. Plenty of celebrities and political actors realized they could weaponize their fanbases to go after critics, and Twitter never did much to stop it. For public officials or organizations, twitter too often was a cesspool of abuse that they couldn't afford to leave, and that was messed up. (I think the balance has shifted now, that they can afford to leave and have a moral obligation to do so, but many haven't.)

I always enjoyed my twitter experiences, because like you, I curated a nice feed to follow (and used a browser to keep on chronological timeline). But I was just a follower, mostly, and was never targeted by the really nasty stuff. But I'm not so myopic as to declare that what worked for me wasn't awful for many other folks.

fpslem ,

Well done, OP, for realizing it in the moment!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c1b8a706-633b-474b-8a04-57a040334631.jpeg

fpslem ,

UK hosted Eurovision in 2023, it would be very hard to top those numbers this year.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year ( www.billboard.com )

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

fpslem OP ,

I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I'm not sure about the platform long-term.

fpslem OP ,

😂😂😂

In seriousness, what is the payment to artists like nowadays on TIDAL? Dare I even ask?

fpslem OP ,

Amazon Music

I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can't even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.

I've actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It's kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.

fpslem ,

The comment on that website is chef's kiss:

"Instead of a Dark Lord you shall have a Queen!"

I don't know anything about Linux and the idea of installing it frightens me. Where do I start?

I bought a laptop yesterday, it came pre-installed with Windows 11. I hate win 11 so I switched it down to Windows 10, but then started considering using Linux for total control over the laptop, but here's the thing: I keep seeing memes about how complicated or fucky wucky Linux is to install and run. I love the idea of open...

fpslem ,

Mint

I definitely found Linux Mint the easiest version to switch to, coming from Windows. All the menus and icons were basically where I expected to find them. I couldn't have cared less about Wayland support, I just wanted to do basic tasks and for my printer to work, and Mint did that out of the box.

fpslem ,

Meanwhile, TVA (powering huge portions of the Eastern U.S.) is doubling down on fossil fuels, and isn't even putting any meaningful effort into solar. 🤦‍♂️

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/climate/tennessee-valley-authority-biden-climate.html

fpslem ,

What's this, a shockingly well-informed conversation about housing policy, building patterns, transportation networks, and carbon emissions? I'm here for it!

fpslem ,

Andor had one heist arc, amid a broader story about radicalization and the creep of authoritarian power. It's a damned ambitious show. I'm so glad it exists.

fpslem ,

I thought you were going to say that they are much older on average and are more likely to suffer from incontinence, which is a problem of its own.

fpslem ,

Same, although I may not wait that long, I'm looking at a new PC build and I can't justify a Windows OS nowadays, particularly since Steam on LInux is working relatively well for the (admittedly modest) games I like to play.

fpslem ,

Awesome photos and travel notes, I wish I could meet up with friend for those beers!

And also, the Spanish schedules always threw me, I never did figure it out. I ended up grabbing meals from mercados or supermercados half the time, because restaurantrestaurant schedules never made any sense.

fpslem ,

Finally got around to Talos Principle (the first one) and it's as good as people said.

I also started playing some space battles in Empire at War on "Star Wars Day" (May the Fourth) and find that level of not-very-challenging RTS kind of soothing, so I'm back to playing that for a bit.

fpslem ,

I don’t love this, TBH. I’d rather see more investment in cities in transit or sidewalks/bikelanes. The geometry problem of car-centric transportation and storage is unchanged by electric cars.

fpslem ,

I feel like Toyota really dropped the ball by giving up on that [Scion] product line rather than converting it into their electric line.

You’re probably right. It’s really surprised and unimpressed me me that Toyota has taken such an anti-electric stance. They should have been ahead of the curve, but instead, they’ve lobbied the governments of every country to not shift to EVs. Screw those guys.

Ford rethinks EV strategy, is working on a smaller, cheaper EV platform ( arstechnica.com )

For the last two years, a small “skunkworks” at the Ford Motor Company has been working on a low-cost electric vehicle platform, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. Farley revealed the existence of this new platform during the automaker’s quarterly financial results call with investors on Tuesday evening. The company is...

fpslem ,

I don’t need an off-road capable truck, I need something like an electric VW Polo or Golf that doesn’t cost $45k+.

fpslem ,

Naw, people on foot and on bike mix pretty well, it’s the 2±tonne metal cages that ruin cities.

Use work laptop as personal device by dual booting on a separate internal drive?

I currently have a Dell laptop that runs Windows for work. I use an external SSD via the Thunderbolt port to boot Linux allowing me to use the laptop as a personal device on a completely separate drive. All I have to do is F12 at boot, then select boot from USB drive....

fpslem ,

Honestly, this is good advice. It’s much better to keep personal computer activity on a personal device, whether that’s on a ThinkPad or anything else.

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    fpslem ,

    I have a soft spot in my heart for Puppy Linux, I had a laptop hard drive fail on me when I was in school and I couldn’t afford a new one. I made it through the last semester booting Puppy Linux from a USB drive. It was no-frills, but it worked.

    fpslem ,

    these compromises in the interests of cost reduction do not seem like a good choice

    Not OP, but there’s more going on here than cost, and I think it’s worth a discussion.

    A lot of the urbanist crowd want single-stair multi-family units for reasons well beyond cost, although keeping housing affordable is still a legitimate goal. Michael Eliason, who was quoted in OP’s linked article, did a piece in Treehugger about single-stair buildings a couple years ago, and he identified some of the down-sides of the American “double loaded corridor” format that is necessitated by having to have two stairwells:

    Double loaded corridors prevent units from getting lights from multiple sides, and they don’t allow cross ventilation, which is a growing issue on a warming planet. (Yes, even for multifamily passivhaus projects.)

    Double loaded corridors generally have dark hallways, and result in less usable space per floor than a single stair configuration, especially if your building code allows units to enter directly off the stairwell, as they do in Germany, Austria, and France. There are also structural tradeoffs with a double-loaded corridor, particularly for a building that is cellular or repetitive in design like a hotel, dormitory, or efficiency units. Single stair buildings generally have more flexibility in their floor plan configurations.

    Another issue with large double-loaded corridor buildings is there are more people using the same elevators, halls, and entries. There are more people entering this sort of building than would in a single-stair configuration, due to limits on the number of units per floor. There are certainly social implications for this worth evaluating, whether one is more personal or impersonal. Post-pandemic, does it make sense to design buildings where many residents are using the same public spaces or does it make sense to partition buildings into smaller pods?

    Similarly, Henry Grabar did a piece in Salon about single-stair apartment buildings that focused on the social experience of living in a single-stair building versus a hotel-style double-stair building split by a long hallway:

    Another Floor Plan Twitter fan is Conrad Speckert, an architecture student at McGill University who takes that required second staircase personally. “I grew up in a three-storey, single egress apartment building where we knew our neighbours well, the stair landings were generous and naturally lit, and everyone got pretty crazy with their Christmas decorations,” he writes on the website for his master’s degree project, Second Egress. “My childhood home in Switzerland reminds me that stairs should be about more than just circulation and fire safety, and that there is a sensuality to them too—the tactile sensation of a winding guardrail, the slip-resistance of the treads, the wash of light from a skylight or the breeze from an operable window.”

    Speckert pointed out that in countries where single-stairs are permitted, many of the units have doors that open directly into the stair, which allows the designer to bring natural light into the stairwell to illuminate everyone’s door, and it encourages small interactions with neighbors that builds community.

    “There’s an intuition that once a building is more than two stories of height, you use the elevator,” Speckert told me. “But when you have a building with one stair that opens directly to the landing, you have the opportunity to design that stair. To not make it concrete with an aluminum guardrail. Now you’re sharing circulation with neighbors, you may know them.”

    In terms of safety, the Treehugger piece mentioned that balconies are used as second means of egress in many European building codes, and they have emergency systems to exit via the balconies in an emergency. Even though most of those European buildings don’t have sprinklers, their fire loss rates are lower than in the U.S.

    And to come back to cost, I’d argue that it’s fair to think about cost, particular as efficient mid-rise housing is likely to be one of the primary housing formats for densifying the urban landscape of most American cities. We’re still in the middle of a housing crisis, and it’s worthwhile to look at how more and better quality housing can be built for less money, whether that’s re-examining stairwells, or parking mandates, or developing efficient prefab practices. The Salon piece quoted a developer from Philadelphia who thinks single-stair is key to building smaller in-fill multi-familiy buildings rather than massive, soulless apartment buildings.

    Bobby Fijan, a developer in Philadelphia, is another guy who likes a single stair. Fijan calls himself the Bill James of floor plans, a reference to the baseball analyst whose keen statistical-appraisal technique helped changed the way players and skills were valued in the sport. “I’m not sure the effect it would have on a 250-unit building by Mill Creek,” he said, citing a large apartment developer. “But it would be particularly meaningful on urban infill”—the one-off apartment projects taken on by developers in already dense neighborhoods.

    I’m not an architect or engineer, but I’ve lived in my share of apartment buildings, and I’ll say that I’m somewhat sympathetic to the single-stair advocates. The long-hallway, hotel-style apartment buildings suck to live in. They’re soulless, the hallways are dark, it’s hard to meet your neighbors, and unless you’re lucky enough or pay enough of a premium to get a corner unit, the apartments are dark too. They’re just not nice to live in, whereas a lot of the European flats you see in these articles are more attractive and would make for better community-building, and that’s worth something too.

    fpslem ,

    For what it’s worth, I really like a three-decker or four-decker with balconies, it’s a solid kind of building. But they are very rare in most American cities, which zone them out. Between the two (zoning reform or IBC/IRC reform) I would favor zoning reform first.

    fpslem ,

    Cool, I didn’t know that existed.

    But honestly, I want something like a 4-5" screen, what used to be normal, it would actually be a hand-sized device.

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