School buses only work if you don't have after school activities. Band, sports, theater, etc. are all fundamentally incompatible with a carless society unless you have high enough density to warrant a proper city bus system. Same with AP classes before school.

Potato, potahto. There are places that you have to go, e.g. work, school. If the amount of time it takes is too long, it completely breaks your ability to function. Whether the reason for it taking too long is because of distance or because somebody thought it would be fun to make cars go horribly slowly to convince you to bike for an hour is mostly an implementation detail.

I bike two to three hours every Saturday and Sunday. But there's no way I'd be willing to accept an hour of biking each way as a minimum requirement to get to work or school. Life's too short, and I'd be too exhausted when I got there to do anything.

True, but you're still kind of missing the point, which is that not everybody lives in cities. Public transit is provably not cost effective at rural densities.

I buy games on Steam and then do all this stuff to make them work better on Linux. But I also buy games on GOG. And I have games on Epic and EA too, and Lutris does all those too.

I initially got ProtonUp-Qt specifically for use with Steam, because it is the best (easiest) way to install steamtinkerlaunch.

I approve of this campaign, which I'm just now hearing about. I have complained about their intentions regarding side loading here previously. I am frankly boggling about it, as it is really the most meaningful difference between the platforms.

Steam is definitely not literally a monopoly. Most people don't seem to know either of the most important things about monopolies, which is 1) what one is and 2) that it's not necessarily relevant whether they are, because antitrust doesn't require a monopoly. It only means you're abusing a somehow dominant position in a market.

With that said, I've been using Steam for a lot of years. I've had many technical problems with it, but I'm not aware of any way in which they are abusing their position. I haven't exactly been looking for this information either, though, and I do see that the article mentions a lawsuit I seem to remember something about.

I think 30% is a lot, but I don't think Steam is really doing anything to prevent anyone from releasing anything else anywhere. They also allow a whole lot of content that is frankly surprising for a mainstream game site, they are ultra-liberal about permitting whatever and I think that's pretty amazing. I do worry about the whole thing packing up one day, but that's a whole other discussion. Are there really any complaints about Valve that have legs?

I hate to be a broken record about this lately, but Lutris is a great interface to your GOG library. So far it's successfully installed and run everything I've tried. I'm gonna have to try this Heroic thing that seems to be more popular than it is now, but last time I looked everyone was telling me to use Lutris — when at the time I was happy with PlayOnLinux, which was then being maintained. On Linux you can very reasonably use the web for GOG (and it's easy enough to get Steam reviews there) and then install the games with Lutris.

While I'm advocating for software you want for playing Windows games, you will also want ProtonUp-Qt if you don't have it already.

Actually, what will happen is that people will move away from places that do this, or they will continue to drive, but more slowly, or they will ignore the speed limits and pay the tickets.

The only way to shorten trips is to increase density, and that can't just magically happen.

Walking and biking are fine if you are only a couple of blocks away from where you are going. They don't work for long distances. So they don't solve the problem, either.

You either have urban density or you don't. If you do, then cars don't work very well. If you don't, then alternatives don't work very well. There's a grey area in between where neither one works very well.

I'm thinking about my rural hometown in west Tennessee, and imagining middle school kids biking to school for up to an hour each way while carrying books, musical instruments, gym clothes, etc., and I'm laughing at how well your "magic cure" would work. It's the sort of thinking I'd expect from someone who has never lived somewhere with fewer than half a million people.

+1. As soon as you get out of the core of Paris and its inner suburbs (Hauts-de-Seine), a lot of metro Paris is suburbia with zero-lot-line single-family houses.

Mind you, it's not "a hundred houses all alike" suburbia, because it was built up before folks started doing that sort of mass development, but it's still suburbs.

Glassification is viable in every way but financially. It's incompatible with capitalism.

I think you missed the joke, which was that you can delete two words from the quote and get "I believe you are a racist."

Bets about whether they stop working with HomeKit in February of 2026?

"The company will also create a program in the next major Android release allowing alternative app stores to register and become what Google calls first-class citizens."

They did this already in Android 12. Third party app stores could even do automated background updates. Did they undo it?

You think there was a time when most people understood entropy? Or the mathematics needed to understand it? How quaint.

If it went almost to the top of the case it must have been a SFF system, because Slot 1 and Slot A processors alike were less than half the height/thickness of a typical ATX case.

It's unrealistic because the market doesn't get to decide. Logic doesn't decide on the supply side OR the demand side. On the supply side, the market is controlled by regulations which were put into place because power companies proved they couldn't be trusted to function without them. On the demand side it's limited by physics, power has to get to places before it can be used.

In the USA for example power companies are really only able to profit from new generation projects, so they are motivated to produce the most wastefully expensive projects because when they cost more, they can pocket more of the costs. That means nuclear whether it makes sense or not. And while everyone complains about solar requiring grid improvements, so does nuclear. It represents a large amount of production in one place, so you need a large grid connection to that place. And they are typically not built near other things for obvious reasons, so there's no synergy.

And then of course there's the fact that it's already a requirement to pay the expected decommissioning costs up front, but it's never enough, so The People always wind up paying.

This has been studied and it's not that simple. First you have to get it there, then you have to ensure it doesn't break open and spread before it gets subducted. I had the same idea, it just turned out to not be a good one.