Right so you do think Americans are shit.

Personally I don't.

I'm not sure I can be bothered to argue with the man who screams invective when basic highschool physics gives results he doesn't like, rather than accepting the results.

I'll add your lack of understanding of this to the pile including physics, C/C++/Rust and geography.

Yeah I'm not a fan of Apple for many reasons.

Shame because their SOCs are legitimately really good hardware wise. Shame about the poor practices, user hostile stuff and general apple obnoxious. Oh and the mediocre operating system.

Unless there is a zebra crossing: the car has priority.

Not in the UK. You ain't the centre of the world, bucko. Some countries don't absolutely prostrate themselves on the alter of the car.

Yes, but the car has priority

Spoken like a true German. Not here it doesn't.

Obviously, the car is expected to brake ... Which is obviously law wise a little bit silly situation.

It really isn't. The person driving the piece of heavy machinery that can kill someone easily is expected to take reasonable care to ensure they don't kill someone. Yes even if the driver might be mildly inconvenienced and have to take 3 extra seconds at most to get to their Very Important destination.

Android is weird. Don't forget that google didn't create Android: Android was first created by some company then bought by google. The Android people were pretty weird, frankly and had some odd ideas.

For one they HATED C++, in a really irrational way. I remember a forum thread when them declaring outright that certain C++ features simply COULD NOT work on Android being then disproved by another poster who showed a hand compiled gcc doing those things only to have them double down. They were incredibly insular and basically reinvented a ton of stuff pretty badly. V4L2 basically worked, and at the time they went through several camera APIs which worked worse before finally beating their own one into shape. Basically the original API was entirely designed around the idea that the only use was making a camera app (unlike V4L2 which wasn't tied to an idea of an end use), which they reluctantly discovered wasn't all anyone wanted to do. Also copy/paste. They were definitely from the "lol X si teh sux0rz" crowd. But you know what? The ICCCM from 1989 describes how to copy/paste anything in X and that still is how it works today. And it does work[*]. Android still has trouble with anything other than text in some contexts because they were insular and decided they knew best.

Then they got bought by google. The company who's motto is basically "we know we're the best why would we do it differently", so one insular, arrogant company bought another insular, arrogant company and you have Android as a result which is like Linux but cursed because the people who made it originally and maintain it now are al insular and believe they know best.

Oh and also don't forget Zawinski's CATD. Also that Sturgeon's law applies to software "engineers" as much as anything else.

Yay. Anyhoo have a nice weekend.

[*] The old "problems" with copy/paste in X were down to a number of factors. In the late 80s and early 90s, anything other than text was hard because that stuff was big compared to the size of the machines. Pus there weren't interoperable formats like HTML to exchange data. So few people implemented it, and that meant few other people did because nothing else could do it etc etc. Also a lot of people can't read and implement a straightforward spec. It ain't that hard. But basically the modern, working copy/paste is just a straightforward implementation of a spec from 1989 built on primitives from 1987. And Android fucked it up.

I've yet to break 1k on a computer system because it's just not that necessary.

I mean yeah as you say you're not doing anything especially intensive. I spent 2 and a half grand on my last desktop (excluding upgrades). RTX2080Ti, 64G RAM, Ryzen 9 3900X. Quite a beast in its day, though showing its age now compared to more modern machines. Mostly been used for deep learning (which is really a Linux first task) and a bit of 4k video editing and creation.

I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.

I'm a Linux fan, typing this on a 2010 Thinkpad W510 that I spent no idea how much on, probably 2k plus some upgrades along the way for not much. The amortized cost is very good. Definitely showing it's age, and I think the hardware will conk out or the CPU will just be too slow before it really passes out of reasonable distro support.

Even so, now it's got 32G of RAM and 1TB of flash so it's better specced in quite a few ways than many new laptops.

The fuck though? Android have a weird fetish for taking Linux tools and then disabling features which work perfectly well and it turns out also work fine on Android if you use ASOP and the upstream tools.

I hate to give GNOME credit, but Evince has a really fast renderer. It it noticeably faster (like 5-10x) than okular and its original parent xpdf. They've done some good work on that. If I plot a stupid graph with too many points, Evince will be the first to render it by a mile.

Apple goes to great efforts to protect user privacy. Some of what they do might just be promises and/or lies, but that is still better than the alternatives available,

The single largest attack surface, the thing that gets used the most is the web browser. Apple intentionally block privacy friendly browsers. On other platforms I can run mobile firefox with ublock origin, privacy badger and noscript (which is about the most effective privacy preserving tool).

There's also the matter of user experience. When I use windows 11, I fell pushed-around and limited. When I use MacOS, I feel obeyed and empowered. Your mileage may vary, but this was enough for me to buy Apple.

I mean you're comparing a crappy sandwich to a turd sandwich. Crappy sandwhich wins every day. Personally I find OSX rather opinionated and limiting.

OS fight! :)

Anyone consider that increase, is because idiot pedestrians walking distracted and statistically drunk has increased 5000% in the last couple of decades?

So are you saying Americans are shitter than all other developed economies and also are a bunch of lightweights who can't hold their booze?

Because it sounds like that's what you're saying.

Because sensible countries have seen decreases.

No chance we look at fucking obvious reasons pedestrian deaths have increased?

The fucking obvious reason is cars have got more dangerous to pedestrians and also Americans hate pedestrians and road safety safety. You've got roads more dangerous to drivers AND more dangerous to pedestrians than any comparable country. I look forward to hearing how you're better than North Korea actually or something.

God forbid we consider personal accountability for the unaccountable morons walking drunk all day

Ah yes America, home of the court ordered interlocked ignition (hello NM! we love you!), and somehow it's drunk pedestrians that are the problem!

I think your coal roll fumes have poisoned your brain.

People were free to cross the road any time anywhere since the invention of roads.

Until, that is, America allowed car companies to buy laws to prevent it.

That, my man, is not freedom. Unless you'd like to explain how it somehow makes you more free?

Requiring all traffic light pedestrian cycles to give pedestrians complete control over the entire intersection (all directions), with no turns, for a period of time (a.k.a. pedestrian scramble intersctions).

  Regularly ticketing pedestrians who cross when it isn't their turn.

The UK has a vastly better pedestrian safety than the US. Also we don't hate freedom here: you can cross the road where you damn well please.

eliminating road-side parking

Well I am definitely in favour of that.

No no you don't understand. Every suburban road warrior commuting into a job in town is actually an outdoorsy manly macho man who spends all the time in the wilderness on unlit roads hauling mysteriously large loads without so much as a 5 minute pee break every 26 hours.

Why do you hate America?