My communities have moved to discord. It does good chronological discussions, with support for threads.

The social media platforms I used to use all went through enshitification.
Twitter's X-ification mean its a place for journalists, corporations, and porn.
Facebook started inserting so many ads and pushing short video content, while sometimes hiding peoples posts for days, that it made it mostly useless.

How is this different than breeding animals for meat?

All it takes is one site being hacked and getting my biometric bits, and now I need to change my biometrics, which is way harder than changing a password...

The hard part of passwords is not getting something secure, its keeping it secure over time. There is a reason we rotate passwords, and biometrics just don't support rotation.

We have both a DVD and streaming subscription. There is a lot of content only available on DVD. We've basically watched the streaming content of interest, but have a long DVD queue we are slowing going through 1 disc at a time.

So we have 2 cats.

Cat A is a lean sleak hunter, who is older. She's very clever. She solves any cat toy or puzzle quickly and efficiently. When we were trying to control her food intake, she figured out how to open the door to the room where we were keeping food, went to the backside of the bag, ripped a small hole, and ate some; then left the room and closed the door after her. She did this for a week before she failed to close the door completely and we noticed. She sort of knows her name, and may just be responding to us using intonation.

Cat B is very food motivated, but easily fooled by puzzles. However, he knows his name, the other cat's name, the words "lunch", "treat", and "bed time"; and has a remarkable sense of time and our patterns of doing things. As an example, he gets fed his favorite wet food every day at 11:30am when I get lunch (I do remote work and keep a regular schedule). Starting at about 11am he makes sure to come in and lay wherever I am. If I get up any time start at about 11:25, and say a sentence with "unch" in it, he'll run to where his wetfood cans are stored in the kitchen and point at them. If I say his name instead, he'll get up, and watch where I'm walking to. If I don't say either of those words, he'll lay there and look dejected because I'm failing in my duties to provide him food. My partner has come in to the office at 11 and mentioned something about lunch, and cat B ran to the kitchen... Similarly he understands the word "treat", and if we say that in the dining room, he'll move towards the room where his treats are kept and then keep looking back at us to follow.

This seems like its a related to the observations from the article going around earlier claiming that millennials are killing businesses because they are to poor to be good consumers. Younger folk are more willing to move, but you can only move if you can afford to move.

How about instead of forcing everyone to handle paper and coins, they instead require any bank wanting to do business in NYC to issue a fee-less checking account to anyone who requests it in person regardless of ID status? Maybe cap the maximum total deposit until they meet certain ID requirements to prevent money laundering issues.

Make banking freely available to all.

So this metric needs to be changed to unmetered broadband access. There is no point in having lots of bandwidth if you don't have the allowed bits to use it. The speed metric should be allowed_bits/time.

I use 2 computers with 3 monitors. One machine is my linux desktop driving a pair of monitors. The other computer is my windows laptop driving a 3rd monitor. The windows laptop lets me run all the corporate required windows only programs comfortably. I run synergy across them, so that I use a single keyboard/mouse/cut&paste buffer across both machines. It lets me have all the utility of linux desktop, while still running Outlook and other IT mandated software tools.

From a workflow point of view, the windows machine is often my "communications" gateway -- it runs my email and IM clients, as well as acting as the persistent reference window when working on tasks that spawn multiple virtual desktops. The linux machine is where I do all my real work.

I've been very pleased with how smoothly this works.

So I look at this and think "some machine, some where has to be running the code". When you play flash games, all the work is being done on your local machine. When I play wow, its pegging a 2ghz processor to the extent it slows other things running in the background noticeably. When you start doing complex work in photoshop, your limitation is often the amount of memory in the machine running it. While this is awesome for streaming content from remote servers, I really question the ability to provide the server resources to run these applications in any sort of high volume situation. What would the system requirements be to be able to run 10,000+ users through a single machine?

My preference for how to work is with a closed door with sufficient sound isolation that I can play music without disturbing others. My current employer's 5 ft cube walls, with no doors, near a well traffic'd hallway probably halves my productivity through a mix of frequent distractions and folks stopping in to chat.

It is important to have good intragroup communications. The challenge is doing it in such a fashion that it does not cause undue loss of productivity. The best group I've worked in used an internal IRC server extensively -- including have social channels as well as official channels. It allowed people to be chatty, without the chat causing active interruptions of work. Face to face meetings were still needed, but they were used sparingly.

This study is comparing apples and oranges.

The study assumes you are getting rid of your car to use public transit. There are so many things that are not public transit accessible that still require a car that they are not putting any replacement cost in for.

In Boston, a rental car for a weekend with insurance is ~$300. I use my car 3 weekends a month to travel outside of public transit range. Adding in the cost of getting a rental each weekend and suddenly 12.6k I'm saving is reduced by 7.8k (plus fuel costs and a lot of overhead dealing with rentals). The study is assuming depreciation of the car -- which likely means its assuming a purchase of new car. The cost conscious folks are either purchasing used cars or driving cars for far longer than a normal depreciation period.

And this doesn't even count the opportunity cost of travel time. I live in a near suburb (Arlington) and work in Cambridge. I can walk/bus to the T, and take the T to work. It takes about 1.25 hours each way. It takes me 20 minutes each way driving. I value the ~2 hours per day I save by driving pretty highly. Admittedly, if I have to drive during rush hours, my commute goes to 45-50 minutes each way and public transit becomes much more attractive.