Most rebuilt postwar European cities were built for cars. Then the people realized that sucked, often quicker cuz their legs y built environments accommodated cars poorly, and instead we got effective metro systems instead.

The Northeast US cities have the bones of urbanism still. Their grids were often laid before the car, so you have the narrow streets, housing without setbacks, capacity for mixed use and density to justify good transit infrastructure. The problem is outside New York the cities proper all depopulated - Baltimore and Philly peaked decades ago and have seen mostly population decline since mid last century. The problem is turning these places around requires a lot of investment to rebuild the decayed urbanism that is there and they both (the whole corridor) needs more transit that what it already has to support real urbanism growth when it starts up again.

These are places that have been systemically paracitized for a long time. Taxes are higher in Boston, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, etc than anywhere else in their respective states, and the actual cities are some of the only property tax revenue positive places anywhere - all that suburban sprawl is dependent on outside money to sustain all the roads and infrastructure in ways these cities are not. But that outside money often came from these cities, and we saw huge white flight last century as wealth fled to sprawling suburbs.

None of these places can really turn around the economic sackings they have endured on their own. Even NYC has huge budget problems supporting its metro. But good luck getting the broader fed to reinvest in cities in the 21st century... there are defense contractors pocketbooks to pad, companies to bailout, and techbros to give tax exemptions to.

A lot of our energy expenditure is lifestyle satisfying. Asia and the better cities in Europe demonstrate you can build dense cities with excellent transit as an alternative to car dependency, but the US fairly universally rejects it from both sides - white flight to suburbs and their perpetual expansion and the inability to actually build dense and transit oriented housing, hell most places use zoning codes to actively prevent its development.

We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything, but the willpower is very much not there, largely because of corporate interference that bred this climate that transit is for poor people and to own a car is to "succeed" in life. Its such an awful, backwards culture perpetuated by the profit motive over possibly the survival of the society.

I took 5 AP classes in high school that got me out of 5 classes and took 4 CLEP tests the summer before my last year so it would be my last (those tests are a very easy way to get credit requirements you don't care for filled). Then I dropped analytic geometry my last semester and only did 3 classes including the CS capstone because I just wanted to code at that point.

The trick is if your encoder can adapt the quantizer based off a metric to compare the encode quality you can save a ton more space without visual degradation.

My problem is the client doesn't support multiple servers, so I can't have a work vpn and a home vpn, not even with an easy toggle - you have to run tailscale with different conf options for both. Changing namespaces also isn't easy, so having friends and family segregated even on one server is also a pain point.

My wife and I saving to house shop soonish, but one of the primary requirements of our residency will be transit access. We don't like driving, don't like having to own a car, and definitely do not want to have to drive up and down the east coast to visit friends and family. Amtrak access is thus basically required, and anywhere we can avoid buying a car to live is valued dramatically higher than alternatives.

Its a growing sentiment the younger you get, where the veneer of the 50s American dream is more and more eroded and we are realizing humans in the 21st century should be living denser, with public transit, and walkable access to day to day needs, than to live in gated communities without a sidewalk or any human contact.

And 99.9% of US real estate is built up totally in antithesis of this, largely on racist fundamentals dating to the early 20th century.

Like we legit were looking at areas and when talking about just over the DC border into MD the conversation always immediately goes to "yes the properties are a third cheaper, but theres no metro access" and its just off the radar. Pittsburgh is our joke city since it has no usable Amtrak routes out of it (and yes, I know its urban core is nice, but its also tiny and unable to grow).

None of these decaying places can afford the capital investment to redevelop to be walkable and sustainably dense. They already are burdened to maintain a million acres of suburbia that is all tax negative. And nobody wants a "top down" solution that involves displacing millions to redevelop cities so the demographic trends going forward want to live there.

For anyone looking, Philly is actually pretty affordable. Its combined income tax is 6% in the state, the sales tax isn't outrageous, and property costs are a fraction of NYC or DC. Its definitely near the top of our list considering how unaffordable the parts of Portland, Seattle, and Baltimore with transit are.

Its intentional sabotage by Apple at this point on behalf of MPEG-LA, it seems.

If Netflix wants to hire me, dm me, lol.

I just transcoded some movies with vmaf of 98% from 4k hdr blurays this last week. Takes about two days of mostly single core work with cpu-used=4 on a 5950x but they get average bitrates of around 4400 kbps. Which is like, really, really good for hitting that quality target.

The trick is that since its mostly single core I just do 16 movies at a time, or 24 on my server.

Its not popular on HN but most of the libertarian tenants that belay picking yourself up by your bootstraps are not applicable to a supermajority of labor. There is no change of attitude within the framing of the economic system as it exists that individual actors take on a collective scale to suddenly stop being exploited systemically.

But they aren't. Matrix is http and json while XMPP is tcp and xml. Protocol extensions to xmpp have added http transports - but thats just wrapping non-http requests in http and making processing harder.

I think a good comparison is X11 vs Wayland. X11 was retrofitted with all the functionality Wayland has natively - "why switch" is a legitimate question. But we will see in the next 20-30 years how the maintenance burden of X protocol legacy means we will see any new development using Wayland because its so much easier to do. In the same sense, chat apps will probably favor Matrix over XMPP because of the protocol maintenance burden - even when drop in libraries exist that implement XMPP, the inherent complexity makes them buggier, slower, and requires a lot of developer nuance to get right and its all due to legacy cruft you have to accommodate on an old standard.

Its also like how more modern kernels stopped trying to be Unix compatible. Trying to meet the POSIX standard in the 21st century is kinda a waste of effort when a lot of it is unnecessary. The model is sound, its just adhering strictly to the eccentricities of it is just unnecessary headache.

Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.

They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.

Delegate responsibility where you can, which includes use authentication. It sucks that Persona died all those years ago because web browsers really could use an identity system for users to authenticate themselves against sites with their browser accounts.

The problem is then ofc getting browsers to cooperatively allow cross sign in. If messengers are anything to go by, siloed products really do not want to interoperate, particularly I imagine Edge and Safari.

You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.