mplanchard

Joined 7 years ago

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Member since
Apr 5
https://blog.mplanchard.com/
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Comment · 17 days ago
I have a hard time believing you’re making this idiotic argument in good faith. This is like saying we can’t take in people fleeing from a war in their home country because they will cause a war here.

The people fleeing dangerous countries are not the ones making the country dangerous.

Comment · 20 days ago
More like saying samey corporatized slop bowl copy paste jobs (eg Cava) are driving out real, quality restaurants, a thing that has actually been happening for some time.
Comment · 20 days ago
I miss being able to reliably hail a taxi A LOT. Uber may be an improvement in smaller towns where cabs didn’t exist, but in bigger cities it is mostly a downgrade. Rather than walking to the curb and immediately getting a car, I’ve got to dick around with my phone and wait for a car to come to me.
Comment · 20 days ago
Average, or median? Don’t know the answer offhand, but there are a small number of well-known people who are likely to skew the average quite a bit upward, given how much wealth they accumulated during and since covid
Comment · 21 days ago
Not even touching your caricature of the AI argument, but “most dangerous sentiment [in] civilization right now” is a crazy thing to say during the current global political zeitgeist.
Comment · 1 month ago
The MTA also has far more stations than any other US system, indeed more than any other metro system on Earth.

The NYC subway has 424 stations. The next highest in the US is the L in Chicago, with 146, followed by DC, with 98.

Seems natural it would take longer, though that is scant comfort to the people who need them. NYC has 133 accessible stations, which is 91% of the L’s total station count.

Comment · 1 month ago
NYC has a lot of money, but this is a huge project, involving continuous disruption to a system that must continue carrying 6 million people per day throughout its completion. The NYC subway has more stations than any other metro system on earth, with 424 stations, of which 133 are already accessible. Hitting 95% by 2055 means around 10/year on average for the next 29 years. While it could always be better, for a system that is over 120 years old, this seems not too terrible to me.

Also, not every subway station is equal. Some see significantly higher ridership than others, or are more critical transfer points, and so can be prioritized to have more impact sooner. It seems like that is what they’re doing.

Comment · 1 month ago
Totally agree, and also this was one of the most powerful aspects of using nix development environments: when everyone is guaranteed to be on all the same (recent) versions of bash, make, awk, sed, and any other system deps, you can confidentially write your scripts knowing the whole team can use them, without having to deal with Mac users’ scripts breaking because their bash is old, or because somebody doesn’t have jq installed, or whatever.
Comment · 1 month ago
This sounds to me like something a native french speaker would say in english. I feel like most english speakers would respond, “They are vendors,” “Just some vendors,” “It’s some vendors,” or even just “Vendors,” but not “They are some vendors.”
Comment · 1 month ago
This is often apparent from the sound or spelling of a word, rather than any genderedness in its concept. A chair is une chaise (feminine), and it would be weird for chaise to be masculine. It’s not because the chair is feminine, it’s because the word is. There are some rules that help you figure out the gender based on the word (often what sound the word ends with), but there are exceptions to those rules.

Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).

Comment · 1 month ago
Average, yes, but the way they phrase it, it could be a token bucket or similar, where you can do 60 quick requests and then be blocked for a bit while the bucket refills
Comment · 1 month ago
Sorry, do you know what words mean?

> […] the president or any other elected person, their whole job is to serve people. Do what the people voted that person to do by putting aside all personal preferences, belief and ideologies.

I don’t see how you can say that, and then:

> In that regards, I wonder dignity, humility, empathy would have anything to do with governing

Like, those are the traits required to unselfishly serve others. See literally any religion or framework of ethics.

Comment · 1 month ago
Yes of course, anyone who lives somewhere with winter knows that some winters are colder than others. In the late fall when it is time to swap the tires, you don’t know in advance whether the winter will be harsh or mild, but people put snow tires on anyway in places where harsh winters are common.

It would only make sense to require them every winter if the large majority of winters were quite cold. As such, nowhere in the US requires winter tires, but someone else noted that Quebec does. This makes sense, since even a mild Quebec winter will spend most of the time getting below freezing.

I would be very surprised if there were a place that required winter tires by law where the winter does not always get and stay at or below freezing for significant periods of time almost every winter.

Comment · 1 month ago
Didn’t know it was required, but it makes sense, as it is indeed quite cold. Good thing I always have winter tires on in the winter anyway, so I’m not breaking the law when I drive to Montreal!

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