solson4 (u/solson4) - Readit News

solson4 commented on Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk nathenry.com/writing/2023... · Posted by u/sebg

jobs_throwaway · 3 years ago

Do any Seattle-ites not have a car? How do you get around?

Asking as a NYer who would consider living there if the car-free life wouldn't be too painful

solson4 · 3 years ago

I lived in Seattle from 2016-2020 and didn't have a car for about half that time. If your house and work are near a link stop you certainly don't need it, everything you'll need is in walking distance or a train ride away. Other than link and the rapid buses, there's good bus coverage, but it's slow, wouldn't want to rely on it IMO.

Biking is not great. I did it a lot, but I'm comfortable riding through heavy traffic on steep hills, if you're not, probably would be hard to rely on.

Finally, I'm big into climbing/mountaineering and lack of a car was never a big problem. I'd rent one the few times I had too (way cheaper than parking and insurance), but otherwise could usually carpool with someone else who was going. Sorta' puts you on someone else's schedule, but if you need a belay partner anyway...

solson4 commented on The Future of Thunderbird blog.thunderbird.net/2023... · Posted by u/TangerineDream

VyseofArcadia · 3 years ago

> Why does Thunderbird look so old

UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

solson4 · 3 years ago

On the other hand, I gave thunderbird a try after switching to linux and found their UI so bad that it was harming usability. After the app had finished taking up the screen with various controls, settings and the list of messages, there was a tiny window left over to read the email itself, and it seemed like the threading of messages was basically broken. It wasn't that it looked old exactly that bothered me (although it did), but that I was buried in a mountain of jank from the start.

I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.

solson4 commented on Vancouver Zoning Map maps.nicholsonroad.com/zo... · Posted by u/lbrito

mrmuagi · 4 years ago

Interesting. I'm kind of shocked at how much one-family dwelling there is. I would love to see expansion to Richmond, Delta, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam as there is a ton of commuting population that ingress and egress to Vancouver.

solson4 · 4 years ago

It looks like this could change soon with the city allowing “metroplexs” everywhere in city limits[1]. It’s not law yet, but the city has been doing a lot of upzoning, so we’ll see.

1. https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-fumano-the-e...

solson4 commented on Mars has right ingredients for present-day microbial life: study brown.edu/news/2021-04-22... · Posted by u/hhs

bpodgursky · 5 years ago

I don't understand the excitement for finding life on Mars. I personally really, really hope we do not find life on Mars.

If we find even the most basic microbial life, NASA is going to shut down all future exploration in the interest of Martian planetary protection. China and Russia probably won't, but the US will cripple itself (again) out of caution.

On a more existential level, finding life elsewhere in the solar system (assuming it's not diaspora from earth or vice versa) says really dark things about our own potential. If life is truly common in the universe, the fact that we haven't seen it anywhere means that the great filter is still in front of us -- and nobody has slipped through.

OTOH, if the great filter is behind is, there's no data about our likelihood of killing ourselves before we do manage to explore the rest of the known universe. This is such a better outcome.

solson4 · 5 years ago

I think the excitement is that it would give us another data point for what life can possibly be like. So far (AFAIK) the best evidence is that life evolved once on earth, and so everything we see comes from that basic blue print. But does it have to be that way? Would alien life also be carbon based, or something else? Is DNA/RNA (or a close equivalent) a universal feature of life? If not what do they use instead? If so, that's also very interesting. There's just so many questions we can't answer when the sample size is one. I guess my belief (hope?) is that that curiosity would spur further exploration, not kill it.

As for the great filter, yeah, it's a bit scary if we rule out bio-genesis as an option, but that still leaves the single to multi cell jump behind us (and arguably development of human level cooperation/problem solving, but I'm less sold on that one).

solson4 commented on Ink 1.0 – Open-source scripting language for interactive narrative inklestudios.com/2021/02/... · Posted by u/Kinrany

solson4 · 5 years ago

Very cool. I’m working on an interactive fiction engine in my spare time, and it’s interesting to see how someone else chose to manage the complexity that exponential branching starts to cause. Their concept of knots makes a lot of sense for a video game with narrative “hubs”. Definitely like the text based approach, the flow graphs that other engines use look like they get really messy really fast.

solson4 commented on Rust is a hard way to make a web API macwright.com/2021/01/15/... · Posted by u/tmcw

solson4 · 5 years ago

In my spare time over the fall I put together a CRUD app to learn rust. Yew frontend and an actix/diesel backend. I must say, I actually really liked working with actix. There was a bit of a learning curve, but after I'd figured out the rust workflow, I felt very productive. Sure, could have gotten up and running faster in Django, but the rust app felt much more solid, like the compiler had my back. If there was something like Phoenix to help with the initial setup as others here have suggested, it would probably be my goto for this sort of thing. Yew on the other hand... it's got a ways to go before I would recommend it.

solson4 commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? · Posted by u/dvt

solson4 · 5 years ago

Just started a new job, so had to take a break while I get my routines sorted out, but before that was making semi-interactive sites for my short stories to live in. The latest one was a trio of short stories embedded in a... html puzzle box I guess? Anyway, it's up here: https://3ai.highvoltageclouds.com/

solson4 commented on Oregon becomes first U.S. state to decriminalize possession of all drugs twitter.com/BNONews/statu... · Posted by u/jeremylevy

throwaway894345 · 5 years ago

> It's not much different to people consuming alcohol really, the only real differences are alcohol is generally more socially accepted, and that alcohol is generally considered to be more harmful to society

I would amend your analogy: "people comsuming alcohol to get drunk". Lots of people enjoy a glass of wine or a beer or sipping whiskey or whatever, not because it makes them drunk, but because they enjoy the flavor (e.g., wine pairings, etc). I'm pretty sure almost everyone who does drugs does so to get high. Note that I'm not arguing that alcohol is better than drugs, only that I think this distinction is important.

solson4 · 5 years ago

But everyone who's drinking alcohol is doing it at least in part for the effect. Non-alcoholic beer is a thing and there are plenty of wine replacements and mocktails, but they're nowhere near as popular as the real thing. Obviously there's a difference in a glass of wine with dinner and being roaring drunk, but that's true of any drug. You can micro-dose LSD, or you can take it until you're seeing pink elephants on the ceiling.

solson4 commented on Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus iphoneincanada.ca/news/ap... · Posted by u/tomekw

qPM9l3XJrF · 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't see how this is different from Twitter taking down a tweet which doxxes someone.

Would people object if Apple told Telegram they had to remove a channel that was being used by white supremacists to coordinate terrorist attacks?

The answer to that question matters, because if users in this thread succeed in making iPhones less of a walled garden, terrorists will be able to use their iPhones to coordinate terror repeatedly on a large scale, and there won't be anything Apple can do about it. Is that really the world you want to live in? Personally, 2020 has satiated my appetite for craziness, and I'm ready for a little stability.

solson4 · 5 years ago

Yes, it is quite different. Twitter is one of many platforms. If it begins to censor content it’s relatively straightforward to move to telegram or signal of matrix. The App Store on the other hand is a platform of platforms so its decisions affect all platforms on it. if you’re on an iPhone, there’s nowhere else to go. And Belarus has a gdp per capita of 6300. I imagine for most citizens getting a new phone is not trivial.

solson4 commented on Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels typelit.io... · Posted by u/Octouroboros

billyruffian · 5 years ago

Why is it that I find on certain websites (this one included) that some keystrokes aren't recognised when I use Safari? The letter 'e' not being recognised is common. Chrome works fine. This is on a Mac with Catalina and a British keyboard.

solson4 · 5 years ago

Yeah, having a similar issue. Catalina, American keyboard, Firefox. Halfway through the second sentence it started flagging everything as incorrect no matter what I typed.