Trainguyrom

@Trainguyrom@reddthat.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨18-26 year olds, How do you plan to dodge the draft?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Plot twist: you now get to go to one of RFK Jr’s farms

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨18-26 year olds, How do you plan to dodge the draft?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of assumptions going on here. First of all, historically 26 wasn’t the maximum for the draft but 40, but secondly there’s really no rules for a draft. A draft is already so much of an encroachment on one’s human rights and legal rights that all bets are off should one be declared. Sure there’ll be court orders and legal battles over it but we’ve seen how that goes already with the current administration, they’ll simply delay and ignore while shuffling as many humans out of reach as possible until they can’t anymore.

  Best thing any of us can do is simply hope for the best. My personal hopes are, in order of declining positivity:

  • There is no draft
  • I’m either too old or too autistic to be drafted
  • I can go back to college to be ineligible to be drafted
  • I can find myself a non-combat role given my technical expertise
  • Whatever happens happens and I’ll figure out how to survive and thrive like I have every other challenge that’s come my way in life

  There’s really no other planning for such an eventuality. There’s too many unknowns you can plan for, and while I’m seeing plenty of folks talking about fragging, taking drugs or establishing a false history of drug abuse, transitioning, etc. the fact is there’s no telling what will happen nor what the legal landscape will look like

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨18-26 year olds, How do you plan to dodge the draft?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you think they’d actually bring back the draft?

  On one hand a draft would be extremely daft on many fronts. It would make an unpopular president far more unpopular, it would put guns into the hands of a ton of disgruntled people, and there’s generally plenty of willing recruits based purely off of the economic benefits of volunteering

  On the other hand, the way his administration is talking to the media it really sounds like they’re trying to lay the groundwork for a draft, including most notably saying why Trump’s youngest son isn’t eligible to be drafted (any normal politician would explain why their kid was “choosing not to enlist”)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨so cozy 🐟⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I had an employee at a touch tank at an aquarium explain to me that stingrays swim around in giant schools constantly touching each other so they really just like being pet and touched, and as we were chatting (it was a really slow day) I could see the stingrays dancing and getting antsy because they weren’t getting enough attention and the employee just kept petting them as they kept coming up and bouncing out of the water clearly going “Pet me! Pet me!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve Sued By The Performing Rights Society Over Music Rights in Games Valve Doesn’t Make or Own⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

  1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
  2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Men wanna be me, women wanna be with me.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A friend talked about getting weird looks once when doing this ok a shopping trip without the kids

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seagate just unleashed 44TB hard drives⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The price is irrelevant, because they aren’t for you or regular consumers. They’re already reserved and being shipped to AI data centers.

  I mean this is the standard operating procedure for all top end data center products, they aren’t sold on consumer marketplaces but can be purchased by suppliers with existing contracts and relationships

  As they ramp up yields larger capacity drives will slowly trickle into more consumer channels until eventually the 40+TB drives are like the 8-12tb drives are today

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i have a fantasy of marrying a divorced dad and being the young cool stepmom⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My wife spotted a couple of strands of grey recently and seemed to get really excited, so maybe she wasn’t just playing it up to make me feel better

  I’m just glad it took longer for me than it did for my dad, he went grey in his mid twenties. I remember by the time I was my kids age he was already completely grey, and I still occasionally have people scrutinize my ID when buying alcohol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God bless the Midwest⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That is one thing I will say about Culver’s, is the quality can very wildly from franchise to franchise. Craig Culver ran a really tight ship but things have slipped a lot at some of the franchises since he retired

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God bless the Midwest⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Culver’s is quite good if you consider it high end fast food (fast casual or whatever the fuck those industry goons call it) and now that every fast food restaurant costs way too much you might as well get good food that’s not been pre-prepared

  Also during Lent you can get walleye from Culver’s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really struggling to make heads or tails of your core point that you’re trying to make.

  I shared my story about trying to do some car replacement trips by acoustic bike, how it took a full year of training to be able to consistently make the school runs by bike (with a trailer mind you), and then pointed out how ebikes completely remove that physical fitness requirements while providing all of the same benefits of an accoustic bike

  Also I love how you keep changing and leaving out details of my story as you go along. I really can’t shake the feeling you’re not actually trying to make any specific point and just want to argue with people

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, maybe I’m a bit too optimistic but if they’ve pissed me off they’ve probably pissed off everyone so it should be easy to convince enough people to show up to tear out the silly rules that they keep getting fines for

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bruh you seem really stuck on this idea of “dormant physical athleticism” whatever that means.

  Let me break this down for you, the human body has muscles, these are like motors for moving bits of flesh and bone around. Like motors, the amount of physical energy they output changes based on the energy that gets input. Since humans don’t really have control of the chemical energy flow to these muscles, the way you can change that is by pushing these muscles to their limits, and as you keep doing that these limits start increasing.

  Its really quite awesome, because unlike most things in life, your muscle gain directly correlates to the amount of work you put in. Its one of the few things you can directly control!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨women⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I said what I said!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You should probably reread my comment because that was literally what I said

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable

  I started biking again 2 years ago, honestly partly pushed by various city planning/car rejection media when I realized I could start being the change I want to see in the world. I’d done some strength training during the pandemic but holy crap was I not in shape enough to be biking. It took me a full year of biking nearly every day to be able to bike my kids to school in a trailer (about 2 miles round trip)

  Even now where I finished last summer biking over 22 very hilly miles, I struggled to bike to a haircut just a mile away after just 3 months of winter hibernation, and now that it’s early spring I got up to 5 miles so far within a few bike rides.

  Point is, for the average adult, biking is an option but it takes some time and work to build up your strength. Ebikes completely change the game because anyone can ride 10-20 miles on those, and if you have balance issues or other health issues you can get an etrike! They’re such incredible life changing machines!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨(serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

  Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there’s a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It’s because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn’t platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

  If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say “while we’re building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?” So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn’t survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

  This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn’t move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

  The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it’s really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there’s aspects of modern society that simply can’t exist without cars. I’m imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you’ve got a good 3-5 years or so before it’s really going to start hurting most families, and I’d imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don’t renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

  The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I’m immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

  Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there’s many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it’s pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

  Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren’t connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

  Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

  Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it’s difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We’d also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people’s homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

  The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it’s relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A “narrow” 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I’m imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there any reason not to charge my laptop with a USB C phone charger?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  See I worried about this with my phones for a while, but then I realized I’m literally just doing the job of a charge controller for the phone which only cost about $300, and by the time any wear might show up from enjoying the fast charge capabilities I’ll have already have switched to a newer phone since I tend to upgrade every 2-3 years

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m the kind of person who would go full rules-lawyer on them, get myself elected to the board and generally rip out every silly rule they have if not completely disband the HOA if needed

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My ring doorbell

  Obligatory get that police state spyware off your home and use something else (if cameras are even at all necessary!)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m imagining there’s some setup to how the cans were placed that creates a blindspot where the OOP can move them without himself being seen, so the camera will simply pick up the cans moving each night without any clear source of the movement

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the removed signs should’ve been liberated and re-placed at the rich neighborhood park, and chains should’ve simply been set by the swings there. Make them see what they’re doing and explain to their families why this is happening (if they even bother to use their parks)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A product of his environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean its perfectly conceivable for any camera to have a blind spot. The lens can only see so much. Heck given its a Ring camera its almost certainly on a wireless connection so its trivial to briefly disrupt the connection if you’re okay with violating FCC regulations

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dear Faith I⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just to muddy the waters, I worked with a guy who had “system administrator level XII” in his email signature and one of the teammates asked him about it. His response was that he just put that in to see if anyone noticed and occasionally bumps the number up when he feels like it’s about time to do so.

  So you never know when someone stuck a private joke into their email signature like that. Heck when I was brought back to my role I was never given a clear job title so I just put the most accurate job title I could think of in my signature of “IT Contractor”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI tool OpenClaw wipes the inbox of Meta's AI Alignment director despite repeated commands to stop — executive had to manually terminate the AI to stop the bot from continuing to erase data⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don’t need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ariana Grande: The Last Racebender⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Italians in general weren’t even considered ‘white’ untill… the 70s?

  Why does this just make me think of those tweets from when Luigi was arrested

  we’re finally on the verge of learning once and for all if Italians are White

  And once he received terrorism charges

  The final answer on “what are Italians” is apparently “middle eastern”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨American Foreign Policy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Holy crap I’ve never seen any of this before but now I’ve watched the entire first season and need to watch the rest

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand how any of this is legal

  Part of it comes down to how driving is legally a privilege, but it’s also been made a legal requirement in many instances (such as living on a highway that disallows pedestrians) and a functional requirement in many others (have to walk past 5 miles of parking lots and take a long meandering path to get around the interstate along noisy, busy stroads just to get to any grocery store by foot for the most common example)

  Sometimes in some places there’s half-assed policies in place to try to paper over the problem, such as free paratransit for disabled and elderly individuals that requires scheduling the ride days or weeks in advance, special driving permits for those who had their licenses revoked to be able to get to work, school and go shopping but restricts allowed driving hours and places to make it even more of a punishment, bus services that run only hourly on weekdays, stopping only at poorly marked stops located in built places no human would want to stand at for even a few minutes, etc