Yeah, Cities Skylines had traffic that was reactive to design. I’ve played some CS2, and while some things are improved (like lane connection), it feels like the traffic is just simulated sprites based on a traffic congestion variable for the area or something. Upgrading roads sometimes helps, but providing better routes doesn’t always help like you would expect. It feels very disconnected and rewards linear progression rather than skillful or smart gameplay. I still play CS1 and I check in on CS2 once or twice a year to see if it still sucks. I did enjoy the bike patch to some degree, but the gameplay in general just seems artificial and lame. CS1 may be old with mediocre graphics, but it’s still a 9/10 game in my opinion and you can buy in cheap nowadays to get caught up on DLCs and such. I have nearly everything except the radio packs. The menus are inconsistent and the way they organize things doesn’t always make intuitive sense. I think they would be better off recreating CS1 on a more modern engine than trying to reinvent a masterpiece. For me CS2 was the biggest disappointment of the gaming decade. With that said, lots of games sucked on release. Fallout 76 grew into it’s shoes, Stalker 2 was panned at release and is now much more highly regarded. I hope CS2 finds its way back into sync with the community, but I’ll be enjoying CS1 and other games until that happens. Thankfully MS hasn’t completely destroyed Minecraft. I practice city design on a much smaller scale on there (more “place making”, less traffic management, more roleplay, less mechanics).

I can’t see the pic in your comment, but I am gonna guess Broadway and Lincoln between 19th and 20th?

Interestingly enough, Denver has 3 main grids:

The range and township grid as the typical NS/EW grid, the Araria grid by DU which is largely built over, and the downtown grid, the last two of which are aligned to Cherry Creek and the Platte River, though I’m not certain which one to which waterway. If it wasn’t for one-ways, that area would be screwed up beyond belief. As it stands, it just looks a little odd and everyone needs to try to pick their lanes in advance. :D

I agree. I’ve thought a lot about how valuable signing a simple message with a key can be. In an age where machines can appropriate your likeness, how do you accumulate and shed reputation, how do you prove it was you? One low tech version was taking a photo with a newspaper to prove you are a real person. Another is exchanging a public key with a person in real life so you can have reasonable certainty that communications signed with that key are legit. Since this boils down to denying what our eyes have seen, governments and businesses who are very keen on control reality are making their plays. Even identifying yourself cryptographically is only a temporary fix to maintain an existing identity. Your kids will be profiled and mimicked from day one. This whole slippery slope we’ve been sliding down lately seems very foreseen. It feels like these traps were engineered a very long time ago.

I think education is the absolute most important thing for a functioning post-truth society. Kids need to smell shit from 20 miles away because the world is full of traps for your mind same as it is for your wallet and your physical body. We also need to be able to verify and trust our tech stack. We need to pass down the stories of the times common people lost and the times common people won. We need to read and discuss philosophy. We’ll also have to tackle American religion head on. Also excessively addictive entertainment designs. We are a deeply flawed society and I’m not sure where we should start except for taking some of our time back so people actually have the opportunity to think about these things.

I like the way you phrased that. I had a similar experience making peace with my mortality when I left religion. The self I “am” is just an illusion. It’s the link in a metaphorical chain that’s being forged. There were a lot of links before me and there will be many after me and every new link is shaped by the experience and skills the blacksmith developed from the previous links. I am not the link, but rather, I am the chain. Every action I take was made possible by the past and will echo into the future through the people I impact, the physical artifacts I create, and those will someday leave behind. One day the chain will have many links. Looking back from the newly forged links my link will become distant and less detailed, and yet, I am still the chain. Even if I am no longer known by name and everyone I ever knew has been dead for centuries, my actions will continue to echo until the end of time itself. That’s the only way I was able to make sense of it without resorting to woowoo metaphysics, deities, and such. It’s also why I feel it’s so important to be nice to people.

Now I’m wrestling with the nature of consciousness.

I hope you have a great day!

I have struggled with feeling lonely during different times in my life. I found I was attached to preconceived outcomes and some unhappiness I was feeling stemmed from that. When I stopped searching, I learned to find. I stopped trying to plug that hole and I sat uncomfortably in my loneliness. I’m definitely still a work in progress, but now I try to enjoy my time with people, to be more in the moment and less “10 steps ahead”. Now, most of the time, my loneliness doesn’t live on the surface, just in that occasional existential dread of knowing that one day I will have to die. I hope someone I love will be there to hold my hand, and I’m scared to be alone. That’s a heavy weight and I sometimes wish I was too stupid to recognize our mortality so I didn’t have to wrestle with it.

When I was young, I had my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents, and thought I always would. I was friends with a bunch of kids in the neighborhood and at school. I’m down to one parent and a super young and hip grandparent in-law in their 90s. When everyone was sick with Covid and my partner was feeling the stress too, there were times I felt very alone and I really felt the weight of having nobody to lean on in those moments because everyone was just as overwhelmed as me. It’s an uncomfortable part of the human experience. I try not to put all my eggs in one basket, but as an introvert it can be hard to maintain a large circle of support. Hopefully some of that answers the question. I’m curious how others see it.

It would be pretty cool. I doubt EVs enjoy being ground up in a hardcore woodchipper.

…and one of those giant pneumatic crushers. I bet if you crushed enough cars they’d work a little harder to keep it from happening.

No real mention of the parents other than a line about how they’re lining up to sue too. When I was a kid, my parents made me log every moment I spent in front of the computer in a book along with what I was doing. I got into some stuff, but I also got sat down and talked to a few times. Many of my friends had to share phones with siblings. The computer was in a public space and we were all told to never use our real name online. Where did things go wrong and why?

I dislike Meta an FB a lot, but I think it’s ridiculous to make them responsible for every kid in America. Isn’t there a confirmation dialogue that says you’re not allowed to use it if you are under 13? The parents gave them a tool that can be used to look up >>>almost anything<<<. Thats like handing your kid a metaphorical RPG and sending them out the door to go play. Making sure kids have guidance and help in developing media literacy is at least partially the parents job.

Having said that, I do think there is a lot of other bad stuff META did that should have already put them out of business. In my opinion, they’re obviously a bad actor but blaming them infantalizes everyone else. Poor little Americans, powerless against the big bad Meta. Also, why is it okay to manipulate adults? If anything, these feeds should be boldly labeled as “does not reflect reality”, or “this content has been algorithmically selected to be addictive, take frequent breaks, touch grass”

I read that the one of the differences between Organic Maps and CoMaps is that the server side code for CoMaps is FOSS, while some of the server side code for Organic Maps is not. I hope I understood that correctly. I have Organic Maps installed because it was in the GrapheneOS app store.

If CoMaps has open server-side code, could I create my own map tiles with the best bike routes in my area and self-host them for myself and my friends? I find that google, bing, OpenStreetMap, etc all suck at recognizing good bike routes in my area and hand-curated routes are much better. I’d prefer to hand-curate the best routes color coded based on perceived safety and whether they are daytime only routes or acceptable for nighttime travel. Is something like this doable with CoMaps?

"You have selected ‘Caucasian Christian’. Permanent light mode has been activated and you can no longer look up porn on Sunday.

You have selected “Arabic Muslim”, sensor access has automatically been granted to determine when you are facing Mecca. If you have too many friendly fire incidents in CoD, the US will deploy reaper drones to your IRL GPS location.

On a more serious note:

There’s been a lot of talk about protecting kids, but none about protecting grandma from scams and AI misinformation if her systemd age field indicates she’s 65 or older. Why is that? Is it because kids don’t have rights, so who cares if by protecting them we prevent them from developing a shred of digital literacy? Or is it because the over 65’s can vote and kids can’t?

So in other words, “Sure we built the people-crushing machines, but we didn’t wire them up or turn them on.”

Agreed. To elaborate:

Sure, the developer is a bit of a Judas for complying in advance, but our anger should be aimed at the people with power and reach promoting these laws in the political sphere (the metaphorical Pharisees).

To those saying “it’s just a field”, please consider that the timing is a more significant statement than the addition of the field itself. Why now? If you don’t support fascism, don’t build the frameworks that support it and don’t let fascists use YOUR platforms or software to make THEIR point, make them fork it and let them fail. I don’t think many members of the senate or house would be capable of adding this themselves. I’d be surprised if they could code hello world in TI-83 BASIC. If they ask you to do it, stub your toe and call in sick. Make it really shitty. Leave in a bunch of bugs that crash the program then blame the age attestation feature to turn users against it. Use copywrited code that they’ll have to remove later due to license incompatibilities. Report your boss to HR for every indiscretion that you might have normally overlooked. Or do nothing; that’s still better than complying in advance.

We have to break the narrative that this is inevitable. There’s enough of us, with concentrated enough knowledge and influence (aka, you folks are a bunch if nerds and I love it!), that if we collectively stop, the whole train stops or derails.

I hear you 100%. This sort of shit comes back with a different name each year. I am SOOOO sick of voting down abortion bans every election cycle.

26 US states, including mine, have initiative or referendum processes allowing citizens to place an issue on the ballot. In some states, that’s how the anti-abortion laws are ending up on the ballot, but we an use their own tools against them. In many states, these initiatives failed so we know we have a minimum of 51% support if it’s a law, and at least 33% support if it’s an amendment (depending on that state and their rules). Polling shows, an even larger percentage, most Americans, do not support these laws. The numbers are on our side.

https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum

If we can collect enough signatures, the voters can put an end to this. If we add it to the state constitution, where the process allows this, we can completely prevent laws doing this from being considered because the only thing that can overrule a constitutional amendment is another constitutional amendment.

I’m gauging interest to do this in Colorado to foil age attestation laws, but we could potentially end the back and forth bullshit in multiple states.

I’m sure the trees appreciate the AI sicofancy. /s

Protip, you can use your hostsfile or your router to block google so you don’t get tempted. If you may have to bypass, you can use some blocking extensions to allow an override after a nag screen chastising yourself for being weak willed. I rarely reach for the goog nowadays because I have a whole workflow I go through before giving in.

I wonder how far one of these would fly if it wandered onto a road and got hammered by a semi doing 55mph.

I saw the location on one of those “war dashboards” a day or two ago. Can’t have been that secret.

Thanks for the correction, I’ve clarified my previous comment.

They would focus on monetizing that pill and wringing every last dollar out of it.

When I see all the people running off this cliff, and the trump loving gen Z guys, I have to wonder if I’m going to have 5 simultaneous girlfriends before a single girl smiles at them. You gotta have self-respect before others will respect you.