The new large cycling strips that appeared in the last 5-6 years are so good. At commute time there are frequently jammed with /cyclists/, but let's face it it's miles better than being stuck in a car. I shudder to think about the alternative where each cyclist was instead alone in a small car, this wouldn't even fit on the roads.
I would love to be on what amounts to a group ride to and from work safely. That has to do wonders for all kinds of things both physical and mental. If it were safe I would do it year round.
As a pedestrian I would hope that those cyclists remember when they’re pedestrians too. Both can kill you easily. But cars don’t sneak up on you silent from behind when you’re on a sidewalk.
Have you looked at any actual data about the rate at which drivers and cyclists kill people in your area? Can you even find news about the last time a cyclist killed a pedestrian in your city?
Because I keep an eye on the official Police stats in Toronto and it is eye-opening. Statistically, drivers kill people, and cyclists don't. It is not even remotely close.
Just a single anecdote, but one death made the papers here last year because it was an e-bike that hit and elderly gentleman. The e-bike had been modded and the media was suggesting the cyclist faced jail time as a result. (if I remember correctly)
I don’t care about your stats. The fact is: cars move in their dedicated space. Most of them obey most of the traffic rules. Bicycles and scooters zoom past me on the sidewalk and it doesn’t make me feel safe. Neither having to jump over them on a sidewalk. I’m young, I can, but my mother cannot and it’s a problem for her. So take your stats and read them alone. Thanks, I take a car. I’m from the generation who doesn’t have their noses glued to mobile phone 24/7.
while i don't agree with your general sentiment you're right that bicycles should have their own dedicated cycle lanes. too often drivers get their dedicated lanes while pedestrians and cyclists are forced to "share space and just take care of each other".
What a ridiculous statement. Motorized vehicles are involved in the vast majority of road casualties. You are much, much more likely to die from a car accident than a bike accident.
as a former pedestrian only and bike rider for the last 5 years, we really do have to admit that bike riders can be real assholes. whether or not the level of injury is the same, it definitely feels an unwarranted physical threat to have a biker shoot past you from behind or run you down in the crosswalk.
Do we have to admit that in this sub-thread? Your sentiment is better placed where we are not currently deriding the absurd take that "both can kill you easily". There is no recovery to be had here.
Of course there is. The world isn’t black and white. I said “could”, there are many shades of grey in between. Don’t be such an absolutist, like your truth is the truest one.
sorry, I just really don't like this glib response that while I might be unnecessarily aggressive and threaten you, its not really not a problem since the likelihood that I'll actually _kill_ you is much lower than if I were the same idiot driving a car.
Ugh... You know perfectly well from context that by "bikes" I meant "bicycles". I am making the effort of speaking in your language, please don't use these linguistic gotchas against me.
I don't know any difference between bikes and bicycles. I am also not a native English speaker. This wasn't supposed to be a linguistic gotcha, but a semantic one.
You are not making a good faith argument when you refute this person by saying this “doesn’t fit your narrative” two comments removed from you telling another person that you have no interest in their statistics because of how you feel.
You're using biased language there, which to be fair is common when people discuss RTCs.
A collision between a pedestrian and a cyclist going at around 15mph is more likely to lead to the cyclist getting more hurt and the blame is slightly more likely (something like 60%/40%) to be attributed to the pedestrian.
Whilst a lot of people are fearful of cyclists and pedestrians sharing space (often due to cyclists being quiet and passing very close), the statistics show that the actual danger comes from car drivers, even just looking at incidents on the pavement.
The thing is that cyclists have "skin in the game" and so have a disincentive to collide with anything. There are certainly idiots on bikes, but it's far better to get as many idiots as possible out of cars and onto bikes (or ideally walking) for the purpose of harm minimisation. Every idiot on a bike could be an idiot that drives.
Most collisions between cyclists and pedestrians end up with the cyclist getting more hurt. Also, the blame for collisions is slightly more attributed to pedestrians (e.g. walking across a cycle lane without looking).
As I recall, pedestrians are more likely to be killed by a driver whilst on the pavement, so whilst collisions may be more frequent with cyclists, they are extremely unlikely to lead to a KSI.
Two of my neighbors were hit and killed by a car while walking on the sidewalk. The car was going in excess of 150km/h, hit the median, and swerved back, out of control into the sidewalk.
You haven't been in a bicycle-jam until you've been before an open bridge just before the university colleges start in the Netherlands. Hundreds of cyclists trying to squeeze through a tiny bottleneck. Still costs less time than by going in a car.
I do wonder how many cyclists in Paris are really replacing cars versus replacing metro usage. Obviously, it's still good for people to cycle as well since the metro can be insanely crowded at times, but living in Paris, my impression is that the people who cycle are the kinds who would have been unlikely to own a car in any case.
That's a really good point, I hope at the very least it enables a "car -> public transport -> bikes" flow. So even if these people were taking the metro, all that extra metro space can accomodate car-owners who wish to switch.
It depends though. At least in London a lot of cycleways were made by removing bus lanes and replacing them with high quality segregated cycle lanes.
This has led to a big increase in %age terms of cyclists in London, but a fairly significant decline in bus passengers.
I think roughly 300m/yr cycle journeys were added, but bus has lost 500m pax/yr (mainly because of increased congestion making them less and less attractive). Note this isn't all down to bus lane removal, but it's a significant part of it.
Well IDK, as a pedestrian in Paris I hate cyclists way more than I hate cars. Cycling in the Netherlands is wonderful; here, it might well have been a mistake.
> At commute time there are frequently jammed with /cyclists/, but let's face it it's miles better than being stuck in a car.
Cycling is wonderful, except when it rains, when it's cold, when it's hot, when it's windy, or when you want to carry stuff. So it's not a practical solution 80% of the year.
Unless you have a place to shower and change at work or wherever you go, biking is utterly impractical. That's also assuming you have a safe place where to leave your bike, and that your commute is like 10 miles or less.
Not true. There's no need to shower after a short trip. Or even a 10km trip, if you don't exert yourself too much. But fortunately many offices do have showers. Also, bike locks exist.
There are millions of people who find cycling incredibly practical, so claiming it's impractical for some easily debunked reasons only shows the limitations of your experience. But you can fix that. Give it a try.
God I hate this argument so much - it's just such an obviously incorrect statement which is always hard to win against because then the other side will always say "well what if you live in Novosibirsk and it's -60C outside, WHAT THEN CYCLISTS" - well nothing, if you live there then yeah I guess it doesn't work. But if you live in London, Paris, Warsaw, Barcelona, Talin or Stockholm it just doesn't hold water , and these are places that get very hot, very cold, get plenty of rain, snow and wind. It's like that old thing about beetles being too heavy to fly but also they can't read so they don't care - somehow cyclists in these places just get on their bikes and get to work and carry stuff and stay dry or cold or warm and it's fine, despite what the internet thinks.
I’m with you. As someone who cycles every day, just put the right clothes on when the weather calls for it, and if you need to buy a sofa, then rent an hourly car for ten bucks.
I've been to Copenhagen in the dead of winter with snow on the ground and my mind was blown by how many bikes there were on the streets. It really is an adaptable activity.
I believe they prioritise clearing snow/ice from the cycle lanes.
Personally, I enjoy cycling on snow as it's often not that slippery and due to the cold, I'll usually have a fair amount of clothing to act as padding for if I do come off. Black ice is worse as the rest of the road may be fine, so you go fast until suddenly you're sliding down the road.
On a nice day it's fantastic to be out, but Paris can be cold and rainy. They really need to have a plan for those days, too.
Paris Metro is pretty nice, and reaches most of the car free area. But I'm not sure if it can handle all of the cyclists if they're all trying to avoid a déluge.
I live in the Netherlands where the weather is arguably tougher than in Paris (rain, cold and wind for large portion of the year) yet everyone bikes year in year out.
And not just young active people, it's a habit found across all age groups, parents bike their children to school (or with them if old enough, etc.)
All that to say I wouldn't worry too much about the feasibility issue, it's really more of a mindset to adopt, and it's happening more and more in France.
Paris has one thing that Amsterdam does not that makes cycling more challenging: elevation. (Ok, Amsterdam has bridges but those are for the most part really short and momentum is enough to carry you across).
I cycled to work every day in Southern Germany, which had even more elevation, it was not a huge problem, you get fit enough in now time. Older people just use e-bikes.
Bicycles have had gears for almost a century, and they allow to tackle hilly areas easily. Also, the Netherlands is notoriously windy, and a headwind is just as difficult as a hill.
No, what makes the Netherlands different is their street design prioritizing safety rather than speed at all costs. When the streets feel safe from speeding drivers, more people choose to ride a bike.
Not at all. I simply suspect that you are uninformed about why cycling is popular in the Netherlands. In the 60s the Netherlands was just as flat as it is today, but it wasn't a cycling paradise. It all changed with the campaign "Stop de Kindermoord" (literally translated as "Stop the Child Murder"), which began in 1972.
Considering I'm not Dutch, you may feel reassured there is no superiority feeling at play here.
I agree with another commenter that while flat, the Netherlands have their own hurdles (biking with a strong headwind on the banks of the IJ is not easy, even if flat), and I definitely agree that their city design is what makes this unique.
I lived in various parts of France growing up, and I can assure you there are flat cities there, yet biking in them felt very risky at best.
This “nobody cycles in bad weather” is a tired myth. Yes, there’s some truth in it but cycling numbers past the traffic counters in my city in the UK (very similar climate) dip by 10-30% in winter months, and the higher end of those is mostly leisure routes not commuting ones. The Netherlands has a lot of rain and much more cycling than most other places.
This is overblown. I visited Tokyo recently and a friend of mine was constantly riding his bike around in the middle of a cold and snowy winter. He wasn't the only one, either.
I cycle in Paris every week, and the only annoying experience climate-wise is the extreme heat you can get some days in july and august. If it's cold or wet, you can just wear appropriate clothes and be comfortable. But if it's sunny and 35°C, you are going to be drenched in sweat no matter what! Of course, being in the metro those days is even worse...
I have cycled every working day in The Netherlands and in Germany for years (in Germany it was 22km per day) and I would often cycle a bit recreationally in the weekends. It really isn't an issue at all. I just have a waterproof jacket (one of those that circulate air as well), water resistant shoes, and rain pants. On very rainy days, I would put on the rain pants and would arrive mostly dry.
It is not really an issue.
The only thing that was slightly meh was the yearly ~two weeks of thick snow in Southern Germany. It increases effort a bit, but still not a huge issue and the cycling roads got cleared pretty quickly.
I have an older ASUS laptop from 2015 which also has (more minor than this!) ACPI state management bugs. I initially bought that machine because it was a pretty high-end and was somewhat disappointed about both the build quality and the firmware/software support.
Somehow laptop makers all write complete garbage firmware.
I'm sure dell does the same terrible handling of DGPU power and badly written ISRs that pointless raise system latency. I had shoddy crashes for months that would cause my dell laptop to BSOD and burn up in my backpack because the DGPU got stuck on I a loop during some ridiculous windows modern standby wakeup.
I'm a big fan of my Deck, but I think Steam-related software projects always have a distinctive low-level stink.
I use mine on a train that has Wi-Fi with a captive portal and attempting to join it makes the whole UI unresponsive. Using the overlay with a guide in a game always resets the scroll location. These are the kind of things I can live with, but also things I don't expect ever to be fixed unless Valve come out with some wholesale replacement for some overt new strategic goal.
Lenovos in my experience are pretty flawless in both Windows and Linux -- my current laptop is a Lenovo and sleep/wake has worked flawlessly in Debian and Windows 11. My work laptop is a HP and sleep/wake also works fine in Windows. I've had the occassional power issues (including failures to wake from sleep) with Intel MacBooks previously for both personal and work laptops.
I have a Steam Deck and love it but it still cannot suspend and wake without the audio crackling issue - other than that it is magical though. (The pause games decky plugin is a third party solution that fixes it!)
I was pretty disappointed when my work MacBook ran into the same "Bluetooth headset connected, set as audio sink, but the OS refuses to acknowledge its existence further and routes audio through the speakers" but that I've seen on every other desktop OS. I really hoped Apple would be better, considering their hardware costs more than twice as much.
I also ran into weird Wi-Fi issues that required a reboot, and getting that thing to recognize external displays without corrupting video is some kind of dark art while my Lenovo and Steam Deck work just fine with the same USB C plug.
Apple beats some brands for sure (especially the cheap "consumer" lines with a starting price lower than Apple's headphones) but their computers are hardly flawless.
I have yet to run into issues with my Steam Deck, which is very impressive, but I'm sure I'll run into an issue at some point. No computer works flawlessly.
Macbook essentially involved Apple hardcoding 11th hour fixes selected by product code in their OS level drivers after utterly fucking up ACPI tables in ways that would make the discussed bug blush. Pretty much most of what BootCamp did on later models, and what various hackintosh "special drivers" did, was fix things like HDA tables located in completely wrong place.
Steam Deck is just... extensively tested and debugged in ways that I don't think Apple did unless they got an egg on the face in national media (remember "you're holding it wrong?")
Surface Pro 8s have a bug where the battery just gives up randomly and won't ever charge again. 2, 3,4 and 7 do not have this - one sitting on my shelf two years charged right up from 10%.
Replacing the battery costs like $200-500 because the screen likes to explode when removing it.
Lenovo docks of a specific gen will have the USB hub/billboard just crash and stop doing display port.
older Dell docks would pollute arp tables and crash switches.
Computers have always had some wild flaws, some worse than others. They are built to a price point typically and by humans under politics so the best design or parts usually don't make it -- cost and profit.
I'm wondering where the "forks" translation came from in the first place. Google Translate used to be fairly reliable for simple translations, but I've seen several examples in the last couple of years where it goes batshit crazy, including starting to loop hallucinating sentences on repeat. Is absolutely nobody checking how well it performs before deploying nowadays?
If you have a plan for automated checking the output of Google Translate against all possible character input strings, be sure to mention it to your recruiter as part of the hiring process.
More seriously: Google Translate's bread-and-butter data source is documents that were human-translated from one language to another with high reliability (such as UN publications). That turns out to work remarkably well for building a neural net that can extrapolate how one sentence should translate to the same sentence in another language. But like most neural networks, it's vulnerable to garbage-in, garbage-out: much like you can get an animal detector to hallucinate "zebra!" if you feed it a noise-pattern as input, if you feed it character sequences that aren't actually words in the input language, it'll try to extrapolate what reality should be between all the corpus it's seen and you'll get garbage on the output side.
Since the tool doesn't actually know what words mean, it has no way, at present, to know "Yes" isn't a Spanish word (and as other commenters have mentioned, it may actually be "a Spanish word" in one weird context in one weird document somewhere in the corpus of all translated documents accessible from the Internet... Or some doc somewhere contains a close-enough typo in the Spanish input document that is over-reflected in the output because no other document contradicts the typo's apparent translation).
Reminds me of Inodoro Pereira, a comic strip character in Argentina who was a peon in the countryside and rather ignorant, and he'd sometimes respond affirmatively with "yes como dijo un tal Chespier" ("Yes, as some Shaespier once said").
The comic strip character was acting all knowledgeable by quoting Shakespeare as saying "yes" when the character meant "sí", but misspelling Shakespeare's name as "Chespier", something like misspelling it "Shaespier" in English.
On the other side of the fence, both KDE and Gnome (which are the main desktops I'm using) are absolutely rocking it lately, the slow improvements are really paying dividends!
I'd been looking for something like this for a while now... but just like other e-ink phones the privacy policy is a bit chilling : they explicitly say they collect "everything" including precise location, messages, etc. I get that from a run-of-the-mill Android device, but it's very disappointing from a device supposedly focused on digital health...
Yes I don't understand why so few manufacturers wdo partnerships with projects such as lineageos or /e/os from the very start. It seems to me there is a large intersection of people who want an alternative device format AND degoogled phone.
I am very interested with this device but only if I can have a firmware without the usual google + manufacturer's crap.
> 2. Information We Collect When You Use Our Services
> Location Information: We may infer your general location information, such as your IP address. When using Minimal Phone, we collect and use precise geolocation data (e.g., GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth signals) to support the Services provided.
> Device Information: We receive information about the device and software you use to access our Services, including IP address, web browser type, operating system version, phone carrier and manufacturer, device identifiers, and similar information.
> Usage Information: To understand how you use our Services and to help us improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, such as pages or content viewed, searches conducted, activities performed, and dates and times of activities.
> Photo, Video, Audio, and Communications Information: When you use Minimal Phone to create photos, videos, audio recordings, or communications, our Services collect this content, including associated metadata.
You also opt-in to binding arbitration by default:
> THIS AGREEMENT CONTAINS A MANDATORY ARBITRATION PROVISION THAT REQUIRES THAT YOU AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE BETWEEN YOU AND MINIMAL REGARDING YOUR ACCESS TO AND USE OF THE WEBSITE, PRODUCT, AND SERVICE WILL BE RESOLVED BY BINDING, INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION. YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A LAWSUIT, CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT, OR CLASS-WIDE ARBITRATION.
> You may opt out of arbitration by sending a letter to The Minimal Company Inc. within 30 days of agreeing to these Terms.
Here are a few I haven't seen in a lot of places but come in really handy.
First, alias this on Linux to get the 'open' command to work like OSX (e.g. 'open file.pdf'). It shadows a real 'open' command, but I have never used it, so no big loss :
alias open='xdg-open'
The second one I use all the time. A process that is stuck on I/O (or other uninterruptible syscalls), or even a Python interpreter stuck in a C extension, won't always respond well to Ctrl-C. However, Ctrl-Z (suspend) and this alias (kills the last suspended process group) do work relatively well :
alias killit='kill -9 %%'
This one I use a lot for copying the output of a command to the clipboard. Just run 'command | pbcopy' and then Ctrl-V elsewhere. pbcopy is actually an OSX command, I aliased it on Linux for ease of use :
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
This one runs a program under GDB. You can run e.g. 'gdbrun =python test.py' and debug C extensions more easily:
