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conditional_soup

@ conditional_soup @lemm.ee

Posts
5
Comments
1673
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • So like public transportation with extra steps?

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  • Well, it's more like the model was unsustainable. The trolley system was originally built by neighborhood builders as a neighborhood amenity to attract buyers. When the neighborhood was all sold up, the builder would hand the system over to the city, who would then fund the maintenance of the system via ? which was fine and dandy for a while because rail infra doesn't need half the maintenance asphalt does, but once you had enough of these lines aging out and piling up maintenance issues all at once and the city having done almost no planning to fund said maintenance, the cities would reliably just say "fuck it, let people drive" rather than try pulling teeth via passing a tax or something. From here in 2025, I'm ready to send a terminator back in time at them over it, but I can see how they arrived there in the context of their time.

  • Voters want Dems to stand up to Trump, not self-flagellate

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  • Good on you. Do you need any help crafting a platform or figuring out where to start?

  • Honda commits to going out of business by pulling back on EVs as sales rise

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  • Tbh, all the Japanese makers tend to be really shy about electric and big on hydrogen for some reason that I've never quite got a handle on.

  • Honda commits to going out of business by pulling back on EVs as sales rise

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  • As long as I've been casually aware of cars, which is about 20 years, Honda has always hated electric cars and had a hard on for hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells.

  • Windows 10 emergency updates fix BitLocker recovery issues

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  • Oh hey, cool, only two years later in my case!

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • A lot of times you can get involved by just emailing public comments to municipal authorities ahead of council meetings

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • Hey, bro, it's always cool when you find someone willing to have an actual discussion, thanks for being open to it! In case that playlist is too time consuming, check out Strong Towns. They're an advocacy group focused on local-first evidence-based policy changes to make our cities stop sucking. Those policies almost always include fixing our busted ass zoning system and improving public transit and walk ability/bikeability among other things. I'm part of Strong Towns up here in Merced, and we're pushing the city, kicking and screaming, into being a better place to live for everyone. They're free to join and offer a lot of really great resources and support, and I'm almost certain that there must be a local group in LA.

  • Should California’s climate budget pay for high speed rail and firefighters? Newsom’s new plan triggers fiery debate

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  • Yes.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • Okay, do you want the lecture, or the tl;Dr?

    Tl;Dr: bulldoze every single family home and put up commie blocks with commercial spaces on the bottom floor.

    Lecture edition: it doesn't have to be that extreme, and we can do it without bulldozing homes with pretty simple and cheap zoning reforms. Bonus: we can also stop our cities from being constantly bankrupt, fix traffic, protect the environment, and make our cities stop sucking. Here's the lecture, in case you're interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • Not the right things. It's like if Gavin went and confiscated everyone's dogs to sacrifice them to Zorak to fix the homelessness issue. It's not going to work, it's never going to work, and then when people complain, you say "well, at least he's trying something." The fact of the matter is that California has an extremely deep deficit of affordable housing. The cheapest rent in Merced should NOT be $800 for a room in a single family house, that's zonko bananas, but it is. We're never going to fix the homelessness crisis without addressing the affordability crisis, and the hell of it is that affordability is actually fairly easy and cheap to address from the government's side, we just don't because it hurts the NIMBY's feelings.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • Merced checking in, we made homeless camps functionally illegal while having HALF of the required beds to house everyone.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • We know how to fix homelessness. It's not bulldozers; you fucking house them. Newsome has made some good strides in terms of encouraging more housing in California, but we'd be much closer to actually addressing homelessness if:

    1. He hit the bullshit zoning laws that restrict housing in this state with as big of a hammer as he hits homeless people with, and
    2. We stopped trickling money to the homeless via an infinitely recursing filter of non-profits and either directly administered the aid via the state government or just gave them the fucking money / housing. In LA, there's something like 10,000 non-profits focused on homelessness that have to coordinate with each other. That's some looney toons level shit right there, and it should be obvious to anyone that that would never work.

    California's been trying to fix homelessness with cops and bulldozers for forty or fifty years, and especially the last twenty. How long do we have to keep "accidentally" killing people and setting taxpayer cash on fire before we acknowledge that it doesn't fucking work and never will? You cannot beat homeless people into being housed, though I can see why Gavin would think that this solution would appeal to potential Republican voters who will ultimately not vote for him anyway.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom demands cities force homeless people to move every 72 hours

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  • He's gearing up for a presidential run, and I'm mostly sure that the DNC wants him for 2028; he's running hard to the right (not that he was ever really far left to start with, FOX made him sound way cooler than he ever was) so that they can try the "run a moderate Republican and see if we can win by peeling off a whole 6 republicans nationally and then shaming the tuned out base when we lose" strategy against Trump for a third time. There for a bit, I would have been pretty okay with voting for Gavin, but it's clear enough to me now as a CA resident that he's the clown prince of shitlibs and he's just desperately scrambling to try and pick up support from DOZENS of moderate republicans all over the country.

    About the only thing he's done lately that I agree with is dedicating $1B/yr of California's carbon cap and trade program to CAHSR for the next fifty (I think it was fifty) years, which solves a HUGE problem that's been a big source of delays for CAHSR, which is the lack of predictable funding.

  • Legal Experts warn Trump may soon be facing “prison, not politics

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  • I would be fucking SHOOK if the Dems actually did that in '26 instead of settling for wheeling Schumer out to waggle his finger at Trump. I honestly think the only reason they're attempting impeachment now is that they know it has virtually zero chance to go anywhere, so it's just politically useful theater.

  • Critical thinking

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  • So, I'd point back to my comment and say that the problem really lies with how it's being used. For example, everyone's been in a position where the professor or textbook doesn't seem to do a good job explaining a concept. Sometimes, an LLM can be helpful in rephrasing or breaking down concepts; a good example is that I've used ChatGPT to explain the very low level how of how greenhouse gasses trap heat and raise global mean temperatures to climate skeptics I know without just dumping academic studies in their lap.

  • Critical thinking

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  • Yeah, I know. I use it for work in tech. If I encounter a novel (to me) problem and I don't even know where to start with how to attack the problem, the LLM can sometimes save me hours of googling by just describing my problem to it in a chat format, describing what I want to do, and asking if there's a commonly accepted approach or library for handling it. Sure, it sometimes hallucinate a library, but that's why I go and verify and read the docs myself instead of just blindly copying and pasting.

  • Critical thinking

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  • Idk, I think we're back to "it depends on how you use it". Once upon a time, the same was said of the internet in general, because people could just go online and copy and paste shit and share answers and stuff, but the Internet can also just be a really great educational resource in general. I think that using LLMs in non load-bearing "trust but verify" type roles (study buddies, brainstorming, very high level information searching) is actually really useful. One of my favorite uses of ChatGPT is when I have a concept so loose that I don't even know the right question to Google, I can just kind of chat with the LLM and potentially refine a narrower, more google-able subject.

  • Trump Calls for Investigation Into Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen Performances

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  • I think you mean the people that will be busily scrubbing their social media and claiming they never supported him and always opposed him.

  • Despite backlash, more states are considering laws to make Big Oil pay for climate change | After Vermont and New York passed "climate Superfund" legislation, 11 states have introduced similar bills

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  • "but muh states rights" Republicans riding to the rescue of Big Oil in 3, 2 ...