Almost 25% of Americans are rural as well… bikes and public transportation are never going to work for them. In fact, cars don’t always work for rural folks - a lot of them benefit from (if not outright need) trucks.
A century ago, it was somewhat normal for any American town over 10,000 people to have at least one streetcar. Most towns also had an interurban connection to the next (larger) town, which would then have more streetcars, long-distance train connections, etc.
This is despite urbanization being lower then than it is now[1]. Some of that is because Americans became wealthier and demanded private alternatives to mass transit, but a lot of it is because we chose, as policy, to deprioritize effective mass transit.
I always get confused by people saying public transportation makes no sense for rural people. I think it makes more sense, provided you use the right kind of public transportation for the right kind of rural community.
A large, spread-out community? Perhaps not so much.
But a small town where 80% of the people commute to surrounding cities? That'd be a great case for 1 or more commuter train, depending on direction and demand.
It’s second nature very quickly. Our train into Oxford leaves at ten past the hour. You find yourself thinking “oh, I’ll aim for the ten past eleven” an hour or two beforehand and organise your morning accordingly. It’s absolutely no hardship.
Truck are popular because of culture, not a necessity. Unless you're working a farm or something like regularly hauling dirt, than they are less practical than a sedan even.
Merry Christmas friends! I have a C64 Ultimate under the tree this year so looking to have a bit of retro fun that would make the HN community proud (after assembling all the kids stuff, of course).
Yoshi’s Island still holds up, and I think it remains a contender for one of the best platformers of all time. Recently replayed with the little ones and they were completely captivated.
As I age, it gets harder to enjoy competitive games. I just can’t keep up with people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years.
I see this sentiment and rationalization a lot but I don't understand it.
Age aside, presently, are you saying you cannot meet a threshold you would label competitive? Competitive games are almost always played on a spectrum? I would argue your placement in the spectrum should curate the ground for competition if the player base is large enough (and ladder system coherent).
Now with my framing understood, how does age fit in? I can buy that as you age you have less time to put into a game and potentially weaker reflexes (I'm not going to pretend to know the science here), but this should simply inform your placement on the ladder?
I don't think it has anything to do with "people who play 6 hours a day and are in their peak twitch-reflex years" unless you mean your enjoyment is derived from overcoming this archetype.
Competitiveness implies desire to win. There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game.
Most games use ranked match-making to resolve this. If you're in Bronze, compete trying to get into Silver, etc.. My experience is that you have to be extremely bad to get stuck at the bottom of Bronze in most modern games.
Yeah, you'll lose a few matches as the ranking system figures out where to place you, but the cost of competition is unfortunately the mortifying ordeal of learning that you are not in fact the best in the world.
I slowly climbed up the ranks of the "Go" ladder over the course of playing 1-2 games a week for a couple of years. "Play a lot" doesn't require "play a lot TODAY". There's a ton of games that have stable, long-term communities where you can reasonably expect that game to be around in 5-10 years.
"There’s no fun if you constantly lose, and you’ll always lose against a kid who spends half of their living day making sure they’re better than you in the game" is true, but hardly reality for the reasons I provided.
While I appreciate you leaving the value of competitiveness in the air... on the other hand, by defining it so purely, you've essentially resigned yourself from participating.
I'm curious what games have molded this perspective.
Any fast FPS shooter (CS, competitive TF2, COD and others), any RTS (LoL, Dota 2) to start with, if you're a bit older - MMORPG is essentially grind for 10 hours or pay someone else to boost you.
Quite the variety, most of which Ive also experienced.
But your original claim simply doesnt apply to most of these (MMORPGs are exception). What I suspect is that the barrier for reaching "flow" or analogous competitive states has gotten too high for _you_ for whatever reason.
In face of this you've constructed an absurd reality to justify your feelings where its the children with infinite time mucking it up.
The truth is, many adults still tap into the competitive spirit in spite of the barriers youve folded to, which I do agree exist, but always have.
I bought one of these to play with when it was announced, but with all the drama I’ve been hesitant to invest any time with it. Anyone make anything interesting?
It's kind of hard to use. I considered putting it to use for a project, but, no official camera sensor boards, not even a Pi camera adapter yet, and the official ISP tuning guides are NDA'd, because, Qualcomm. Would have rolled my own sensor board otherwise.
Very silly. They make a board that screams "for robotics", market it "for AI", and then neglect the cameras.
It would be worthwhile still if this had LTE on board, but it doesn't.
If you live in a region where they operate their own data centers, you will be running on Apple data centers. If not, you're running on a mix of Google Cloud and AWS (IIRC). They used to use Azure as well, but I think that's no longer the case.
In any case, your data is encrypted (by Apple) before being uploaded to Google or AWS, and only Apple has that key. Whatever E2EE encryption you use will be applied on top of that.
Last I checked they were phasing out their own DCs in favor of cloud-provided services. Though it's been a while since I have heard anything about it, so maybe those plans got canceled. It could have also been phasing out those DCs for only the specific services and not all services. My details on the whole thing are fuzzy at best.
As far as I know, everything iCloud and Apple Intelligence runs off of their own data centers if you happen to live "near" one, but you could still be using AWS and/or Google as well.
I live near the Danish Apple data center, and pretty much all my iCloud traffic goes there, with a small fraction (<10%) going to Stockholm, which has both AWS and Google data centers, so I assume they're using both for geographical redundancy (erasure coding)
It gets a bit more fuzzy once you start moving into Movies/Music/TV/Billing/whatever as well as their backend services for the store and monitoring.
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