High density isn’t the only alternative to suburbia. Walkable villages — the way people lived pretty much everywhere in Europe outside of Paris, London, Berlin etc. — are not suburbs but they’re also not high density apartment blocks.

The difference between a village and suburbia is specialization. Suburbia is specialized to housing only whereas a village is a self-contained community with both housing, small businesses, an industry or two, and surrounding wilderness as well as agricultural land.

Villages are not sprawling, they’re fairly small, and they’re connected into a network of other villages as well as larger towns and cities. In the past, this connection was via a road network (usually unpaved dirt roads for walking or horses, but some cobblestone roads too). Today this connection could be via train and even high speed train.

The real problem though is that we can’t just start over. We’re stuck with the infrastructure and planning choices we already made.

The US of the 1930s is just as foreign of a country as China or Japan today, if not more so. You overestimate the ability of car manufacturers to generate political will. This is a societal-level breakdown in trust in political institutions that goes way beyond transit issues. There are millions of Americans who want nothing more than to burn their government to the ground and rebuild it in their own image. Watch some YouTube videos of city council meetings over almost any issue and you’ll see people who look like they need to be restrained before they pull each other’s hair out.

Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.

China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.

Friends help friends by putting them into the recovery position.

Sounds very cozy! I suppose you could also simply carry the carafe to your coffee mug and pour it there, as though you were working at a diner with you as your favourite customer!

Move your coffee machine to your desk so you can make and pour coffee without having to move the mug!

If they’re allowed to force updates then they should be legally required to separate feature updates from security patches. Only security patches should be forced.

Feature updates that change or remove features users depend on should never be forced.

Would be even more badass if that leather jacket were made from his uncle’s skin!

I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.

Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.

While we’re at it, we might as well outfit everyone’s quarters with a replicator and install transporters in the buildings so we don’t need to bother with food prep or vehicles at all!

Tracks are cool but kinda difficult to cover the suburbs with them!

Yes! The hard part is staying on earth!

A see a few people here saying “they” when we should be using “we.” Just by using “they” you’re exhibiting the mindset of “they, not me” and “us vs them.” Racism is just one facet of it.

The point is that someone posted this guy’s project to the AUR with a badly written PKGBUILD and it was failing to build. This led to him getting tons of support requests which he could not help with since he doesn’t control that AUR build.

He also couldn’t get it removed from AUR without giving the admins his personal information. Completely understandable given the history of console companies going after emulator developers. The guy has been doxxed and seems close to being run right out of the open source community by a bunch of zealots.

For troubleshooting issues with his code. Not with broken packages created by others that he has no power to fix.

He changed the license in the first place because someone took unpublished code from him and contributed it to another project. He had permission from his other contributors when he did that but people still went on GPL crusades against him.

Now it’s the issue of people re-packaging his releases for other package managers such as AUR (which is against the license) and doing so incorrectly which leads to support requests from the users of broken packages.

There’s a whole community of people who have turned hostile to this guy over his decisions but it comes off as a sense of entitlement on their part. This is after all an emulation community which is full of people who simply use these tools to run pirated old games. They don’t understand the hard work that goes into a sophisticated emulator. They just want more, better, faster! Gimme gimme gimme is all they know!

But then you can’t offer support to users of your upstream code.

This is an issue of open source etiquette and there’s no technical solution that can solve it. There have been numerous passionate developers who have been run right out of open source by well-meaning users who simply don’t know the protocol around contacting a developer for support.

He got mad because people kept bugging him to fix problems created by other people which he has no control over. His “tantrums” are his way of re-asserting control over his life.

Open source dev burnout from support requests is a real and widespread phenomenon. When a software developer releases the fruits of their hard work they are doing the wider community a service. When large numbers of people begin to contact the developer for support the effect can be overwhelming even though every individual request may be legitimate and non-malicious.

In the case of packaging errors created by a third party not in contact with (let alone under the control of) the developer, these support requests for dealing with unsolvable and irrelevant (in the developer’s eyes) problems can be absolutely maddening.

I am quite sure the developer would have had no issues with people doing what they did as long as they accepted the responsibility to fix their own issues without contacting him. The fact that they did not do so (and therefore caused him grief) is negligent even if it isn’t malicious.

One of the most entitled takes I’ve ever read.

The guy built software and opened sourced it. People started packaging it for their favourite distribution repositories and then users started coming to him for support on problems he didn’t create!

It’s like if you were a farmer selling eggs and some kids bought your eggs and started throwing them at people’s houses and then instead of the cops arresting the kids they come arrest you for selling eggs. It’s bullshit!

Pretty much every single website uses HTTPS these days which means all traffic is encrypted anyway. Instead of a VPN you could use an encrypted proxy that connects over HTTPS. I doubt the UK is just going to completely cut itself off from the rest of the world’s internet (because all it takes is one path out).