Everything old is new again: The Light Railways Act of 1896 also propsed rail lines built to less then mainline standards (often narrow gauge) to get transport links to otherwise unconnected locations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Railways_Act_1896 comment edited because I fat finger editing the submit button
My favorite part of the app is the spectrogram - I'm not sure exactly why but seeing the songs has made learning which bird goes with which song so much easier.
Translated from corporate: we're going to a proprietary system that you'll need to have serviced only by us at insane markups in order to gain recurring revenue.
In a similar vein I recommend Empire of the Sum by Keith Houston, an excellent history of calculators that also spends a lot of time on how we humans calculated before we had them
It's a cycle. The internet started with usenet and specific interest newsgroups and niche forums a la phpbb. Then the wide open of social media. Now back to specific again. A generation from now it will shift again.
Solving the wrong problem. The big LLM builders need to switch to opt-in (paid licensing deals) instead of opt-out (lawsuits). Exclusive deals if possible for the moat building.
A distinction without a difference. Corporations and authorities owned but the state are state agencies, the confusion on this point is a feature by their investor, Robert Moses, to give himself maximum power and minimum oversight.
As to state control over the city- it's in Title IX of the NYS Constitution
1)The MTA is a state agency under the governor and not the mayor
2) The state has had special powers over the budget of the city since the state bailed out the city financially during the 70s
This library is my python productivity secret weapon. So many things I've needed to impliment in the past is now just chaining functions in itertools, functions, and this