array_key_first

Right, the reason it might be underutilized is if you're bad at designing cities for it. Which the US is, so it is.

We design cities for cars, which results in the cities spreading out further and further, which makes transit less desirable and more expensive. Other countries don't have this problem to this degree, because they don't design their cities exclusively for cars.

Also, I don't think most roads would need to exist if the amount of cars decreased. Because of the density problem noted above. Cars are sort of self-eating. The more cars you use, the more land-per-car you need as everything spreads further out to accommodate the cars.

Waymo is subsidized. They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road, land, or surrounding parking.

That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it.

There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted.

Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.

Also just like... looking at a train and noticing it can carry a ton more people than a car, has no concept of traffic, and can theoretically go as fast as possible.

This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.

The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.

For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.

I really don't understand this mentality at all. Freedom is about the ability to do more stuff, not the requirement to do more stuff. Meaning, everything you want to do with a locked down phone, you can do with an open one.

There's no, like, gun to your head saying you HAVE to side load apps. You can just... not... do that. If you think side loading is insecure. You can download 100% of your apps from the play store. In fact, that's what 95% of people do.

I mean, what's the threat model here? That you somehow forget your own belief about side loading being insecure and then accidently side load an app? Does that even seem possible?

I can kind of understand this argument for granny who doesn't know where she is. Kind of. But for you, it makes no sense. I mean really, think about what you're saying here about you as a computer user or even as a person.

The prices would go down too much, and then infrastructure would rot as production slows down. Then, prices would skyrocket, and so on.

Oil production and distribution is basically infrastructure, like energy or internet. It can't really follow free market dynamics without eating itself.

Encryption is more work than not-encryption, and most software is optimally lazy and barely functional. The main goal of the developers is to make the app almost work most of the time, and not crash too much or be so inconvenient that users delete it. Anything past that is extra, and businesses don't pay for extra.

Because the parent used their anecdote of gluten intolerance to explain why caring about the gut microbiome matters. But traditional gluten intolerances are not related to the gut microbiome.

We also don't really understand why things like a FODMAP diet work. It's not that feeding your gut bacteria is bad, it's actually pretty good. But for some people it's bad, and they get symptoms they attribute to gluten intolerance.

Legumes, onions, whole grain etc that are high FODMAP are good for you. Fiber is good for you, it lowers your risk of metabolic diseases and helps your digestion. But, for some people, it's bad for their digestion. That's weird.

So all that is to say that, while gut bacteria matters, it varies person to person and we can't definitely say what food is good for the microbiome and what isn't.

Presumably try to get those women arrested, or at least investigate them.

It's actually quite difficult to investigate an abortion, though. Abortion isn't "real", in the sense that there's no obvious difference between a natural abortion (read: miscarriage) and a purposeful one.

The thing that means abortion abortion colloquially is the purposeful-ness of it. If you knowingly terminate a pregnancy, that's an abortion. If your body terminates its own pregnancy, for a variety of reasons because the human body is very complicated, that's not an abortion.

Generally trusting people with that nuance is, I think, asking for trouble.

A fecal transplant definitely doesn't work for celiac disease, which is the only gluten intolerance you have to worry about.

Other gluten intolerance is probably not gluten, gluten is just a close enough proxy. Could be FODMAP + IBS or maybe some other sensitivity.

Rust's stdlib is fine, it's similar to C++ and C++ never had this problem.

It's just that it you give developers tools, they will absolutely abuse them to the highest extent. The problem with cargo is it's too good, so of course devs are gonna be pulling hundreds of dependencies. It's also why things like Claude Code have so much potential for shitty outcomes. Developers are lazy to the n-th degree. In fact, being a developer is predicated on being lazy. Laziness is the whole motivation behind software!

You don't need proof or measurement if it's a question of time complexity. The time complexity covers that.

And if you aren't optimizing for time complexity, then it's probably an over-optimization. Even if switch was faster, how much are we gaining here? A microsecond?

But, I've had instances where I've turned reports from minutes to milliseconds because of some shit SQL or doing something crazy in a loop. That's the optimization that matters, IMO.

Gluten intolerance is a real thing but I don't think that necessarily means that your gut flora is damaged or whatever. Plenty of people are lactose intolerant, and their gut flora is fine, they're just lactose intolerant.

I don't think you could solve gluten intolerance but just improving your gut microbiome, so they're probably not related.

People who have gluten allergies have a legitimate disease, typically celiac disease.

Being tired after eating bread or whatever is not a gluten allergy, that's just how food works. A lot of people claim to have gluten allergies but no, you would know for sure if you had a gluten allergy.

It's a measurement problem, which engineers also fall prey to, perhaps even more.

It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow.

But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time.

But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

Some people like those things but it's a matter of perspective. The American point of view of sprawling suburbs and automobiles is just one perspective on freedom. To many, it is not freedom. Having to drive a car is not freedom. Having to commute huge distances is not freedom. Having to live in isolated homes is not freedom. Etc.

There's no right or wrong answer, and I take issue with the notion that however our culture is setup now is the correct way. Clearly, it's not, because many (most?) people are unhappy.

Ambition is good, but too much ambition becomes clawing, desperation. It's pathetic mostly, but it works. Because, again, people like hearing good things. So their leaders like hearing that they want the job really really badly and would do anything for it.

I think you're misinterpreting me. I spelled it out pretty clearly, I think. By politics I don't mean being liked, I mean being manipulative. Which is a related, but different, thing.

The delusional confidence is also a form of manipulation. Basically you influence others perception of you by lying and distorting reality. And you use emotions as a weapon. People like good feeling emotions, so you do actions to make those emotions appear in people. Flattery, deception, undeserved confidence, that type of thing.

The best leaders are people who are honest, rational, level-headed, and have a community based outlook. Meaning, they put the needs of the company and their team first.

The leaders we actually get are almost the exact opposite. They're individualistic, selfish, deceitful, and emotionally manipulative.

The reason that happens is because of how we decide promotions and the culture of the company.

This isn't how most people would define individualism and collectivism, I think.

Individualism is the propensity to do whatever is best for the individual, even if it hurts the collective. Collectivism is the propensity to do what's best for the collective, even if it hurts the individual.

Wearing masks and social distancing helps the collective. But because Americans are highly individualistic, and doing so is ever so slightly less convenient than not doing so, many people decided not to wear masks or social distance.

Oftentimes what is best for the individual and what is best for the collective are one and the same. That is the only reason America works at all. COVID was not one of those times.

Riots in the streets because you have to wear a piece of cloth on your mouth and stand slightly farther away from people?

I don't know how people are so delusional to think lockdown was a lockdown. Did we... did we have the same COVID?

I went to work every day, in person, at a restaurant. I served people every day, in person, at said restaurant. I went shopping at the grocery store. I went to the park, to the mall. These were all "essential jobs", somehow.

The only thing that changed is they put those little stickers on the ground telling people where to stand. Oh, and I wore a mask.

Wearing a mask was always such a non-issue. Even if the effect was only marginal, there's essentially no cost to wearing a mask.

It's, like, slightly uncomfortable. Slightly. As the other commenter said, people complained not because there were legitimate complaints, but rather because they were big babies.

I believe you could've asked them to do anything and they would have complained. It wasn't the mask. It was the concept that they would have to do something simple for the greater good, and someone else was asking them to do it. Meaning, they were (are?) fundamentally stubborn, individualistic, and selfish people.

I don't think it's that managers or decision makers are bad, I think moreso it's that, for most companies, the criteria for promotion are absolutely busted. And, it creates a culture of self-preservation, which affects ICs, too.

What I mean is that people are selected for leadership based not off of their leadership ability, but rather their political ability and ambition. The reason we see increasingly delusionally confident people as we climb the corporate ladder is because the people promoting them are forced to make their decisions based off of small, distilled data.

So, basically, bullshitters rise to the top. It only makes sense given the constraints of the system. Metrics help, sure, but firstly those arent use too much for management promotions. And secondly, they can be gamed, and often are.

At the very tippy top you have c-suite, who are often so delusionally confident it borders on psychosis. After a certain point it just becomes lying, but the truth is that people like to hear good things. We just can't help it.

And, for self-preservation: most companies have an absolutely rotten, toxic, and even evil culture. For most companies, the majority of employees are focused on self-preservation. And nobody will say that out loud!

But when managers get into that self preservation mindset, it can get really ugly. It becomes lying, organization sabotage, fudging documents, in-fighting, etc to try to stay afloat. Especially as the organization appears to be less stable.

Policy still matters even if guns exist. After all, murder is still illegal even though murderers exist. Building a bomb is still illegal even though bombs exist.

The tricky part with the US is the already vast supply of firearms circulating. Can't do much about that.

But, I would think, stopping or reducing the sale of guns right now would still have an effect. We already somewhat regularly try to reduce the sale of guns via policy, mostly to people we think are potentially dangerous.

But, I don't know exactly how much that has helped, or will help. What I do know is there is definitely variance in gun violence. Both across nations, but also across states in the US. So, something is behind it.

I think both dense and not dense areas suffer from tragedy of the commons. The only difference is in the suburbs the effect is spread out, so you can kind of pretend it doesn't exist. Which also means that each individual person has the potential to cause more damage.

From a cost perspective, it is solved. The communists solved it a long time ago. Build more, denser housing that is therefore much cheaper per-unit.

We don't do that because of people's preferences, and more importantly their will to force their preferences on others. But, it is solved.

The common string between both of those advocacies is that they heavily favor huge corporations instead of the little guy.

Basically, DMCA and DRM makes you a criminal while protecting NBC and Disney and such. And AI steals your work and allows soulless mega corps to basically take your job.

Personally I'd argue AI is very likely to be worse for the average person, depending on their career.

Some people don't care or maybe don't realize. And then I think some people are just naive, and are assuming everyone else will be fucked, but they won't be. And then some other people are self-destructive, and they know it will make their life harder - but they advocate for it anyway, because they feel they deserve the suffering, and maybe hold some misguided belief that suffering is the fuel of victory.

If other innocent people are collateral damage, then yes. Essentially the US "let this" happens and now wants to reverse course, but they're gonna be taking down a lot of good, hard working people with them.

Also, this will negatively affect a TON of citizens, which always sucks ass even if you think immigration is evil.

We are actively seeing the current US government shift towards malevolence and fascism. These fears of government control were very rational, evidently, as the government is currently abusing every possible system it can. I mean, a lot of this stuff is really being pushed to its limits and beyond.

And, all of those "unspoken rules" and relationships, due diligence, etc are finally coming home to roost. We have put too many trust-based systems in place.

Also, the US has a long history of abusing government power. The last time we required ID for voting we did it to prevent black people from voting. So now, people are rightfully scared of voter ID. Um... whoops.

That's an extremely low bar, Windows has been shit for a long time and has basically only degraded. Some people think Windows 10 was good, it wasn't, they just haven't used Windows for long enough.

Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.

It's slightly less lines of code which is nice. I'm someone who prefers terseness so I get it.

However, it's bad. I much prefer the rare, elusive, postfix if:

   goto fail if (condition);

It can create some very readable code when used right, with short and simple conditionals.

Because some crafts are more sacred than others. Making a painting is more sacred than smearing my shit in the Barns and Nobel bathroom stall, although arguably less fun.

Who decides that? We do, collectively. Why do we have that power? Because we define art. Why do only humans have this power? Because art is an innately human thing, so we get to decide.