dylanmccall

joined 1 year ago
[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This project is frustrating :( I would happily use this train if it magically existed today, but to me it feels like it’s eating up all of the oxygen. The trains we have are fine. I wish they were faster. But the core problem is the existing rail network is neglected, antiquated garbage and there aren’t enough passenger trains because there’s only room for freight. It would be a lot of work to improve those tracks and add more trains, but something tells me it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and more effective over time than a one-off megaproject that will never scale and whose timeline is competing with plate techtonics themselves.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep. It's like this is specifically targeting people who could finally fucking afford to buy homes in their thirties and jumped on it before it was too late. (I know it isn't actively malicious, but the effects down the line - and let's just throw in https://lemmy.ca/post/1338829 while we're at it - are going to be horrendous).

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly people don't even need to get rid of their lawns most of the time. Just don't mow it so short, or so often. Don't obsess over it. Let it grow. Let its roots grow. Allow some native perennials to fill the space in between, pluck the ones you don't like, and see what survives. Be patient. It won't be in a constant state of shock and it'll hold water much better. Chances are it will be greener - even in a drought (isn't that the type of situation where we all benefit from green space that is actually alive?) - and might not need to be manually watered at all.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We know that the platforms don’t do linking as in <a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages.

There isn't a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as <meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it's less work.

(Of course, they won't do that, because that would be stupid. They'd rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don't know what to do about it).

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I love the person in the Vancouver Sun comments whinging about how this is going to "triple the population of a neighbourhood overnight," (what ever will we do? build infrastructure?!), while the story literally says "this development will not happen overnight." This city is unsalvageable. I have nothing but sympathy for the developers.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

People love to bring up accessibility whenever cars vs. [any other form of transit] come up, because it's a convincing argument on the same level as "somebody please think of the children." Because of course the only way grannie can get to Third Beach is by car, straight from her doorstep to the bottom of the stairs. And the only way that can ever be possible is if we build a four lane road to handle them all, and add another acre of parking to fit all those extra cars that appeared for some reason. (See also: Granville Island).

I'm being facetious, but it is a hilariously popular argument. There are very good reasons to have a functioning road there, but while we're talking about accessibility, cramming bikes and pedestrians together on that section of the seawall is not it, and I'd argue it is a more serious accessibility issue than the road being congested. It was nice having that separation.

And alas, those other trails through the park are lovely, but they aren't very comfortable or efficient on a road bike.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I also had a problem where Mlem was failing to log in, but for me it’s that I was logging in with my email address. Once I switched to using my username, it worked fine.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's why runtimes are the way they are: for most simple desktop applications, they shouldn't really need much on top of what is already included in the GNOME, KDE, or Freedesktop runtime they depend on. (If you're curious, flatpak run org.gnome.Platform and poke around). Those runtimes get regular updates within each branch for important bug fixes. Alas, many applications add at least one or two external libraries they need to build / distribute themselves, and some applications add a lot of them. But it isn't like every application bundles its own libssl or something.

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, permission popups are absolutely a thing. The system for that is called Portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html. The idea is an application asks for the tightest sandbox it needs to run, and then uses the Portal API to request capabilities at runtime, such as access to specific files or permission to start automatically. The catch is you can't just make legacy applications magically use an API like that: it requires work on both ends. But it's certainly happening, bit by bit :)

[–] dylanmccall@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

It's nice to be here! I've been meaning to check this place out for a while, and suddenly there's much more activity, so now seems like a good time :)

Is there a Patreon page or something where we can send donations for lemmy.ca in particular? I'd love to be sure you have what you need to keep this all running.