I don’t think there is an easy answer to a question like that, as it involves a lot of individual circumstances. You did land a licence, which suggests you are not cognitively impaired to the point that driving is out of the question? Give yourself some credit. It sounds like you are on the anxiety spectrum though, as am I. Perhaps you were in the midst of a panic attack at the time of the accident?

I think in some ways it’s a noble calling to find alternatives to driving? But do it for the right reasons. If it’s stage 1 on the path to becoming an agoraphobiac, fuck that. You’re only 19. Don’t build a cage around yourself now that you’ll only realize is there when you get your standard issue midlife crisis at 40.

My son doesn’t drive, and he seems to be doing ok. He strategized to get an apartment near enough to work and amenities that he can walk most of the time, and there is also an LRT station nearby. He rideshares for anything else.

I don’t know what will happen if he ever starts a family? That could introduce some challenges, but one day at a time I guess. For my part as an empty nester at this point, I have discovered an ebike is an awesome alternative to driving the 10k to work. It saves so much money over any other option, is better for the environment, and I’ve even managed to shed a bit of weight. Still got the old dad bod though…

But I think these are some of the right reasons to look at driving alternatives. Anxiety just sucks, and you’ll probably still have it on an ebike or public transit. Take care of that first and then assess your options, I think?

I know someone who’s going in for a colonoscopy. Maybe they can get the two-for-one package with a reading tossed in?

I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?

When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.

Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!

But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.

I’m almost afraid to ask what Golden Dome is? If it’s SDI 2.0, we need to stay away in droves. I think there’s some merit in sinking a bit of R&D into dealing with emerging threats like drones, and maybe upgrading the ancient DEW line radars? But if this is another Star Wars missile shield over the entire continent proposal, that was a costly boondoggle in the 80s and I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t be one again today.

Oh man really? That’s hilarious! I’m glad Dad didn’t shell out for a big spread in there then. It was just his name and that’s it.

This reminds me a bit of that shady outfit that was promising to have a star named after you for a price. I was taking astronomy at the time and some friends asked me about it. I said NO! Don’t even think about it. While there are way more stars in the Milky Way alone than there are people who have ever lived, astronomers are most certainly not in the business of naming them all. You can get a visiting comet named after you if you spot it first though.

I was at a used bookstore and there was this volume called the Who’s Who Almanac or something to that effect. I was shocked to find my dad’s name in there! He was an academic in a rather narrow discipline. I wouldn’t say he was a prolific publisher or had any major discoveries under his name, but he spoke numerous languages and was well-travelled. To be fair, the book was essentially a giant list of names and didn’t include bios or anything, so the bar might have been pretty low? But still…

I’m not familiar with how Netflix’s ad tier works and am almost afraid to ask, but could someone ELI5?

If a company wanted to push an ad on Netflix, wouldn’t it be up to them to decide whether to use AI make the thing? Or is this sort of the equivalent of a small business sending a script to the local radio station to have the DJ read it (i.e. rather than producing their own ad), except they add some AI-generated visuals?

Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?

In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.

This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.

For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.

Yeah seriously don’t tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it’s going to go badly…

I saw one of these on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix AZ, but never heard one played. It’s so huge you can’t reach those frets at the top there, so the inventor had to come up with a keyed mechanism you see the guy working in the photo.

I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

I’ve been playing around with the free-threaded build of 3.13 and it seems pretty stable with the standard library at least. Most of what I’ve read suggests the only problems have been with 3rd party libraries that make unsafe assumptions about the GIL being around. But I’ve tried it out with my own production code and it’s been rock solid and performant (at least by Python standards).

I see what you’re getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you’ve got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it’s possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don’t function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it’s possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

But you have to consider that averaged out, you’re looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that’s a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it’s not up as much.

About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.

But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.

I suppose if some sort of critical mass is reached, it could push the world from x86-64 to arm? Every modern OS supports it at this point and emulators have come a long way for older software that needs them.

They had that protest in every state did they not? But when I couldn’t find much on it in the Canadian media, I went searching CNN and other American sites and found very little also, which was surprising to me. Here on lemmy, there were all sorts photos being posted from various cities, and it looked like a pretty big deal?

We somehow have more than 2 parties in Canada even with FPTP. And yeah, it sucks. The left’s vote, in particular, gets carved up into tiny pieces and the conservatives take advantage of that all the time. We desperately need voting reform and it occasionally gets dangled in front of us, only to be shot down. Kind of like high speed rail, which is being dangled again of late.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.

Is it not a net benefit to China in that the US drawing inwards expands their global influence? And they must be laughing at what carnage Trump is inflicting on the North American auto sector at a time when China is surging ahead with EVs.