The fact is that it depends and it is a bit confusing for people not familiar. But it isn’t hard to get used to.

+8Q, Paris isn’t specific enough. There are multiple +8Q inside Paris. It can also be a bit risky to make short codes like this especially with larger cities as different maps may put the city in different spots.

What does work is +8Q Eiffel Tower which is useful for something like “Meet me here by the Eiffel Tower” or “I’m right here” when you are texting someone you are meeting and you know you are close but can’t see each other.

So you end up with a few common options:

• +8Q Eiffel Tower We are pretty close together but need to get the exact spot.
• V75V+8Q Paris, France For exact spots around a known area.
• 8FW4V75V+8Q For fully qualified with no reference needed.

And a few less useful options:

• 8FW4V7+ This large part of a city.
• 8FW4+ This part of the country.
• 8F+ This area of the world.

If I was designing the system I don’t think I would have done this “trailing zeros assumed” approach. Because IMHO for day-to-day use V75V+ Would be more useful as a shortcut for ????V75V+ rather than the actual V75V????+ showing a rough location on a human scale (in this case the Eiffel Tower park is pretty clearly targeted) rather than an area larger than a city. But that is really the only complaint I have.

The problem is that only your heaviest users are going to pay to remove the ads, so it doesn’t make sense to price the subscription at any sort of average user. You need to slide the price point way up the distribution just to break even.

While Plus Codes are less memorable they are very easy to share verbally. Especially since you only need city + a few characters to be unambiguous. They are very useful any time you need to share a specific location (GPS-style)

This is Parkinson’s Law.

If you generalize it a bit it is “consumption expands to fit available resources”.

It also supports iOS.

Yeah, downtown there are tons of gas-station brands that are just convenience stores. Surely many gas stations will offer electric charging but since most people will be charging at home the total number of gas stations will surely drop. Some will turn into convenience stores and some will just shut down.

Nah, 90% chance that they do something stupider.

Yeah, I get it. It is definitely dry and it is shampoo 😆

You are thinking of something else. Bar shampoo is intended to be used with water much like bar soap. Dry shampoo is just sprayed or rubbed into hair without any water.

While Amazon is awful it isn’t just them. It is a systematic issue with our economic system. Our society constantly makes efforts to keep the poor poor so that they are forced to work for low pay resulting in a cycle of abuse. Basically every public company will end up in the same situation and we see that with every large company. If a large public company isn’t shit the CEO will be fired by the shareholders and replaced with one who makes the company shit.

So yes, avoid Amazon, but also talk to your government representatives. The cycle will always continue until the incentives are changed. To properly exit this shit system we need to change our society and government.

I hear what you are saying. But our society is pretty fucked up if you “deserve” something bad because you bought a product without imaging how the manufacturer can make it worse in the future.

The owners should be able to return the product if something like this happens, no matter how long ago they bought it.

Yeah, it is very important to consider how dependant you are on third parties. At the very least the more dependence the more power they have over you. But also how screwed you are if they just go under.

• If you use SaaS they can interrupt your use at any time and you can only react (for example demanding a reversal or lawsuits).
• If you host closed source software they can’t interrupt service on an existing contract but can legally require you to stop using it if they don’t renew the contract. (And if the company goes under you can likely get away with using the software as long as it doesn’t need code fixes.)
• If the software is open source you can continue using the software indefinitely including making code fixes. (Maintenance may be expensive as it is now your problem but that can be costed and an exit plan made if required.)

Yeah, I finally pulled the trigger and moved to my own domain from matrix.org. Man, it is just so much faster. Which is sad, because the performance is pretty bad. (Element Web seems to do some per-room request as part of the initial loading screen which is obviously not scalable) but getting off of matrix.org is a huge performance improvement.

That being said there is nothing really wrong with matrix.org. The problem is really public rooms. People will join and spam. It is true of any protocol (have you heard about email?) but Matrix definitely needs to (and they are slowly working on) make it more expensive for spammers.

Only rail. Toronto has an excellent bus network that is not pictured here.

There is not even enough money for proper maintenance let alone new construction! Of course new construction looks good politically so it will get separate budgets while the existing infrastructure slowly crumbles. Look at the “reduced speed zones” that have lasted for years because the rails can’t properly be maintained.

But the 1 line did get longer. So total capacity is probably higher overall. That being said the 1 line is already insufficient for the capacity needed downtown so I’m not sure making it longer helps that much. Maybe in a decade when the Ontario Line opens it will get the long needed relief.

It’s a disaster until you compare it to most other North American cities. Like what is better? NYC and Montreal? I’m sure there are a few other cities that I can’t think of.

But its true that it has been neglected for decades. Thankfully that has changed a bit recently with 2 new lines being in construction. However the maintenance budget is continually insufficient to keep everything in good repair. Only new projects make your government look good I guess. (But we need both new projects and maintenance)

I live in Toronto and was in the Chengdu metro a month ago. I didn’t do a close inspection but it was fine. Honestly probably better than Toronto. The trains had AC and the terminals that I went to were not crumbling.

I think this meme is pretty reasonable. Toronto had a great start with subways, and still has huge ridership. They also have an excellent bus network. But the funding is very tight and the city has long prioritized inefficient personal vehicles. But it is a good point that you are comparing cities that an order of magnitude apart in population. Toronto also has 2 train lines (one light rail that should be opening within a year, and one subway that is probably 10 years away from opening) which are great to see, finally showing some investment in public transit. But the rate is nowhere near what the political will in China allows and also has a huge focus on new projects rather than keeping maintenance of existing infrastructure.

In many ways this is a wakeup call. If we wanted this level of infrastructure we could have it. But we need to actually commit rather than continuously slashing budgets so that we can let the rich pay less taxes and continue to subsidize car ownership.

But holy shit a marvel of marketing. Better be a case study in business school. They had little to no actual implementation for years and years but are still the go-to name for autonomous driving and selling subscriptions to something that doesn’t exist. Absolutely wild.

This is one of those things that must have been an absolute shit thing to discover the first time. Sure now we are ready and can prepare. But having to diagnose and improvise a solution would not be pleasant.