This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.
Source? This seems extremely unlikely to me, running a camera all the time consumes a fair bit of energy and they don't take long to turn on. Unless that's because they're always on?
Regardless, that's a pretty strong claim. I'd love to learn more if you have a link that can back you up!
A lot of companies pay and treat tech writers like shit.
If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience.
For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both.
Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release.
I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:
* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile
* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date
* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in
* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)
* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour
* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it
Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.
Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.
I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)
TL;DR it looks like the M4 Mac Mini redesign is _not_ soldered onto the logic board. So instead of paying 6x street prices of similar SSDs, you can just upgrade it yourself with an SSD of your choice!
This is absolutely huge news. I wonder if Apple will do something similar for the Studio, Pro, or -- dare I hope? -- even the Macbook Pros in the future? I can't imagine allowing this 'trapdoor' of money savings is a huge problem for profits since most businesses would never bother messing around with warranties for a spec upgrade. But this is absolutely MASSIVE for consumers. Just put in a little extra work and you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars compared to Apple's upgrade pricing, for a good enough end result.
Not to mention the fact that this must also save _Apple itself_ an insane amount of money for repairs! Instead of throwing away the entire logic board, the CPU, the soldered-on RAM, and the soldered-on SSD whenever any of those components fail, you can just replace the malfunctioning part. Who'd have thunk (other than, y'know, every single computer company from 1980-2015)?
I would also of course love to see this upgradeability return to RAM. I'm curious if anyone more knowledgable than myself might know if the SoC/Apple Silicon Unified Memory system makes that more difficult, or if we've just accepted it because Apple Says So.
And while I'm on the subject of non-upgradeable RAM: does anyone know why no SBCs, from Raspberry Pi to Orange Pearl Jam Cake to Milk, allow for upgradeable RAM? Surely it's possible in the SBC form factor?
Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be a custom storage module, not available for sale.
So Apple gets the best of both worlds. They can keep charging their high storage costs, but they themselves gets the flexibility of easily upgrading storage due to having this as a module.
The modules are proprietary to Apple because of course they are. So no, no easy upgrades unless and until someone clones the design and is able to produce them in enough quantity to be competitive on price - but even then it'll be more expensive than a commodity SSD of the same size.
Looking at the price difference between m4 and m4 pro I think they're not that worried about users "upgrading" SSDs. Also, good luck finding SSDs that match the speeds you get with Apple provided ones .. at reasonable prices. If this were a laptop I would worry about power draw as well.
As an apple hardware enjoyer: you're so high on copium.
Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party, and they're not even remotely at the top wrt maximum write/read bandwidth compared to pcie Gen 5 m.2 ssds you can buy for ~$200-300/TB.
So yeah, Apple's ssds cost at least 3x (and perform measurably worse). And I might add: gen 5 is already what, 1 1/2 yrs old now?
> Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party
I'm not sure what you're talking about here, because Apple was one of the first PC OEMs to adopt PCIe storage, and very quickly followed that up with a transition to NVMe. This was circa 2015. They just didn't use the M.2 connector, and when they introduced the T2 chip they stopped using third-party SSDs in favor of their own built-in NVMe SSD controller.
Also, I don't think PCIe gen5 SSDs are being shipped in laptops yet (at least not in any significant volume), on account of the extra speed being completely not worth the power cost. Much like the transition from gen3 to gen4, availability of SSDs that are only suitable for desktops with large heatsinks comes long before availability of reasonably-efficient SSD controllers. Eg. Samsung's PM9E1 SSD for PC OEMs only started mass production a month ago: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-starts-mass-producti...
You may be confusing when the NVMe specification was first released and when the first NVMe hardware was actually available. From what I can tell, the first NVMe SSD controller was announced in 2012 [0], the first real product using it was announced in 2013 [1], but that was all enterprise-focused and the first controller and drives suitable for use in consumer systems (rather than high-airflow servers) didn't show up until 2015 [2], which is when Apple started using it.
[0] from IDT, later sold to PMC-Sierra, then Microsemi, now Microchip's Flashtec product line
[1] Samsung XS1715 was at least the first to pass compliance testing at UNH-IOL
[2] Intel rebranded their enterprise NVMe drives as the Intel SSD 750 marketed for PC enthusiasts, but the real beginning of consumer NVMe was Samsung's SM951 when they started transitioning away from PCIe AHCI (used for compatibility with systems lacking NVMe-aware drivers and firmware).
Extremely exciting. Google Maps has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, finally passing the threshold of enshittification by instructing me to turn "at the <fast food seafood restaurant>" instead of just telling me the road name late last year. Search for points of interest has gotten awful, just as bad as Google Search, the Play Store, and the App Store with sponsored content taking over all usable space for basic searches (seriously, I do not want you to prioritise <fast food donut restaurant> when I search for "diner" or "coffee shop").
If Kagi can prioritise useful search results, trade ads for a monthly subscription, and contribute meaningful data back into OpenStreetMaps as a backend, I would subscribe in an instant. Currently DuckDuckGo is enough to meet my web search needs, but I desperately need a good alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately Osmand is just not a great interface for most of my needs, and has no Android Auto support, either.
Maps are the weakest part of Kagi right now, and it's a real sore spot for me. Searching for the name of a location often doesn't find it. Searching for addresses often finds a location in a different state (even if I specified the state). It seems to have no idea where I'm at in any way shape or form.
I've been trying to buy a cabin and looking up the addresses has basically meant just switching to Google, unfortunately. I'm really hoping the address lookup gets better, and it learns to search nearby results.
The fast food restaurant sign is usually 300 times larger than the road name sign, if there even is a road name sign. I have never been able to see any road name sign from the car.
Only time I've ever had an issue is when I manually disconnected power from a Pi 4 when I overreacted to a network outage. I was dumb and thought my Pi's DNS was screwing things up for the whole network, but it turns out that it was just Spectrum screwing things up for the entire region. Fortunately there was only one minor corrupted file, it didn't bork the SD card, and I was able to repair the setup manually.
I've never had any problem as long as I've stuck with the `sudo shutdown` command, which powers down in a controlled manner so writes don't get interrupted. But I've also never had an issue after a power outage, so I think somehow power outage shutdowns are more graceful than just yanking the power cable out.
If you're really concerned, you can always configure your Pi to use a read-only root filesystem. Combine that with a USB SSD to store your _actual_ data and you should be OK indefinitely. Or just boot from that USB SSD -- just remember to configure fstab correctly for your intended behaviour! You might be surprised to discover that fstab can delay a boot indefinitely if mounting expectations do not match reality.
I don't think London has made quite the strides in bikeability that Paris has since 2020, but when I visited Hackney last year I was astonished to see more bikes during rush hour than cars. Walking down a road to a coffee shop, I actually had to wait a few seconds to cross at the intersection between two bike highways.
Hundreds of people riding bikes to work. And as quiet as the wilderness behind my house in the rural USA. I could hear the wind in the trees, and that was it. Maybe a little drivetrain noise from a poorly maintained bike here or there.
I desperately want to live in a city that quiet. Back when I lived in NYC practically every environment was an assault on the ears.
Works well until you end up with temperatures too hot to wear pants. Or you exercise someplace with ticks and get too sweaty for pants.
Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.
Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.
The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.
I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.
Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!
The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.
Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.
If there was any validity to what you're saying, why do places with more permissive zoning and less insane permitting processes see consistently lower rent and property price growth (see: Austin, Minneapolis)?
We really need the Interborough Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express) 50 years ago.