Notices by Dan Lyke (danlyke@researchbuzz.masto.host), page 2

@b0rk hey, just a note to tell you I appreciate these cool trips down memory lane. It's fun to have all of these reminders about what I used to find so compelling about computing.

@b0rk I thought I saw this addressed earlier, and my head is fuzzy from allergies or a cold, so apologies if this reply is redundant, but something like 10 bits means that to, say, find the 13th bit you actually have to divide by 10. Dividing by 8 you can do with an AND (for the remainder) and an SHR for the divide.

And in hardware, those operations map to transistors and circuit complexity.

1/n

@b0rk Place where this got super expensive: The Apple ][ used 7 bit words in its hi-res framebuffer (even one color, odd another, high bit chose palette for those pixels). The hoops we jumped through to try to divide by 7, or build sprite animations around 7 or 14 pixel cycles, were legendary. Pretty much everybody did it as a lookup table, and that's 280 bytes.

2/fin

@chrisdemarco uh. In the Bay Area we relegate the poor to suburbs far outside the job centers, and build extra freeway lanes rather than closer in housing.

The history of humanity has been economic growth in the urban cores. The only variation from that came with three extreme subsided of automobiles and suburbs in the later half of the 20th C., And we can't afford that any more.

@chrisdemarco no, my alternative is in that we stop exploiting people to maintain automobile subsidies.

And there's precious little evidence that suburbs and sprawl make for happier communities.

But thanks for playing.

@LovesTha @Cassandra and the quality of the street life and neighborhood. If it's narrow sidewalks and 3 lanes of traffic each way that's different from very walkable and loiterable and landscaped.

@Cassandra I think that there are a whole bunch of models for cities that are quite livable. And given the climate situation, and the general impact of personal automobiles on our health and environment even if they were all electric, we've gotta figure out how to do it anyway.

@Cassandra yeah. A few years ago I got hired to do a bunch of research on transportation technology, and that opened my eyes to it all being about land use patterns, and I accidentally co-founded a local advocacy and education organization (https://www.urbanchat.org). And that has led to a lot of discussions with a lot of really smart people about what could be, if we unshackle ourselves and let ourselves dream.

@Cassandra thanks, though part of the challenge is that there's a lot of really good really eloquent writing on the topic, getting people to seek it in out and be open to the message is... Harder. Working on it.

@Cassandra there's always up. Which makes public transit and walkability even more useful.

@Cassandra in the particular cases I'm thinking of, the rich lobby for more highway lanes so that their service workers can drive in from further and further away, and fight local housing, so that their service workers can't live locally, and have to own a car.

@Ulrich_the_Elder I've been trying to assume sincerity. Which will undoubtedly get me in trouble, especially since I do go sarcastic at times...

@Ulrich_the_Elder nope, I was referring to the arguments about why we should widen 101 or save highway 37, where the argument is that the poor people won't be able to drive to their service jobs in Marin County from their homes in Solano or Lake Counties.

@katow why do you think you have to remake the same mistakes rather than learning from a century of failure and destruction?

@katow looking at a century of US history and saying "I want my society dominated by cars" is like looking at the history of WW1 and saying "I wish I had more mustard gas in my neighborhood".

@kierkegaank Not in my area. There isn't enough density in the regions where their jobs are to run public transit. It's a deliberate policy decision to make it more difficult for lower income people to live in rich counties.

And I'd argue that most of the US is like this.

@kierkegaank Yeah. I like the attitude that a developed nation is one in which all social classes use public transit. Here, we'll build extra freeway miles long before we allow mixed density or social class housing.

@Dave42W baby steps... Also, I can do things locally about traffic and housing development patterns, changing our entire society's fundamental understanding of economics is a little more challenging.

@Dave42W Agreed. And changing the discourse is changing things.

@Dave42W Grin. I ran screaming from organized religion years ago, and these days only get as close as Unitarian Universalist adjacent.

I understand the positive roles that a good church and minister could play in a community, but in practice those institutions scare me.