it seems wildly efficient to use the massive amount of dead space we cede to cars. Without cars, parking lots are just massive heat sinks that trap and hold heat. Might as well do something with them to make it a little bit better. It also has the added benefit of creating shade for people in the summer and cover during rain.
I really want America to get on board with this. Getting people to not drive is a nearly impossible task given how slow cities move to change the codes, so if we have to have parking lots, put them to use.
I really want the US to get on board with solar in general. Parking lot solar is a good thing generally, but I don't think it should be mandatory because it's an inefficient use of resources. We don't have any shortage of rural land.
Maybe a more flexible policy could be something like: for every parking spot, you must add 1 kw of solar somewhere on your property (whether that's the parking lot or building roof or whatever is up to you) or add 2 kw of solar somewhere within a 20 miles of the site or add 3kw of solar somewhere in the US.
A lot of companies might find that the last option is the cheapest, and if that's the case we should want and encourage them to do that instead.
Feels a little gameable. I’d sell solar rights to some bit of land that I was already going to profitably adding solar to. It might still result in good incentives though.
I’d love to not have a car, but I’ve lived in five us cities - one (nyc) had public transportation that was usable - the rest public transportation was massively less efficient than driving. Until that gets fixed people are driving…
massively less efficient is definitely the word, LA has some residents that swear by our trains, but do they go faster than the 1 hour 5 minute commute in traffic? Nope!
The speed of traffic will always be equal to the speed of public transit. To reduce traffic jams you speed up transit. I do not remember what this always-observed effect is named.
If you want America on board, get the people on board. Tell them why it's a good idea to stop driving their car. I'm not saying this to be snarky, but that's what it's going to take.
I'm the perfect client for an electric car (I can charge at home, and 99% of my trips are less than 100km). I want one even.
I still use my old ICE though, because the price of vehicles went through the roof those last years, which means the money I saved to replace it only gets me 60% of a car.
My point is telling or convincing people is not enough. The desired outcome must be oviously practical and cheaper.
Not sure where you live, but in the US, used EV prices utterly crashed in the past 18-24 months or so, due to new Tesla price cuts destroying the resale value of used teslas, which kinda bubbled across the whole industry. I bought a “$80,000” car with 16k miles for under $35k with 0 interest (was gonna pay cash but who can say no to that rate).
On the other hand, I fully support the idea that you just wait till your car is actually ready to replace - that’s much more economical than going EV immediately with a car payment, just to check the EV box.
Stop driving their ICE vehicle. Anti car doesn’t fly in America. People want their big spaces, privacy and most don’t want to live in cooped up apartments and spend the majority of their life within walking and public transport distance.
I wonder how much is truly preference at this point rather than societal inertia. Actual walkable cities with good public transit are incredibly rare in the US and as a result tend to be very expensive (which itself should tell you something about demand). Most Americans have no choice but to live in an area that requires a car for daily life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would choose the car dependent lifestyle even if given the choice not to, but the demand for alternatives is probably higher than you think.
I also think there's a very reasonable middle ground where people can still practically have and use a car but it's not required literally every time you leave your house. Personally I think giving up my car would be a bridge too far since I like road trips and drives out to hiking areas and things like that, but I also find it unfortunate that there are limited options of affordable places to live where I don't need a car to do everything.
I see you here - you make very good points. It just seems like economically it’s too hard to manifest more of those pleasant, walkable cities and neighborhoods into existence in a way that they aren’t just as costly to live in as the existing ones. You can’t just build Williamsburg on the next available spot of land next to the last suburb, because no one will want to live there without a car when there isn’t a subway right in the neighborhood to take them to Manhattan in 25 minutes.
So, they just aren’t making many net new walkable cities or converting previously car-dependent ones into walkable paradises. The only newly-built ones are built on insanely expensive land (because of the proximity to great transit and/or very high paying jobs), so they’re really only feasible for people with at least $250k annual incomes, which isn’t most people. I think a lot of people know all this instinctively and therefore are against even talking about it because they see it as an unsolvable problem.
Yeah I see your point. I think only NYC and Chicago are truly walkable cities that we have in the US and yes different people have different preferences. I find that a lot of people in the US do not want to live the walkable city lifestyle once they hit their mid late 30s but I’m sure they are plenty of people to do and it would be nice for them to have more options to move to in that case. I loved living in Manhattan for 10 years when I was in my 20s but now in my 30s, I would not want to go back and do that again. I really appreciate having a lot of property and the freedom that comes with having a car and being able to just go anywhere you want and not having to rely on fixed public transit routes. Usually when you say something like this people come back with you can just rent a car when you need one, but that added inconvenience of having to rent a car means you’re just not going to do it the vast majority of the time.
Really the two big reasons for not driving ice cars are temperature and sea level rise. Even then I think most of America and even Florida would regard losing Florida over the next century to be a reasonable price to pay for not having to get on a bus.
I think most people - even Floridians - know that our pretty small-population country swearing off all internal combustion transport will have zero impact on whether sea levels rise, because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize (in fact, they think it’s fair game and morally right for them to use that cheap coal for 100 years since the Western countries got to do that).
There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth and major carbon regulations, but they have been losing relevance even at the state level lately.
> because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize
Everyone is moving away from burning coal, even when they have plenty of plants in which to do so, because of the very same logic which had us burning it in the first place:
Price.
> There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth
Yes, and I dated one of their campaign managers. However, the Green Party isn't relevant.
America is not a small population country and is still per capital emitting more than China; while China is now on a downturn (admittedly from a very high absolute level of emissions)
IMO, that remains to be seen. China is still adding new coal capacity roughly equal to America's entire coal capacity, or about ~160+GW, just in 2025(74GW)/2026(90+GW expected) while retiring almost none.
Capacity is less relevant than usage. It's not like you drive a combustion car by putting your foot to the floor on the accelerator and only modulate your speed with the clutch and breaks.
The problem is when the environment is already optimized for car use, when everything is massively spread out. Hard to get people to stop using cars when infra for walking is an afterthought.
"rules for thee but not for me". People who said _anything_ they deemed disrespected after Kirk died was basically crucified but when it's against someone they deem an enemy they dont care at all.
Im definitely not the target here, but if someone I knew wanted a store and wanted this I would have a few things I would be critical of.
1. no tests, no static analysis.
2. avoiding composer. Why write your own autoloader when Composer can do it, and keep things up to date pretty easily.
3. associative arrays being passed around. There is no type safety on those arrays, and you aren't using a package like PHPStan or Psalm to at least try and enforce _something_ at run time.
4. I find it odd you are anti-composer (one of the best things to happen to PHP) yet tell people to configure a web server with various extensions, permissions, etc.
If I was going to install this, I'd want composer support and tests.
the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now because of this whole thing.
Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market initially it's likely network effect in action.
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
As far as I can tell, Discord doesn't delete history so you can join an older discord and scroll back. 99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days). Plus you can connect Discord to your Steam/Playstation/Xbox account, which gamers like.
Relatedly, the "gamer-oriented" business model of sell cosmetics and subscriptions to every user individually rather than the Slack big enterprise-oriented business model of a central admin paying an entire per-user cost out of pocket was a factor in many of my communities moving from Slack or skipping Slack. It's a lot easier for a small community admin to start for free and find enough "Boosts" from community membership for the nice-to-have server features that cost a bit extra than to foot the entire bill themselves in the hopes that enough users will eventually reimburse them. (It also allows for a hybrid where a community admin centrally pays for some amount of boosts, but doesn't have to pay for all of them.)
Discord does delete messaging history. Sometimes messages that aren't very old at all. The conversations just outright disappear and there's no way to get them back.
People, do not use discord for conversations with family/friends that you want to have any chance of holding onto, even just a year later.
Basically dumping - they made an objectively superior product that was completely free to users, funded by investor money without any plans for immediate profitability and long term sustainability.
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
Their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a better term, that no one was asking for and at least monthly Nitro beg screen is pretty indicative that they are having issues making revue and are desperately throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
Yeah I was concerned back when it first started rolling out. Years later the gaming community embraced like it was the second coming of Christ. Nobody looks at the people and organization supporting these platforms. If I remember correctly, wasnt funded by major conglomerates in the entertainment industry?
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
> Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers. Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of which were that great. Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That’s really it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90% of their target audience already had the client running in the background.
That is also why I think it "won" over Slack. Discord solved audio comms for gamers, period. It got so good, that SMB and startups started to migrate for stuff like easy pair-programming, open meetings etc.
Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2) full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people have to create an account for each forum. Most people are using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of rich text chat wins out.
But that's the effect. Either Discord gets to lock the information away (even if it currently chooses to leave the gate unlocked), or it's available to anyone who does a web search.
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
I haven't heard that word used as a metaphor or hyperbole since I stopped playing on call of duty in 2014...
Weird that the hacker news community wants to stick to it. Yall need to grow up. Because I know you would not use it as a metaphor or hyperbole at work.
Isn't it a good thing ? It makes clearly marks companies like Persona dangerous and toxic enough to hopefully makes an example that prevents others from working with them.
I think they have been steadily losing their years of goodwill and trust over time. Their client is becoming worse and worse every release, introduced ads, etc... Typical enshittification, it could be worse, but Discord already went from being cool to being tolerable. The age verification thing is just another step on the way down.
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