ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Why would you want to drive behind a slow cyclist?

    Why would you want to drive behind a slow cyclist?

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    Whenever I’m engaged in a conversation and the other party is saying something that doesn’t resonate with me, something I don’t get or something that just seems strange, I make an honest effort to put myself in the other person’s shoes. I do research, thought experiments, bounce scenarios off friends, hypothesize with LLMs, etc.

    I genuinely try to understand the “in universe” reason for a given belief or idea. I honestly and strongly believe that most people are intelligent and most people don’t just believe random nonsense. There’s always some sort of internal logic behind a given belief.

    The question I’ve been trying to answer this week is “why would you want to drive behind a slow cyclist?”

    In the universe of an anti-cyclist, the purpose of city roads is to move private vehicles from point A to point B in as little time as possible. Street lights should be synchronized. Pedestrians should cross streets underground. If a road is congested, we should add another lane to (temporarily) shave 22 seconds off the commute from the the suburbs, even if it costs $1,000,000,000.

    How does crawling behind a cyclist going 20 kph accomplish this goal?

    The anti-cycling universe if filled with some strange math and misconceptions about funding of roads and public infrastructure. These errors often lead to an argument that cycling infrastructure is too expensive; or perhaps too under utilized to justify the expense.

    Or, to put it another way, “I will suffer the inconvenience of crawling behind a cyclist because fixing it costs too much,” just like, “I resign myself to being stuck in traffic congestion because we can’t afford to pay for one more lane that will fix it.” There are only so many one billion dollar bills to go around.

    The big ticket road expansion projects are admittedly rare and the city is constantly spending smaller amounts of money to rebuild sections of road.

    So if the anti-cyclists want to travel in private cars as quickly and efficiently as possible, they should want to spend those precious tax dollars on the most impactful change towards the goal of getting cars from point A to B quickly? They want bike infrastructure!

    I am completely unable to find an in-universe, internally consistent reason to oppose bike infrastructure.

    Why would you want to injure someone?

    The universe of anti-cyclists is populated individuals who believe that cyclists are taking their lives in their own hands, that road deaths and injuries are an unavoidable force of nature. “It may be sad, but shit happens.”

    The same could be said about pedestrians who walk down Portage Avenue to get to their bus stop.

    Oh, wait! Nobody says that because it’s not a thing that happens. Sidewalks exist!

    Humans are small, fragile and slow. As soon as heavy vehicles started to share space with people on foot, we invented the sidewalk. We figured this out over 4,000 years ago!

    When an something has existed so long, it seems obvious. There isn’t a vocal anti-walking lobby on X complaining about wasting money on sidewalks are “always empty.” Or casting doubt on the need for sidewalks because “nobody walks in the winter.”

    You wouldn’t expect your loved one to have to walk in traffic to get around town, why would you expect them to be less safe if they chose to get there by bike?

    As a driver, I never ever want to hurt (let alone kill) anyone. I want the road I’m driving on to be as safe for everyone as possible. Driving near a cyclist in traffic is not only slow, it’s incredibly stressful as I try to avoid navigate around them.

    Reasonable people — by definition — aren’t interested in killing each other, if you don’t want to hurt someone, you want bike lanes.

    Bike lanes are for everyone

    As a cycling community, I think we can do a better job of explaining this. It’s natural to be pissed off at the driver that nearly hit you, or to want to r/fuckcars when you see constant reports of cyclists dying in collisions with giant vehicles.

    I’m not saying don’t fuck cars, there’s plenty of reasons to fuck cars.

    But the enemy is infrastructure that puts drivers in conflict with cyclists. Negligent infrastructure that’s designed to prioritize cars at the expensive of pedestrians and cyclists.

    When a cyclist its hit by a car, it’s not an accident. It’s infrastructure that makes this an inevitable outcome.

    That drivers who’s fuming mad that you’re slowing him down on his way home? He’s actually on the same side. If you were in a bike lane, he’d have to find something else to be mad about.

    “You catch more flies with honey…” or however the saying goes.

  • Random Factoids I Learned Last Year

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    In September of last year, I started recording random information I had never known about. My criteria for recording this fact was basically “will I want to be reminded about this in the future.”

    I didn’t set out with a plan for these facts beyond recording them in a notes document.

    But heck, if I find them interesting, maybe you will too.

    1. The Rule of 72.

      This is a shorthand method for figuring out roughly how long it will take an investment to double in value. It’s quite simple, you simply divide 72 by the percentage return expected from your investment. So a GIC with a 5% rate of return will double in 14.4 years.

      It turns out math is super cool.

    2. Karpman drama triangle.

      It’s like the fire triangle, except for drama.

    3. ʻOumuamua

      It is perhaps the first interstellar object observed by humans. There even seems to be some evidence that it exhibited non-gravitational acceleration.

    4. Turnspit Dog.

      An extinct dog breed that was employed specifically to turn meat spits and other cooking things.

    5. Winnipeg’s 1960s freeway plan.

      This would have destroyed some much of what makes Winnipeg great, I’m glad it didn’t happen.

    6. The first amendment to the Canadian constitution created Manitoba!
    7. Time value of money.

      One dollar today is worth more than one dollar tomorrow.

    8. Swedish drill music exists.
    9. The ancient Celtic carnyx.

      Terrifying.

    10. The UK did not have decimal currency until 1971!

      Get a load of the cash register in that article, it seems completely unusable.

    11. AWS Snowmobile.

      If you have petabytes of data to store Amazon Web Services will literally drive a literal shipping container to you in order to transfer the data. If my math correct, maxing this out will cost you a cool $209M/month, that math can’t be right, can it?

  • A Case for Webrings in a Post-Social Internet

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    How’s that for a headline for the first post of a new year!

    Webrings hold a special place in my memories of the late-90s early internet. For those who never encountered one, or weren’t around back then, webrings were an early tool for content discovery. In the pre-Google and social media era, finding content — let alone good content — was a significant challenge. DNS provider Hover wrote an insightful blog post about webrings a few years ago.

    I recommend giving it a read before continuing here.

    I found it interesting that webrings were such an integral part of the early internet that the company was actually acquired Geocities; and then when Yahoo! later acquired Geocities they found it worthwhile enough to attempt to monetize it with ads. Go figure.

    I ran a webring. Any tech-savvy teenager with an internet connection could set up a webring and recruit members. This early exposure to a “democratized” internet piqued my interest in blogging, podcasting, and WordPress later on.

    Find a niche in the post-social, post-Google Internet

    Restate my assumptions:

    1. As everyone has noticed by now, Google is starting to suck.

      I don’t want to say that finding quality things on the internet is as bad as it was before Google even exists; but I can’t recall the last time I’ve found something delightful via a Google search.

      Most of my delightful finds come from reddit, newsletters, or TBH the kottke.org RSS.
    2. Social networks are decentralizing and fragmenting.

      This is a good thing (but that’s a different blog post) but it’s making discovery more difficult. A various points in the past, Twitter’s algorithmic feed and Facebooks newsfeed have both surfaced genuinely good relevant-to-my-interests content.

      With all my contacts fanning out across different mastodons, if not different apps entirely, it’s becoming more difficult to casually stumble upon good stuff.

    Which makes me feel a lot like we’ve swung back around to the content recommendation zero-state that existed on the internet of the 90s.

    Everything 90s is back, why not bring back webrings?!

    A retro solution for modern times?

    Why not consider reviving webrings? But what would a modern webring look like?

    I’m not really envisioning a literal revival of webrings. The original webring UI, as detailed in the Hover post, would feel out-of-place in today’s internet (in a bad way). The UX, the concept of browsing sites in a linear order, curated by someone else, might hold some novelty but lacks practicality.

    What intrigues me is the essence of webrings: a centralized yet distributed system of recommendations.

    If I knew what that looked like and how it worked I would be building it right now.