Avalon Dairy in BC uses glass bottles, and grocery stores which sell them take them (in exchange for your $1 deposit) and send the bottles straight back to Avalon. They get cleaned and reused directly. If you're at the store, you can look closely at all the bottles and find the dates they were first used. Alas, I've kind of gone off getting them now that we're using 2L bottles of milk every week - the bigger bottles are extra bulky and my nearest grocery store doesn't sell Avalon.

I'm still a big fan, though. It's a good system, it genuinely causes the bottles to be reused (instead of just not made out of plastic, or "recycled"), and it's so simple. We could easily have this for everything if we regulated (or at least incentivized) specific containers for groceries, at least for things packaged domestically. No more needlessly complicated special jars for different brands of maple syrup. If every company used the same containers, when they reach the recycling depot (hopefully intact, although that's another problem) we could actually do something sensible with the things.

This project is frustrating :( I would happily use this train if it magically existed today, but to me it feels like it’s eating up all of the oxygen. The trains we have are fine. I wish they were faster. But the core problem is the existing rail network is neglected, antiquated garbage and there aren’t enough passenger trains because there’s only room for freight. It would be a lot of work to improve those tracks and add more trains, but something tells me it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and more effective over time than a one-off megaproject that will never scale and whose timeline is competing with plate techtonics themselves.

The increasingly fuzzy text from being jpeged too many times is exquisite.

Yep. It's like this is specifically targeting people who could finally fucking afford to buy homes in their thirties and jumped on it before it was too late. (I know it isn't actively malicious, but the effects down the line - and let's just throw in https://lemmy.ca/post/1338829 while we're at it - are going to be horrendous).

Honestly people don't even need to get rid of their lawns most of the time. Just don't mow it so short, or so often. Don't obsess over it. Let it grow. Let its roots grow. Allow some native perennials to fill the space in between, pluck the ones you don't like, and see what survives. Be patient. It won't be in a constant state of shock and it'll hold water much better. Chances are it will be greener - even in a drought (isn't that the type of situation where we all benefit from green space that is actually alive?) - and might not need to be manually watered at all.

For me, a big one is integration with email / calendar / contacts services that aren't Google. I don't know where Google dropped the ball here - Android was originally amazing for this kind of thing - but at some point they started bolting a lot of features specifically on top of Google accounts, and out of the box Android doesn't even understand how to sync with CalDAV / CardDAV. So if I want my Nextcloud stuff to work at all I need to go and install a third party app. The third party app works great (I happily used DAVx5 for many years), but it's ridiculous when iOS has all that integration officially supported and available straight out of the box. And it even does clever things, like suggesting contact details it learns from my (Fastmail) email. Android has that stuff, but it is completely on the cloud, and it only works if you give everything to Google.

We know that the platforms don’t do linking as in <a href=...>Click here</a>. They all embed titles, summaries, pictures and sometimes whole pages.

There isn't a trivial way to get those without media companies going out of their way to provide the information. If I go over to that article on nationalpost.com, I see multitudes of OpenGraph tags, such as <meta content="Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram" property="og:title"/><meta content="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pablo-Rodriguez-1.jpg" property="og:image"/>. OpenGraph, to be clear, is a protocol created by Facebook to standardize how web pages appear on their platform. If National Post wants links to their content to look like your example, that is entirely in their hands. Heck, it's less work.

(Of course, they won't do that, because that would be stupid. They'd rather make an embarrassing attempt to extort Facebook for free money because they have realized advertising is doomed and they don't know what to do about it).

I love the person in the Vancouver Sun comments whinging about how this is going to "triple the population of a neighbourhood overnight," (what ever will we do? build infrastructure?!), while the story literally says "this development will not happen overnight." This city is unsalvageable. I have nothing but sympathy for the developers.

People love to bring up accessibility whenever cars vs. [any other form of transit] come up, because it's a convincing argument on the same level as "somebody please think of the children." Because of course the only way grannie can get to Third Beach is by car, straight from her doorstep to the bottom of the stairs. And the only way that can ever be possible is if we build a four lane road to handle them all, and add another acre of parking to fit all those extra cars that appeared for some reason. (See also: Granville Island).

I'm being facetious, but it is a hilariously popular argument. There are very good reasons to have a functioning road there, but while we're talking about accessibility, cramming bikes and pedestrians together on that section of the seawall is not it, and I'd argue it is a more serious accessibility issue than the road being congested. It was nice having that separation.

And alas, those other trails through the park are lovely, but they aren't very comfortable or efficient on a road bike.

That's why runtimes are the way they are: for most simple desktop applications, they shouldn't really need much on top of what is already included in the GNOME, KDE, or Freedesktop runtime they depend on. (If you're curious, flatpak run org.gnome.Platform and poke around). Those runtimes get regular updates within each branch for important bug fixes. Alas, many applications add at least one or two external libraries they need to build / distribute themselves, and some applications add a lot of them. But it isn't like every application bundles its own libssl or something.

Yeah, permission popups are absolutely a thing. The system for that is called Portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html. The idea is an application asks for the tightest sandbox it needs to run, and then uses the Portal API to request capabilities at runtime, such as access to specific files or permission to start automatically. The catch is you can't just make legacy applications magically use an API like that: it requires work on both ends. But it's certainly happening, bit by bit :)

It's nice to be here! I've been meaning to check this place out for a while, and suddenly there's much more activity, so now seems like a good time :)

Is there a Patreon page or something where we can send donations for lemmy.ca in particular? I'd love to be sure you have what you need to keep this all running.