In case you don’t want to give NYT clicks. https://archive.is/a4hDO

Sydney Charlet had no job, rent due on an Upper West Side apartment, and an idea.

She had just moved to New York from Los Angeles and brought her Tesla Model 3.

She learned quickly that a parking spot on the street was not guaranteed and that the city’s alternate-side street cleaning schedule, which usually sets aside a 90-minute window for the city to sweep each side of a street on a rotating schedule, does not make parking easy.

Drivers must either move their cars, sit in them and watch for the street sweeper, or face a $65 ticket.

Ms. Charlet, 29, turned her idea into a side gig and posted it on TikTok.

“I’ll sit in your car for the fraction of the price of a parking ticket,” Ms. Charlet said in a video, as she waved a business card calling herself “The Car Sitter.”

The video was reposted and in comments and replies, New Yorkers took the occasion to share their own parking tales and misadventures.

Even if you’re not hiring someone like Ms. Charlet, anyone who has tried to park on New York’s streets knows that even when a space isn’t pay-to-park, it still comes at a price.

In the early 2000s, Cynthia Russo, then a stay-at-home mother, would pile into her Toyota Tercel with her 1-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son to deal with alternate-side parking on the Upper East Side.

In those days, Ms. Russo’s schedule was built around avoiding a ticket she said she could not afford.

To make the time bearable, one of her two older neighbors would keep her company and they would pass the time baring their souls.

“I used to tell my husband it was like ‘car confessions,’” Ms. Russo said. “My kids were in the car the whole time — they were oblivious.”

The neighbors opened up to her, and it came naturally to Ms. Russo to listen, she said, but she never told them why: She had previously been a therapist.

Bash Halow, 60, a business adviser who lives in Chelsea, hit on an idea in a moment of desperation. If he sees an open spot on the opposite side of the street, he offers a person on the street $20 to hold it for him while he circles around.

One day, several years ago, that person was an older lady with a push cart.

“She unhesitatingly agreed,” Mr. Halow said. “Six minutes later, as I rounded the corner to grab the spot, I see this guy trying to park in the spot and the lady standing in the middle, not budging.”

The woman used an expletive to tell the man to get lost.

“I’m saving this spot for my friend,” Mr. Halow recalled her saying. “That’s what really touched me.”

He paid her at least $60 on the spot.

For others, great parking spots come easier but cost more than money.

Will Simon, 55, who lives in Park Slope, some years ago came upon what he called “a perfectly good parking spot.” The problem was that it was occupied by chunks of concrete from a hole that Con Ed had dug in the street.

He took a few minutes to move the concrete and scored the spot. But Mr. Simon said that he, in general, has never seen parking as a chore. He said that people who complain about parking bring the suffering upon themselves.

“You should have to earn your cars,” Mr. Simon said, adding that the city owes him and other drivers nothing. “I’m able to store a 5,000-pound hunk of metal on public property.”

For those who can, it may be easier to just ditch a car.

Stuart Campbell’s wife racked up parking tickets when she was a flight attendant living in Greenwich Village, he recalled.

“Eventually her car was impounded — an old Hyundai, which was not worth much,” Mr. Campbell said. “When she went to retrieve it, she discovered the fines and fees were higher than the value of the car, so she never picked it up.”

At 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday morning in August, Brian McBride, a sanitation worker, parked his street sweeper in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. Alternate-side parking had just begun but he waited before moving his mechanical broom down the choked streets.

Anthony Saporito, a superintendent at the Sanitation Department, said drivers get a five-minute grace period after alternate-side parking rules begin before department workers start sweeping — and ticketing.

Mr. Saporito followed the sweeper in a Sanitation Department vehicle with a clipboard of blank tickets perched on the dashboard. He pointed out the two, then four, then dozens and dozens of vehicles that had failed to move.

“If that car wasn’t there, he could have just had a straight run,” Mr. Saporito said of Mr. McBride, who, though deftly handling the sweeper, could clean only so much of the curb around a single parked car. “But no, he had to cut out. He probably missed about 10 feet on the back of the car, and he probably missed 10 feet on the front of the car.”

Every parked vehicle, except one with a permit for people with disabilities, got a ticket. The road, littered with leaves even in the dead of summer, kept its dusty appearance compared with the gleaming, wet asphalt where the sweeper had just passed with its whirring brushes.

Mr. Saporito wrote tickets, printing foot-long slips from a machine attached to his hip before stuffing them under windshield wipers with a neon orange envelope. The Sanitation Department issued 515,582 alternate-side parking summonses in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended on June 30.

“A lot of people will say, ‘You know what? I’ll roll the dice and I’ll get a $65 fine once every couple of weeks rather than having to pay to put it in a lot,’” Mr. Saporito said.

In neighborhoods filled with longtime residents, people remain “rule followers,” Mr. Saporito said. It’s the newcomers who push the boundaries.

“Now, I can’t tell you how many times when I was a supervisor here, I’d pass this car and it would say: ‘If you need me to move it, here’s my phone number. Call me. I’ll come move it,’” Mr. Saporito recalled.

He pointed to the gold badge on his chest and said: “Does this say ‘Mom’? You want me to do your laundry, too?”

Epic

I’m living it

Exactly!

They’d probably claim liability as a reason not to hand out food. Solution: draft a form waiver for all recipients to sign.

I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.

In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.

I’m running Nobara 42 (Fedora-based, created by Glorious Eggroll, the Dev who makes GE-Proton, responsible for the best gaming experiences on Linux presently) right now to get my 9070 working with Steam.

Having the 6.13 kernel wasn’t enough, as my former distro (MX) wasn’t planning on adopting Mesa 25.x for several months or longer. Every week or so, Nobara grabs newer Mesa builds and kernel updates and things work better. At first, HGL was black screen and audio only, but that only lasted a week.

Try it out and see what you think. What have you got to lose?

Mainer here. Its great, except that the governor’s race is specifically exempted from RCV. May have something to do with GOP former governor LePage, but can’t recall before my morning meds…

Have been using TrueNAS for 13+ years since the FreeNAS 9.x days. Can attest to its bulletproof-ness in my case.

Would second asking in the iX forums. I’ve managed to get replication help directly from iX staff before when using the forum. You shouldn’t have this issue, and you will find answers.

I’ve moved my disks to a completely new machine with fresh install and then import my config, reboot and everything is as it was. I’ve also done the same without my config and imported the pool with no problems, just need to recreate shares, and any jails (a feature which I no longer use) would need to be reconfigured to be 100% functional.

For sure, but I worry that Amazon would see that as just cause to terminate my account, and I have some video and music purchases I’d lose access to. In the end, maybe that’s the cost of safety in this marketplace, but it sure is getting hard to shop these days…

I have a screenshot of the original estimated delivery date of this Friday. I’ll reach out Monday if (when) the GPUs don’t arrive.

Still, it stings, because when I made the purchase, the GPU I want was still available from other sellers for close to MSRP, but now they are all over by more than 25%, and I’m not paying more than they’re worth (which, arguably, I was already doing).

I agree that this needs to be out there. I’m not fully tapped into the overclockers and other enthusiast forums/communities, but I do follow tech news closely. I’ve read about a lot of scams, but this one had slipped by, if it was ever reported on where my eyeballs are reading.

I just never considered that I had to worry about sellers on Amazon. In hindsight, it’s awfully naive of me to think they are this big and have a handle on fraud. Like put forth in Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well, and that includes managing fraud on a marketplace.

Oh, man! What a horrible surprise that would be to receive a chip from 2011 when you’re expecting the BEST GAMING CPU EVERRRRR.

I won’t lie. I was looking at that CPU on Amazon a few days ago and noticed that the “sold by Amazon” one was being undercut by a third party (which COULD be totally legit) by $50. I think I am going to pause my tech purchases for a little bit.

Thanks for the link!

I can’t say with a straight face that I didn’t see this coming.

By blocking all mention of Pixelfed on their platforms.

Eeexactly.

How could that happen when every post is locked at creation?

…apparently my roughly 2 year old and still fairly powerful desktop does not meet their requirements due to that stupid chip it needs to have. I do not wish to buy a new computer and I do not wish to be a Windows slave again.

https://github.com/builtbybel/Flyby11 will allow you to install on any older hardware by using the Server install method that skips the hardware check for TPM. That said, a 2 year-old PC could actually have TPM. My 5 year-old gaming rig does, and so does my 2015 with an i5 6xxx. Maybe your PC TPM defaults to a disabled state, or perhaps it really is not present.

Audacity(which I love)…

Tenacity is the preferred, privacy respecting fork of Audacity. Platform agnostic.

But here’s the thing, I WANT to be a Linux user…

And you can, but it sounds like you should probably keep using dual boot and learn Linux as you go. You can likely play your games on Linux (check protondb.com for compatibility and tips), but your list of required apps may be beyond your current ability to use on Linux.

However, with some time and experimentation, I suspect you’ll find the tools available for Linux might be superior to what you use in Windows. Like your mp3 normalization options are likely more varied and robust in Linux.

I do not wish to be a Windows slave again.

The only way to achieve this is to keep working with Linux to gain experience. In the meantime, there are tools and methods to limit the spying and put control of your Windows PC back in your hands.

You can block unwanted version upgrades with an app like Steve Gibson’s incontrol.

Install your chosen app-level firewall to block telemetry.

Utilize one of the popular privacy scripts (disclaimer: can easily break functionality of your PC, but easy to roll back, just make sure to save the corresponding reversion script to negate tie changes) like privacy.sexy to disable unwanted features of Windows.

All that said, it sounds like your first Linux experience had been somewhat typical, with some bumps and learning involved. I applaud you for the effort 👏. Keep learning and keep trying to move more of your workflow to Linux. The past five years has brought a lot more from being Windows only into Linux then ever before.

Ugh

He’s gonna take a sharpie to the constitution