My take: I certainly didn't have authority over my mom, but I definitely felt like I had a lot of responsibility. Households are typically run by (at least) two people, and for good reason. I stepped up where I could--helping manage the dog, helping make food, staying out of trouble when she couldn't watch me, in general trying to keep stress off of my mom--not because I felt like I was in a position of authority, but because there wasn't another adult to help shoulder the load, so some of the load fell to me.
You can do this with sparkle! Our app that uses sparkle runs silent automatic background updates. No prompt for install needed! We could pop a changelog after update, to let the user know there has been one, but most often we don't.
Part of the issue is that most browsers other than Firefox at this point use the Chromium engine [0]. Using a browser that uses a different engine from Firefox and Chromiums would be most ideal, since that would put even more value on the use of the real standards, and not what the market leader implements.
Do you have either a non-paywall version of that article or an alternative article with a similar view? I'm curious what it says, but I can't read it with the paywall in place.
Trails will help highway traffic between major cities, but it doesn't address how spread out suburbs are from people's jobs and support infra (grocery stores, doctors, restaurants, etc). It's a chicken-and-egg problem, now:
- people are spread out because they've owned cars, so the distance doesn't bother them
- If you take their cars away, they're too spread out to support themselves, because of how the towns were built.
anecdotal evidence with n=1, but I'm a Tesla owner who refuses to pay for the "Full Self Driving" tech, expressly because I think it's way further off and overhyped compared to what I'd actually want for the cost.
I especially think the "your car becomes a taxi and pays for itself" gimmick is beyond fantasy. I chalk it up to Musk being an actually mildly insane CEO, which has benefits to go with its downsides.
As for the cost of the car, I wanted an EV with more range than other manufacturers provided. (I also make use of the longer range on a regular basis--probably about 2 times a month?) (edit:) I also wanted a car that Went Fast. Not practical in any real sense, but a lot of fun.
There are around a dozen Tesla owners at my company. As far as I know, none of them are banking on their cars being a taxi and earning tons of dough. At least one has the FSD upgrade, and uses it primarily to back his car out of the garage on its own so his kids don't bang up the doors when they get in.
> if they don't have a 3 to 6 month emergency fund that's on them
A lot of my friends are fresh college grads, moving into the world, and suddenly finding themselves without job opportunities. They haven't had time to get established in a career, much less build up a 3 to 6 month emergency fund.
There are plenty of people in the US who are living paycheck to paycheck, where an unexpected $500 expense would be financially difficult for them [1].
From a position of security and with the benefit of hindsight it's very easy to say "oh well, they just didn't prepare enough, it's their own fault" when in context that's a rather shortsighted take.
Part of it is poor financial literacy, I'll grant you that. We should take strides as a country to improve that.
But perhaps a larger potion is that simply most people don' t have the luxury of advanced financial planning, or the ability to actual act upon that planning.
I'm not sure how that's inefficient, it's pretty normal market dynamics. If the demand for a thing is high enough and the supply is low (or artificially controlled), then the provider can just freely set the price wherever they want.
Enter a competitor, and now the competitor has incentive to undercut the original producer to capture their market segment, and then it's a battle between the two between the cost to produce, market price, and value of the good to consumers.
I suppose there's 'inefficiency' in that both producers are now providing identical goods, but very rarely are the goods actually identical. In this case there's also the surrounding product ecosystem of Apple and Google, which is a significant difference at the very least.
The counter-argument I've heard is that commit messages are a better tool for those kinds of annotations, especially if there are multiple points across the codebase where a change was made for the same reason.
That's exactly what commit messages are designed to do, too.
I've seen plenty of comments in code that say "handle case X because of behavior in place Y", that's tied to changes in place Y. I find it more meaningful when I see all those changes together, bundled in a commit diff, with a message on why.
In an especially good editor you can even have the title of the commit rendered into the blank space on the end of the line, which I find useful if I'm trying to figure out the past motivation behind a piece of code.
tl;dr I've enjoyed them enough to buy them three times: once on kindle, once paperback, and again paperback as a set.... but I wouldn't rate them as 'high literature'.
I enjoyed them, though they do have flaws. They embody some of the firm tropes of cyberpunk--lots of sex, lots of grisly violence.
The first one is a fantastically done mystery, IMhO. The second and third do some marvelous worldbuilding.
In hindsight, they do remind me of The Expanse's writing a bit.
Frustratingly, the books had a brilliant set of concepts for them to work with--and even tweak, a bit! But they diverged so crazily from that in S2 to go off in a "Netflix tries to create 3am Syfy" direction.
Even with reliable material, Netflix finds a way to make it disappointing.
user toomuchtodo mentioned this already, but the short version is the US doesn't suffer from the balkanization of charging providers as much. I also own a Tesla, so that balkanization is further reduced.
The longer version is that free level 2 charging is reasonably common, at least in my experience in the midwest, and Tesla superchargers are phenomenally easy to use and quite prevalent. Level 2's that aren't free are generally either (a) owned by a parking garage and factored into the cost of parking, or (b) payable via chargepoint. Every level2 I've seen in the states has had its own cable and a j1772 connector. I know ChAdEMO chargers exist, but I have yet to see a level2 one personally. (Level3 ChAdEMOs require an adapter for use with Teslas.)
Additionally, all those are things I made a point of learning before I bought a vehicle that has non-standard (compared to gas) fueling methods. I have aboslutely run into non-ideal conditions: during a trip to Michigan's upper peninsula I had to leave my car in a lot for ~9 hours to charge off a free level 2 charger, since there was no Tesla supercharger in the region. (One is slated to be installed this year, though I wouldn't be surprised if that got delayed.) The chargers I have to pay for are 'in the city', so to speak, and as such are in range of high-speed mobile data even on my crap network.
Overall, I partially blame the author for not researching ahead of time what difficulties they may run into, and partially blame EV charging infra manufacturers for balkanizing charging standards so much.
That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do, but that's also something that I think it a bit silly for the other EV owners to have not expected: you should at least be able to round-trip from your home to your work. What if there's a power outage? what if traffic is worse than you expect and you're stuck on the road for longer? what if people in your garage are being a jerk and aren't sharing the plugs?
Granted, it's significantly more inefficient for everyone to have this reserve capacity and not use it all the time, and people should be conscientious enough to share the limited infrastructure.
Is there a way this could have been brought up to manglement or something similar? Or a friendly suggestion to the group? ("Hey, if you don't absolutely need to charge, please leave your phone number in the window, so others who need the charger can call & safely unplug your car" etc etc)
As I was reading the article I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the author and developers of EV charging infrastructure; the author, for having not researched these things ahead of time, which seems reasonable when buying such an unusually fueled vehicle, and developers for having such crazy disparate standards and plugs and cabling and generally crap user friendliness.
I typically draw this comparison between Tesla and Apple: Tesla wanted people to enjoy using EVs, and they saw a few problems for that:
1. charging sucks, and range anxiety makes people nervous
2. most people's perception of electrically-propelled vehicles is of Prius(es? i?): slow and unimpressive.
They solved (1) with the supercharging network, which is insanely easy to use (drive up, plug in, credit card is automatically charged), and integrating the network as well as all Tesla "destination" chargers (level 2s installed at businesses, hotels, etc) such that the car knows where all of them are. The built-in navigation on my model 3 can tell me exactly when and where I'll have to stop for charging along my trip, and for how long, with real-time availability info.
I don't understand how other EV manufacturers haven't tried to co-ordinate a similar open network between them: it would solve so many usability problems. Go lob some $$$ at Chargepoint and use the 3g connection the cars are already using to send telemetry back to check availability for chargers nearby.
Give users incentives to use whatever network works with the manufacturer; buy a Kona? get 15% off your first 5 charges with ChargePoint. Honda Insight? Congrats on your 500 free miles with $OtherProvider!
Tesla absolutely has shortcomings, but they well and truly solved this UX issue. They should at least be given credit by being emulated.
The downside of course is it's easy for them to deploy those solutions in the relatively-homogenously-regulated region of the US, but significantly more difficult in regions like Europe.
Whenever we're able to compare imagined scifi things to "real" ones I always like seeing how close the scifi imaginer got. Hamilton's OC tattoos always seemed relatively rationally designed, with both a bent of aesthetic preference (with some people using the OC tattoos to effect butterfly wings around the eyes that change color, etc), but also functionality, with larger tattoos required for more speed/storage/etc.
As we see these develop, I wonder how close (or far) the rest will turn out to be.
It's pretty hacky, but you end up with a single HTML file with Vinge's notes in a side margin, with numbers and everything. There's probably ways that the title bits could be improved, but I'm too lazy to fix it now that I have the actual HTML file.
Good luck! Let me know if you have questions, I may be able to help.
I'm personally a huge fan of "A Fire Upon The Deep" and I got really stoked when I saw there was a version annotated by the author, and then really sad when I saw they were in an old RTF format, and I didn't really like the way I got them to render in modern applications.
So I made some super hacky scripts to convert the old RTF junk into a single, gigantic HTML file with the annotations in a side margin.
Posting that directly would probably run me afoul of some legal entity I don't feel like dealing with, but through the magic of someone else posting the archive to Archive.org and code being sharable, you too can create your own true hypertext version of "A Fire Upon The Deep"!
I suspect it has to do with the EFF being a more formidable legal opponent than Github on their own--also knowing that the EFF has their teeth in the issue, Github won't be dealing with it on their own if it goes to litigaiton.
I use Backblaze's B2 (think S3) style storage for backup, and I'm paying about ~$4.50 USD for ~1TB of storage per month. I don't use a ton of bandwidth though, so if you have a lot of churn in the files you're backing up you could see higher costs, but looking over the numbers Backblaze as the cheapest solution by far to others I looked at.
And Google Assistant doesn't? We quite often (~once a week, minimum) have our Home mini trigger off of some unrelated conversation. 50/50 on if "google" is ever mentioned, too.
People aren't dry brush though. It's not a good thing that huge swaths of the population are dying. We won't be inherently more resilient to diseases in the short term just because all the vulnerable people are dead.
For one, we don't even understand all the long term effects of having COVID as it is: there's heart damage, lung damage, brain damage, extended fatigue, and that's just what we're seeing evidence of now. [0]
If another disease like COVID strikes in a couple years, it could still tear through the surviving population and cause similar long lasting effects. The thousands that're suffering a terrible death daily, separated from their families and straining our healthcare systems to the breaking point--their deaths are not somehow making our populaitons safer from another disease.
EDIT: your analogy also supposes it's somehow the old/vulnerable populations that're the reservoir for the virus in our populations, when data indicates the opposite: it's far more likely younger populations are the carriers/vectors for COVID, especially since they are more often asymptomatic (w.r.t. acute effects) than more vulnerable chunks of the population. Future bugs will have plenty of population to travel through.
From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."
So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).
A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.
Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.
No, the dry brush is what makes the fires get out of control and cause more damage than they "ought to," implying that if the brush is regularly dealt with then the broader population of trees will be better off.
But (a) we're not talking about trees, we're talking about people, and (b) letting swaths of the population die from a disease does not imply the surviving population will be better off in the future.
People can't die twice because we only have a single life, and callously saying "welp, you would have died later anyway, might as well die now so our stats look good" is so unbelievably short-sighted I can't believe I'm seeing this argument made by multiple people on HN.
> This just seems like fear of the unknown..
Uh, yes, it's fear of what the largely unknown disease will do to us. We shouldn't blindly assume that it's "not that bad" if it occasionally rips through the population off of some belief it'll make us safer if we're routinely exposed to pandemics--as follows from your brush-and-forest-fire analogy--when we don't understand the effects of those diseases.
> Natural selection is not a bad thing
I do not understand this point at all. Should we not have allergen warnings on food packaging? Or glasses for folks with bad eyesight? There are plenty of reasons we intervene in the "natural course" of events to make people's lives better. Citing "natural selection" is not in any way a valid defense for just letting diseases meander through populations.
I thought that _was_ the quesiton: you seemed to imply the graph not starting at 0 was the article editorializing in some drama. My point was the situation is indeed dramatic (perhaps "significant" is a better phrase?) on its own, and they weren't unfairly exaggerating it for clicks/attention/fearmongering/whatever.
It makes sense that 'absolute deaths' would rise as a function of absolute population size, but that's why this data is important to pay attention to: if our death rate is climbing more than expected, there's problems we should probably pay attention to.
My whole point is your analogy is flawed and you shouldn't use it for this purpose because it trivializes significant components of the issue at hand. You said:
> Once all the old/vulnerable wood is burned up, it's much more difficult for another forest fire of the same magnitude to happen ...
Which is demonstrably wrong when you liken _people_ to the dry brush, which is exactly what you did. We aren't optimizing to minimize deaths in individual years (or else we'd just kill everyone right now and the death rate would spike and then drop to zero), we're optimizing for general well-being of the population.
Your analogy is flat wrong, which is why I'm poking holes in it. It also belies a shocking lack of empathy for your fellow humans, which I frankly find alarming.
> Where do you draw the line?
I have no idea, and I don't think this is the venue to argue it, but I definitely don't think we're at it yet, and I would much rather err on the side of trying too hard to protect people's lives than not trying hard enough.
For example, when death numbers from COVID were first being released, people compared them to car fatalities, going "Why are we so worried? Car crashes kill 100x as many people in the same timeframe." The point is not "we should not worry about COVID because other things are more deadly" but "there is an alarming new source of deaths, and we should be working to reduce death as much as we can in the interests of maximizing the population's happiness."
EDIT: I mean, consider, the sitting US president called COVID "a hoax" for a good two months, then kept downplaying it for another two ("it'll be gone after November, you'll see"), and overall completely failed to make a plan at the federal level to, I dunno, provide more sick leave for people so they could actually avoid spreading it to their co-workers, or rent assistance for those out-of-work because we shut down the industries with high levels of communication, or support just wearing a mask when you go outside. We are so far and away from even a reasonable level of response to this it seems wholly disingenuous to pose the "but where do we _stop_ intervening?" argument.
Fair enough, I wasn't clear: we _should_ be optimizing for general well-being, and among other things I think minimum-effort disease-prevention (masks, distancing, reasonable sick leave) are completely reasonable asks.
Similarly, we probably shouldn't be relying on a mega-consumerist culture that, when suppressed for whatever reason, has far-reaching economic effects that doom millions in developing countries to hunger/whathaveyou.
But these issues are not in opposition, we just have a crappy system that doesn't deal with both of them well at the same time. I think it's unreasonable to frame it as "well we can only address these issues in degrees, lest we make the other worse" and not question the system that somehow frames disease prevention and feeding people as opposing goals.
It's certainly possible to address this disease without such drastic impacts, but it relies on the population having an empathic mentality. Look at Japan, as an example[0]: Similar in terms of development, but with a much less invasive response they've only suffered around 2.3k deaths _total_, when the US is already seeing that number daily.
You are completely correct that "a huge % of the population is not happy with the current actions and policy being performed," because we have examples of cultures that are weathering this storm FAR better than those of us in the USA are.... but I think attitudes like yours are contributing to our failure to deal with this pandemic well.
I think they mean app-side: determining if a user is a bot or not gets harder when you can't tie that user to the datamine'd indicators of their humanity.
There's a cost-benefit balance at play: is using the cost of the legal system (lawyers, evidence, courts, long tail on case times) better than developing a system to prevent fraudulent users?
I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a burden of "good faith effort" required to show that you've taken measures to prevent frauds.
Yeah, that seems odd. I wonder if the update doesn't help/involve Weyland people, and if GNOME is an X11 holdout? I haven't been paying enough attention to know.
> You might as well be comparing your experience driving a BMW or Cadillac ....
But OP isn't--he's comparing the current live Tesla features with paywall'd / betawall'd features on the same car, from the same manufacturer. I cannot think of a more relevant comparison! I think it's completely reasonable to doubt Tesla's (and Elon's) claims in this realm, when the existing, public examples of this technology fall far, far short of the kind of confidence we'd want to have in these systems.
> Your experience on the old tech stack is irrelevant.
I 100% disagree. If Tesla can't even get a basic function like cruise control to work well enough that drivers are confident in it, why would I trust that they can get self drving to work well? Especially following things like the Summon beta, or similar fiascos?
I still get twitchy when my M3 comes up on an off ramp it's not supposed to take on autosteer--I've had the same behavior as OP (sudden unexpected speed decrease) happen far too many times for me to have confidence in that system. In turn, I have even less faith in the more complicated systems, like autosteer or FSD.
I mentioned this in another comment, but it's relevant here; OP wasn't using Autosteer or Autopilot, they were using cruise control: a miles more simple system--and that system behaved in a way that seriously reduced confidence in it.
(For the record, I've experienced exactly the same behavior in my M3 as well.)
So, if we can't trust something as simple as cruise control, and we've seen similar confidence-eroding issues in the autopilot features Tesla has already deemed "good enough" for a live release, I think it is 100% reasonable to be skeptical that Tesla is anywhere close to "solving self-driving."
They have a history of overblown claims and faulty software in this realm--as much as I adore my car and the disruption Tesla has done to the industry, Tesla does not deserve the benefit of the doubt in this realm, especially not with safety-critical systems.
I think it happens in just about every realm when you get close to the innovative edge, especially in tech: you can be really excited about some aspects of $SHINY_NEW_THING while recognizing that it has serious drawbacks in other realms--possibly realms that people expect $SHINY_NEW_THING to excel at as a contender in the space.
(inb4 "Sure it goes fast, but the panel gaps!")
Personally I love Tesla-the-company and my Tesla vehicle because of the innovation it's driving in the space--and I'm willing to tolerate the ways it falls short due to how incredible it is in other ways.... but I do try to be up front about those shortcomings when I discuss it, at the risk of being one of those "I love my Tesla, but..." people.
Hiya! Former mac native developer here, moving to a new company. My new corp gave me the option of a thinkpad running windows or a Mac, and I chose the mac just so I could have a sane terminal experience, UNIX-like tools, etc.
I would vastly prefer to use Linux, but unfortunately that's just not an option for a company-issued machine at this juncture--and in my experience it's easier to spin up a VM on a Mac than a Windows box.
Being a Mac native dev, I'm very acutely aware of the pain other devs go through with Apple and their APIs, but unfortunately Macs remain a better platform to write code on in my personal experience.
I actually have been trying this recently! I've been using VS Code via SSH into a WSL2 container running on my windows box and it's been going surprisingly well.... but that was after a moderate amount of effort to get WSL2 working to begin with, which was partially complicated by my past efforts of getting WSL1 to do similar behavior. I'm also not 100% confident NewCorp's IT would be kosher with me spooling that up. I could be wrong, but it seemed easier to go with the lower-number-of-abstractions-to-get-an-acceptable-experience via mac at the time.
Though who knows! Maybe I'll change my mind and get a new machine :)
Fair enough! I have run into an annoying number of issues that were because the flags for `cp` varied from mac to other *nix systems, which was very annoying to debug.
I'm personally appalled that instead of leaning hard into a "flipped classroom model" by having kids watch (or read!) lectures on material on their own, and then working in small groups with their teacher, the US public school system has instead doubled-down on just retrofitting the classroom environment into remote hell.
As a developer it's difficult enough trying to remain engaged on any remote meeting with more than 5 participants, I can't fathom how kids behave.
I imagine a huge component is the school-system-as-babysitting dynamic. If kids were left to their own devices to learn without any adult supervision it's possible (likely even) that they'd end up distracted at best, or at rick of causing or experiencing damage to themselves or their environment at worst.
So... I guess I'm not sure what the model ought to be. I'm sure there's some contrast to be found to cultures where there's more live-in family (grandparents, aunts uncles etc.) than you find in American/Western households.
Personally I've found all my workspace learning to be far, far more effective and enjoyable than my school experiences. A lot of it is the 1-on-1 mentoring I get in my work environments, or the much more hands-on learning I can do (writing code or making changes myself). This, combined with a much less intense deadline culture (no exams, no hard assignment deadlines), work has always been a more enjoyable learning environment for me.
I realize I may be in the minority here, but I find it very hard to see how an apprentice-mentor relationship could ever be outstripped by large-scale lecture-audience dynamics in terms of quality. (Excepting, of course, a poor mentor, but that's balanced out by poor instructors anyway.)
Thinking on this more: There's a high level of self-direction required of students in a flipped classroom model, and by my experience in the US public school system, the kids who're already doing well will do just fine in a flipped (or otherwise self-directed) model, but the at-risk kids are the ones who would need more attention--just like in the classroom.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you think it would be effective to segregate students by ability and/or motivation? That way you could let the motivated/interested/whatever students self-direct, and otherwise more efficiently spend your time with those who aren't self-motivated?
Ahh, that's very fair as well. I guess the underlying issue is, of course, different people learn differently, and we shouldn't have a one-size-fits-all solution... even though that's what we're driven to: efficient-in-terms-of-quantity systems to churn through large piles of students with minimally enforced expectations of the quality of received instruction.
Wouldn't the consequences be doing poorly on future assessments, or otherwise other visible ways of not understanding the material?
The frustrating thing for me as a student was always either (a) when I understood the topic and was bored out of my mind sitting through explanations of it or (b) when I didn't understand the material, and was trying to, but the other students in the class/room who did understand and were bored were distracting or otherwise soaking up the instructor's attention.
In my imagination there's some flavor of system where students can opt-in to exactly as much hands-on instruction as they want for a particular subject... but that does assume "good faith" on part of the students, and that they're motivated to be engaged.
I had to fight with enabling/disabling Hyper-V in windows features for a while, and also somewhere I flashed the BIOS on my motherboard and it reset my virtualization-enable switch to "off" (which I guess was the default?)
50/50 PEBKAC and Windows being difficult, IMO, but my total unfamiliarity with troubleshooting windows made the process a bit more annoying than I felt it ought to be.
At the listed price and efficiency losses, plus the limit in power output probably means these won't be the wunderkind of energy storage--but having more options and more competition in distributed energy storage is always wonderful.
Additionally, just being able to blunt peak demand makes it a lot easier to work with renewables, or other on-demand power concerns.
Keep in mind also, lithium-ion tech has come a very long way in the past decade or so of wide usage. Maybe it's naive, but I'd expect to see similar strides made in hydrogen fuel cell if it starts a similar adoption curve.
I'm beyond disturbed that you think a suggestion to proselytize your religion without any other discussion or interest in this person's life is a useful and empathetic action here.
Please don't do this. Think more before you speak.
I wonder how much has to do with the cost-optimization pressure on a private carrier. Building robust infrastructure is only valuable to them insofar as it enables them to continue to earn money. Reliable service for the sake of reliable service--especially to residential regions--is a non-starter.
Less pessimistically, it's possible that the regions that're affected have natural "choke points" for infrastructure, either moving through the mountains or along highways, etc., which of course leads to a single-point-of-failure, though it may be unlikely.
My take: I certainly didn't have authority over my mom, but I definitely felt like I had a lot of responsibility. Households are typically run by (at least) two people, and for good reason. I stepped up where I could--helping manage the dog, helping make food, staying out of trouble when she couldn't watch me, in general trying to keep stress off of my mom--not because I felt like I was in a position of authority, but because there wasn't another adult to help shoulder the load, so some of the load fell to me.