So, #trump was just charged with a crime that carries a maximum sentence of death (conspiracy against rights, given that someone died as a result, multiple people did during Jan 6).
I feel like I'm seeing a lot of "oh wow, Trump was indicted for a third time", and not nearly enough "oh wow, look at how terrible the crimes Trump committed were. He could literally face a death sentence for his crimes". I mean he probably won't, sort of like how most murderers don't, but he could. It's pretty hard to commit a crime that bad.
Yesterday I idly wondered why my (clothes) dryer has heating coils in it, instead of a heat pump based dehumidifier. The same amount of energy would generate the same amount of heat, in addition to extracting water from the air making the clothes dry faster.
Turns out someone patented the idea. Apparently writing down what a non-expert can come up with in two minutes of idle thought is worth a 20 year monopoly idea, and if that makes peoples appliances less efficient, well fuck them and fuck the planet.
The patent expires in 2025, maybe in a few years dryers will get a lot more efficient. Or maybe there is some non-obvious (to me) reason why it isn't a good idea, because someone patenting it doesn't mean it's a good idea, just that they wrote the obvious idea down.
This is very interesting, I thought they didn’t make the old style dryers anymore and all new ones are small air conditioners.
It’s very convenient that you don’t have to have a dedicated vent, the water collects in a small compartment that you just pour into the sink after drying.
and EV charging locations don't shout their presence with 50-foot ad displays along highways. That's engendered a general sense of range anxiety among many car buyers
Jonathan M. Gitlin telling it like it is for @arstechnica - I have to say I never considered the impact of the billboard like presence of gas stations on range anxiety.
I'm neither an expert nor an american, but the idea that RFK Jr running as a third party candidate will hurt the democrats seems strange to me.
His policies, which can be summed up as "deny reality", align very closely with the modern republican party, not the democrats. It's hard to imagine that he would pull more votes away from Biden than Trump. Are there some people who would vote based on name recognition? Maybe... but surely it can't be that many? Meanwhile "Trump but not a rapist" must appeal to a number of the evangelical republicans...
Our electoral system is really rigged in favor of Republicans. He only needs to sway a few thousand in key states. I don’t think he will because one only needs to show any of his campaign material to a potential dem voter and they’ll drop him quick I think. People who would be drawn to him on his massage rather than his name are likely to vote Republican, not Democrat.
So I don’t think he’s make a difference. But the reason people are concerned is because he doesn’t need to say that many people. Remember that Trump had over 2% fewer votes than Clinton but won by a few thousand votes in key states.
Today I was struck by how much time young kids spend playing with car and truck toys.
If we want to move towards walkable cities, public transit, and micromobility it may be a good idea to stop indoctrinating people at the age of 1 that cars and trucks are fun.
Of course they're natural shapes for toys. Extremely simple and stable, but slightly more dynamic then a literal wooden block... but it's not like they're the only things with that property.
That’s interesting. On the other end, let’s kids have a bunch of LEGO and they will make cars and spaceships.
Another point is the reversal of common toys for girls and boys. In the 70’s, LEGO was promoting equal toys for girls and boys : qz.com/…/forty-years-ago-lego-explained-to-parent…Now, LEGO has LEGO friends with specific parts and colors for girls…
Is this just a way for Elon to scam all the other Tesla (stock) owners out of the huge amount of money Tesla has invested into AI hardware? Tesla has invested a huge amount of money into it, designing their own very different custom silicon for their data center's even, something that only the likes of Google has done. It's hard to believe that "working closely with another company" and sharing the benefit of that investment is in Tesla's best interests.
Sort of like how it's hard to believe that Telsa engineers "volunteered" to work at Twitter for weeks/months and that wasn't just Elon miss-appropriating Tesla resources...
Apple's Vision Pro is incredibly cheap. Low in price, not expensive.
It's easy to get sticker shock because so are all modern computers, and it's ever so slightly less incredibly cheap, but it's still incredibly cheap.
The general rule of thumb for pricing is to start by asking "how much value does this provide to the purchaser" and try and price it just under that. The average professional uses a computer as their main tool of trade, it is absolutely necessary for their trade, and makes them $$$/year. Apart from competition driving prices down, that's how much computers would cost. The vision pro is an order of magnitude below that price. If you view it as targeted at the class of people that fly around the world constantly (and thus can't use a desktop) it might even be two orders of magnitude below that price.
The average American owns 4/5ths of a car (including kids and so on in that statistic). The average price of a new car in the US is just shy of $50,000. That's an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. Indeed just the difference between the sale price and the base models of a car is an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. To suggest that there isn't a population that can afford to buy (new) computers at Vision Pro prices is ridiculous.
While we're at it, for a good portion of the population computers are more important than cars, despite the fact that they spend an order of magnitude more on cars than computers.
All this is to say, the money is there, Apple is just trying to capture it. Given that there are no serious (capable) competitors at this point, there's no reason to believe that they'll fail because of pricing.
Pet peeve of the day: Games with "puzzles" that can only be solved by trying a bunch of different plausible answers.
If you know the right answer (but not that it is the right answer), and the reasoning behind the right answer, but you still can't tell that it's the right answer without engaging the games mechanic to check if it's the right answer, it's not a puzzle. It's just a game a brute forcing answers.
Reading car brained people make delusional comments about how a change that inconveniences them, but obviously makes everyone safer, is bad for safety is so fucking sad. It's obvious that they really have managed to delude themselves into thinking it despite how obviously stupid what they are saying is.
I have to say I wasn't a fan of today's Strange New World's episode.
The premise was fine. The acting was good. The dialogue writing was acceptable. But the plot resolution just stank, "the bad guy stops being bad and starts helping out instead, the debilitating condition stops being debilitating in the one character for whom it matters most, and all the terrible things miraculously simultaneously work out just in time for the credits to roll".
It didn't feel like a triumph, it felt like stupidly well coordinated dumb luck.
I suppose they had the ship become disabled to explain why it didn't help out, but the episode would have been better if that part was just cut out. The ship didn't help out because they couldn't see what was happening or something.
Or if you really want the ship to be disabled, the people on the planet find out what is happening, and come save it. Discovering the cause of the symptoms and the locals understanding of how to mitigate them saves the day. Perseverance, diplomacy, "science", not luck.
It wouldn't fix the bad guys sudden change of attitude, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Watching people get mad at MDN for including ChatGPT, and I'm mostly struck by how time-sensitive PR crisis management is.
It was a clear mistake, yes. Everyone would have forgotten about if it was promptly removed after that was pointed out, or even if the promise to remove it was made.
Instead, because they've let this sit for an eternity (4 hours), we're already seeing reactions like
I am warning my team about this feature and letting them know not to trust it.
and
By implementing and deploying this "feature", MDN has convinced me to stop contributing to MDN and cease donating to the Mozilla Foundation, because I am completely unwilling to participate in perpetuating the massive disinformation which this "feature" presents to users and the dramatic confusion and waste of people's time which it will cause.
Obviously, I will also stop recommending MDN as a good source of documentation. I will also need to remove links to MDN from everything I've written which can be edited.
and
This was very disappointing as a now-former MDN contributor and subscriber. The whole point of MDN was authoritative content but until there are some fundamental improvements in LLMs I might as well be supporting W3 Schools.
These might seem like extreme reactions, but no one is defending MDN, because MDN has given them nothing to wield in MDNs defence. Instead these reactions are only receiving "upvotes" (thumbs ups) and more users piling on.
A not lightning fast response time is doing irreparable harm to MDN's reputation, and is losing them revenue.
I suppose it's unfortunate if Elon is lying as well, because it's unfortunate that people in power lie, but that's nothing new for him so I'll take it.
Annoyance of the day: People who refuse to distinguish between "not in MY backyard" and "not in anyones backyard".
Being against something that impacts you, but for the same thing if it only impacts other people, is hypocritical and leads to problematic outcomes in local governance.
Being against things that have huge externalities compared to their benefits, regardless of how close those externalities are to you, is simply good policy.
As a rule, a politician make broad rules against things across a large city, province, or country, is not a nimby, by definition. They are making rules against things that are almost entirely not near them.