FredPret

Looking nice is part of the function

It’s really odd how often and where damped spring motion comes up

It’s interesting that we do essentially the same thing in all of non-physics science.

Everything is nuclear physics in the end, but trying to solve problems in, say, economics or psychology by solving a vast number of subatomic equations is only theoretically possible. Even in most of physics we have to round up and make abstractions.

> car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs

True for all infrastructure choices

> the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area

True, and I do miss big city life, but all the major cities have been captured by anti-development fanatics of a particular political bent vehemently opposed to me, people like me, and our priorities.

Conclusion: double-garage areas work best for my mix of requirements.

These things can have complications when you take into account all the edge cases. And paying humans/robots to do anything really adds up.

But at their scale, maybe they found a plan that works!

Not saying you need the above, but you’ll feel like you do. It’s certainly the easier way

That’s a really clever and simple plan but doing anything like applying stickers, correctly, by hand or robot, can add cost ranging from $<surprising> to $<shocking>.

Maybe they have a variation of your idea where they inkjet a serial number onto a conveyor belt of incoming items or add a super-cheap chip of some kind.

Then the kid moves to NYC, loves it, meets someone, has a kid, and realizes they need two SUV’s and a heated garage near good schools.

The bad part here is letting “poisoned” inventory in.

Adding vendor tracking adds a layer of ERP difficulty that isn’t practical for bulk, cheap items.

You either have to have serial numbers (unique per item, not just a product identifier barcode) or you have to physically segregate inventory by vendor, which is not practical.

If the vendor doesn’t serialize the item, then Amazon has to add it on receipt. Certainly not worth it for $10-20 item.

That seems correct to me as well, but is it really?

I think they're making an argument related to misinformation / lying about a crime, which apparently is against the terms of ABC's broadcast license. I'm evidently not a lawyer.

Isn't this idea super easy to falsify?

If you make $1 more than some other person in the world, you're richer than them. Where is the connection between being $1 richer and requiring that much less integrity?

> with Woz doing far more of the work

He definitely was the magic ingredient early on. But it's because of Jobs and his drive to make Apple huge that I'm typing this on a Mac.

You need line level employees who churn away at Tesla & SpaceX & Apple, but you also need the visionary maniac to force those companies into existence. Some things can only be done by large companies, and those simply don't just appear without a massive driving force.

I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?

Good point

That would be wrong, but I think the conservative backlash was such that he'd have been very much fired anyway, FCC or no. People were publishing lists of his advertisers on X to organize a boycott.

He has a right to say whatever he says, but surely his private employer have a right to fire him for it?

He has a right to speak his mind, not to have a show.

The fact that there's a mature product doing what you want to do is a good thing. It means there's a market for what you want that's large enough to sustain development.

You can easily distinguish yourself from Citizen by targeting a different demographic, different branding, different UX, interpreting the data in a different way.

Just look at how many businesses there are in any industry that deliver the same outcome for their customers but in a slightly different way.

What you're describing could be a really good news source giving live on-the-ground information to people.

I’m a soon-to-be-ex-VSCode user, but seeing the long march of Copilot (Clippy 2.0, except it steals my code) at Github and now VSCode, I’m taking the plunge and learning Emacs.

Sounds like a powerful model if you can get it right

Here's a comparison of Toronto and a handful of random not-Southern European cities that came to mind. For interest's sake, all these are far north of Toronto, which is in line with Marseille!

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/19863~75981~45062~47913~5...

Toronto is up there in summer, and lowest in winter, and at high humidity. Add in high winds coming in over an icy Lake Ontario and I'd rather buy my groceries fully indoors.

I agree about the lack of snow, but there's still just enough to make that brown slush, which is worse for walking in.

My original point - perhaps overly aggressively stated - comes down to this: the people who vote and pay taxes also like their cars, and this is OK. Building a pedestrian tunnel in Toronto should be very uncontroversial. Infrastructure decisions have to be made, and there are many upsides to widespread car ownership.

- no crazies yelling at you, or at least not within stabbing range of you

- you pick your soundscape

- you pick your temperature

- lower average transit time (I don't have a stat for this one, but I started off taking the TTC (Toronto Transit) and then bought a car. Despite heavy traffic, my travel time literally halved.

- suddenly big box stores like Costco make more sense, which makes the entire economy more efficient

Of course there are downsides. But everything is a tradeoff.

LLM engineer -> silicon psychologist who can sometimes sell the beast into making the year-end postings pass all tests?

Lived in various spots in downtown TO for nearly a decade.

The climate alone easily justifies building pedestrian tunnels.

You come across as one of those car-hating fanatics who'll zero in on literally anything about North American cities, blaming everything you don't like on Evil Car Culture.

I've lived in Europe and in North America, in both places with and without a car.

Car + N.A. is the most convenient and comfortable combination, by a very long way, even if you're stuck in a condo in the gridlocked downtown Toronto as I was.

> The idea that climate issues necessitate this kind of divorce from the outdoors would be a strange concept indeed to people in Barcelona and Helsinki alike.

Try going for a walk outside in downtown Toronto on both the hottest and coldest days.

If you're not in good health and appropriately dressed, you could suffer heatstroke on the hot day and simply die on the cold day.

> the poors (because who else lives downtown anyway?

You should talk about what you know instead of trying to come up with ways to hate something more than you already do.

Now that country goes from having limited access to having none at all - seems worse.

If you don't like X (understandable) then it's much better to not visit it voluntarily than by a top-down block

But then X just gets banned in said country

What challenges did you pick up with Elixir?

I think everyone would have a problem with the type of domination exhibited by Apple & Google, if they understood it.

There are many voters who are not well versed in tech. You can see this reflected in the kinds of politicians that win, and in the types of issues they are (and are not) fighting over.

It's up to us to make the issues clear and simple.

Let's see how that goes after the Lunar Tea Party

It is concerning when all of our major social systems are built on the idea of an growing population and a growing economy (most pressing right now is funding pensions).

Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.

YAML has given me eye-twitching ever since I went on an ill-considered quest of setting up wifi on a Debian server years ago.

I never figured it out by the way - just bought a really long LAN cable.