2,221 karma · joined February 11, 2017
By the way, hijacking scrolling behavior often breaks other things, such as searching for text in a page. Go ahead, try it, search for a term in that article.
However, big caveat: I absolutely do not use Autopilot, nor do I ever plan to. I bought the car because I love to drive it -- the way it handles, the way it accelerates, etc. The only "automatic" feature I've used is literally the cruise control, i.e. maintaining a set speed on the highway. That's the farthest I trust it to do anything automatically.
Being tangentially involved in the field of machine vision / machine learning, I understand the limitations of the current technology, and am appalled at how brazenly Tesla is rolling out this half-baked functionality to users, and marketing it as if full self-driving is just around the corner, when in fact it has a long, long way to go.
I think everyone overestimates the public interest and "excitement" over going to Mars. The reason we haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years is that the public lost interest after the ~third or fourth launch, and stopped tuning in to the broadcasts. With ever-improving VR technology, I'd predict that more and more people would be satisfied enough with a VR experience of Mars, and be done with it. The need to physically "go" to a place and claim it for yourself will be a thing of the past.
Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.
Periodically I take the current batch of unencrypted files and add them to a VeraCrypt volume, which contains files organized in this way, going back to around 2005. The encrypted volume sits on the same NAS. There have been surprisingly few times that I've had to "search" for an old document in the archives. And when I do, I can just go to the target year folder, and glance through the scanned images, and also make sure to give descriptive names to the scanned files, if it's important.
Once every few months I back up the encrypted volume to a gold-layered DVD disc (The encrypted volume is still nowhere near 4.7 GB), and store it in a cool, dark place.
I might be extremely out of touch, but I'm still struggling to understand who is asking for this. In other words, who expects to be more productive with a VR device, rather than a regular laptop or desktop?
First of all, no discussion of minimizing PNG sizes is complete without `pngcrush` which applies all kinds of optimizations to the PNG file (losslessly). In fact pngcrush reduces the author's 48kb dithered file down to 28kb.
And secondly, modern compression formats like webp and avif will blow PNG out of the water when compressing any kind of photographic image. Heck, just turn down your JPG quality, and your image will be much smaller, and still perfectly recognizable.
Know when to use the right tool for the job:
PNG -> diagrams, charts, anything with perfectly uniform areas of color and sharp transitions.
JPG/AVIF -> photos, anything with smooth variations in color.
The general feelings that permeated Soviet society were apathy and misery. It was so pervasive that modern Russians fetishize it and even feel nostalgia for it.
There was an excellent little movie from the 80s called Moscow on the Hudson, with Robin Williams, which beautifully portrays the Soviet immigrant experience. Robin Williams' character says the following lines, which resonate with me completely:
"When I was in Russia, I did not love my life... but I loved my misery. You know why? Because it was my misery. I could hold it. I could caress it. I loved my misery."
The fact that this partnership is with the Amazon app store, not the Google Play store, is a strong hint of how serious they are about this, and how this latest iteration will work out.
Imagine how much work, how much energy and effort, went into building an ML-based image cropping feature, just because an up-and-coming Designer decreed that a certain specific crop ratio was the most aesthetically pleasing to the human eye...
...so that years later, after countless hours of additional user research, they would just remove the feature because it doesn't work, and award themselves a medal for doing it.
This is taking Basilisk II (which is already a native app that runs on all major platforms!) and recompiling it into javascript, so that it can be run less efficiently and more bloatedly in Electron. Can we please stop doing this to ourselves?
As a result, all kinds of pseudoscience has gotten "patented", for example this patent for detecting "tachyonized" materials (you know, materials that have been infused with tachyons, the hypothetical particles that travel faster than light):
They also say "Curate your Trustpilot Company Profile Page through ... adding authentic content". The term "authentic content" is code for "positive reviews", because you'll be able to flag any negative reviews as inauthentic.
And of course you can also look at reviews of Trustpilot itself from third parties, i.e. websites where Trustpilot doesn't have a paid/boosted account, for instance: https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/trustpilot
It's a shocking lack of integrity, but not surprising, given the business model. Anyway, it's disappointing that TrustPilot gets any publicity for being anything credible.
Edit: A nice little touch is at the bottom of their website that says "See what our customers are saying about TrustPilot", with a hand-picked selection of reviews... from TrustPilot! About TrustPilot! Chef's kiss.
Edit 2: This is not to say that Trustpilot's intentions aren't necessarily good, and they may even be striving to provide neutrality. But the problem is that their business model is, by its very nature, antithetical to neutrality. And of course Trustpilot is not the only review site that has this issue, but it's definitely a site where this issue is glaringly apparent.
- This sounds like an absolute nightmare scenario for me and most people I know.
- The year 2030 is virtually tomorrow in terms of societal progress. Nothing of the sort will happen by 2030. This is like science fiction authors of the 1970s predicting that we'll colonize the solar system by 2001.