1,358 karma · joined October 1, 2013
That said, I don't really want to live with the nature of all these flaws. This is not their rocket science that is failing, but it rather reeks of complacency.
I still remember the wrenches found in early Dreamliners. Noone died, but I mean, come on.
Works a treat for 99% of users and use cases.
Ah, are drones finally gone? I'd love to tell farmers things about their land that I saw from above which they already know, for a horrendous price, and fly at a time that's no use to them.
I'm taking pictures everywhere. At the supermarket, on the road, in the kitchen, it's more than words. All these photos are super ephemeral, they will literally expire within 30 minutes. I think it is actually correct to store low resolution copies only, as they are just enough to trigger my own memory. I would gain nothing from a RAW copy of that photo. I would lose nothing from deleting them from the archive, but it's a hassle.
My non-professional photo library is at around 50 GByte, excluding astrophotography projects and photogrammetry runs. It's a really handy size for backups, and it indexes quickly with whatever service. I'm using Google Photos as a dumping ground, but PhotoPrism also indexes quickly.
I'll also note that geotags and a correct clock matter much more for archiving than high dynamic range and raw file formats. "Real cameras" suck for easy archiving. I want to zoom into a map of places I've been, and GPS is way too flimsy to be reliable on my Canon gear.
1968 Porsche, low-end model? 300k. Dakar winning motorcycle? 15k.
Steel Rolex with scratches? 30k. Early digital quartz watches? 300.
Personally I am waiting for a few things to blow up. Palm Treo and Blackberry phones, Nokia fashion phones (think 7260), and weird Sony cameras (dsc-f828). Immensely hard to predict, but fun nonetheless.
Passenger operation as well as operation around people should have come much later, and step by step. Error rates must be determined step by step, and reliability ratings must be earned, similar to ETOPS.
I can only see one reason why they would begin with taxi operations, the driving task with the most visible showing of servitude, and that reason has to do with US history.
For anybody that struggles with the length and slow-paced nature of this genre -- this is hackernews after all -- I had a much easier time imagining this as a radio piece. The writing style is very melodic, like it's meant to be read out loud. The noises of the city, the description of light and temperature, all made it feel very alive. Something to absorb in a very sensual way, quite the opposite of the how-to and faq texts we read at the office during daytime.
(Ha.)
I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.
A logistic curve starts out slow, and that's what we are witnessing.
My guess why it hasn't caught on is Thunderbolt timing issues. I could never get USB audio to work parallel to an eGPU on the same cable, which buries that whole one-cable-to-rule-them-all narrative.
Thus, fuel prices have to be affordable enough for poor people, but a moderately wealthy person can tolerate to pay double that to drive the same distance. Those a little further up the hyperbola can drive four times as far. And after a few years of exponential growth, we all can.
I've been wanting for taxes and other duties to be exponential shaped. Scale property tax exponential with the energy use of a house. Scale vehicle tax exponential to the car's fuel consumption. (You could require airlines to charge a sort of negative-percentage frequent flyer's discount as a tax, but that would be communism.)
My guess is with the right parameters for base and exponent, this system could be very just, ensuring that everyone can fly across the country to visit family, but weekly business flights become prohibitively expensive. And my hunch is that this would be a more effective way to reduce total energy usage without creating disastrous living conditions for anybody.
Meanwhile the rest of the company is free to do the switch.
I kinda assume that Meta could do this if they wanted. Their Instagram and Facebook comments are legal and available in the EU no problem.
Without knowing, I'd expect Bosch and all the others to have a similar product, just five years late, slightly more expensive due to more realistic accounting, extremely boring, and without any of the shortcomings that GP has listed. Those are the ones that will last for decades. Their apps will never be amazing, but they'll last.
With Intel's recent innovation in die interconnects and silicon photonics, this seems a straightforward direction to push. They're going to increase density, it's what the semi industry does.