2,674 karma · joined September 30, 2020
People roasted him for being a Tesla/Elon fanboy: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/21838/the-truth-behind-electre...
Fred gradually started asking tougher questions when Tesla's schedule slipped on projects and Elon ended up feuding with Fred (and I think blocking him) on Twitter: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/bgmwk8/twitter...
Since then Fred has had a more realistic (IMHO) outlook on Tesla, although some might call it a "beef" since he's no longer an Elon sycophant.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but isn't it wild to think that such a limited device would likely be more expensive than the do-everything Apple Watch that includes the health features among a myriad of others? Selling perhaps in the thousands instead of the zillions, the development costs would be amortized over such a small user base it would be an incredibly niche product. It often falls to us techies to figure out if we can hack an acceptable solution out of the affordable mainstream product.
https://catspawdynamics.com/ultra-scsi-to-firewire-to-thunde...
I like to imagine the author finally hit the limit of the 20MB hard drive, then decided, "you know what, rather than put 2 spaces after periods, I'll replace them all with a single space like the kids do", saving 400KB, and making room for at least a couple more weeks of work while shopping for a new computer.
I've taken a handful of sightseeing roadtrips in the US where the pattern tends to be hike/sightsee during the day, then hop in the car in the evening and drive for a few hours to get close to tomorrow's destination. It'd be great to be able to do that, except outsource the driving (and skip the hotel) by sleeping through the drive. Similar to night train travel in Europe.
I just assumed the red lines were "major routes" of some sort, maybe rail, maybe roads.
It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world.
That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well.
And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere.
These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work".
And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).
Window tint is a pet peeve of mine - as a long-time small car driver I'm used to being around taller vehicles that I can't necessarily see through or around. But the situation has gotten worse and worse.
The law hasn't changed AFAIK - there's a longstanding regulation that cars are generally not allowed to have dark tint from the factory but trucks, SUVs and vans can have dark tint from the second row back.
So you used to see older "standard" pickup trucks, the ones with a single row of seats, and there'd be no tint - you could see through the truck. Now the typical pickup has 2 rows, and dark tint in the back.
A lot of cars have become SUVs as well - now your Subaru Outback or even Crosstrek are technically categorized as SUVs and come with dark rear tint in most configurations.
As a result, when I sit at a traffic light, I can see much less of what is happening beyond the neighboring vehicles than in years past.
Sure, everywhere with roads has some large, opaque vehicles like delivery vans, etc. But the percentage of my field of view that is blocked by neighboring vehicles certainly seems higher than ever.
Also, it reminds me of this HN conversation I found fascinating a few years back: Finding the longest straight line you could sail without hitting land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965650
Europe has ~750 million people, and even with current policies (where migrants might drown when their boat sinks while the Greek Coast Guard looks on and laughs) millions of migrants try to enter Europe each year.
The US has ~340 million people, and even with current policies (where children might be separated from parents and placed into cruel detention centers) millions of migrants try to enter the US each year.
If movement was free, how many hundreds of millions would pour from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia into Europe and the US? The 3+ billion who live in the tropics are only going to become more likely to try to migrate as the climate continues to warm.
Apple apparently sold a couple million iPhone 13 minis. Ford reliably sold more than 100,000 Focus cars in the US annually before deciding to discontinue it. But Apple and Ford decided they were better served redirecting that engineering effort towards more profitable projects.
It just frustrating when these gaps occur and there's no smaller player to fill them. A couple million small smartphones or a couple hundred thousand compact cars sounds like enough to sustain a business, but it isn't enough for the big players to care, and small players can't affordably create a competitive offering.
There's always so much room for pedantry with statements like that. If eastern Canada includes Labrador (which it generally does), the town of Nain (which is further north) has roads that people drive cars on: https://maps.app.goo.gl/b1saMzzXKDQrHZQy6
Nain isn't connected to the rest of Canada's road network though, so it depends if one really means something like:
"this is as far north as I can take a long road trip in eastern Canada" or "this is as far north as I can be in a car, on a road, in eastern Canada, even if it is just a 1km ride from the airport on one side of town to the hotel on the other"
For years, CAFE regulations have meant that manufacturers must meet minimum fleet fuel economy averages or else pay fines. In order to sell more profitable but less fuel-efficient F-150s, Ford also needed to sell little Fiestas or Focuses. In order to sell Suburbans, Chevy also needed to sell Cavaliers or Sonics. But now that Ford can sell Mustang Mach-Es and Chevy can sell Blazer EVs for 50 or 60 grand AND get credit for something like 100 MPG equivalent, there's no longer any incentive for them to spend huge sums developing cheap cars that will net tiny profits (if any).
You're looking for "Life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh":
https://genius.com/Dolly-parton-my-tennessee-mountain-home-l...
* Jony Ive has built a company with the densest collection of talent in the world
* OpenAI is spending 10 figures to buy a company from Ive
* It is not the aforementioned company with the dense collection of talent; it's instead a company that no one has heard of
You used to occasionally see bailouts of too-big-to-fail companies or industries, now the White House holds buy-a-Tesla day, presumably to boost TSLA. Just today the US Commerce Secretary announced that a UK airline would buy at least $10 billion of Boeing airplanes (Boeing stock is up ~4%).
Maybe it's just me paying more attention to stock market news these days, but my impression is that politicians have recently begun to care a lot more about the overall stock market going up because a lot more voters care about the overall stock market going up.
I'm not convinced how much of the offensive onslaught was due to the bats either, but all of the sources I've heard/read have indicated that 5 players in the Yankees starting lineup have been using the bats:
https://apnews.com/article/torpedo-bats-yankees-6ac6c797ea93...
https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/which-mlb-players-are-u...