mikestorrent

Doesn't TPMS take care of that? Though, it seems like it's being done in software now to save costs...

Well, how do you drive? And in what climate?

Only Californians could dream up a stupid program like this and pretend that it's environmentally protective to send a ton more tire particles into the ecosystem, while costing consumers more, and probably increasing their carbon footprint at the manufacturing level, just to get shitty tires that might make a car a tiny bit more efficient.

I had a set of these low-rolling-resistance tires stock on an early FWD EV I had a few years ago and they were not only trash in terms of getting grip whenever there was even a hint of rain, but they also had awful stopping distance. Swapping them out for a set of all-weathers vastly improved everything about the car.

Consider the carbon footprint impact of a vehicle accident that totals both cars (never mind the human impact of this!). Probably cancels out hundreds of cars worth of carbon savings from using these shitty tires. Avoiding vehicle accidents has to be job one and tires are the single greatest factor in your stopping distance that you can simply buy an upgrade on. Combined with automatic braking technology - a great addition - you can seriously change the course of your life with a set that's only a couple hundred bucks more (in the sense that your life will be hella changed if you have an accident and end up with chronic pain).

Every car has powerful enough brakes, braking upgrades are mostly just for racing needs; but stock tires are still very often just total garbage and the first thing you should replace.

I was 12 years old and had qcrack on a floppy from a buddy. Everyone had it. Didn't even have to have internet.

Hells yeah qcrack.zip

And here we are, almost all the complaints from a decade ago still have relevance

Then you'd have to focus on making a website someone gives a shit about, with content worth pursuing. Instead, one can just retreat into the engineering ivory tower, making an ever purer object that ever fewer people can understand or care about.

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The appeal is literally a "fuck you" to anyone that makes me have to run a build process for a web page, when I used to just be able to click reload and see the reality in front of me in seconds on a machine 1/500th the speed.

The problem with the SPA is that the browser is a document platform being abused to run GUI applications. It's missing the core primitives that real UI platforms had in the 90s, like decent smart sortable tables and data bindings. So all that crap is redone in JS ten thousand times by developers of varying talents and the result is, has been, and will continue to be crap usability and hugely bloated sites.

It's time to replace the HTML part of the browser with something else designed for purpose: making rich UIs that use platform-native widgets and mirror the human user interface design guide for the platform. XUL was a step in the right direction.

There are proxies to enable old computers with old browsers to render the modern web as an imagemap. And of course, 20 years ago I was doing everything you'd want to do with a modern webapp with PHP; fast enough for a thousand users on a dual CPU Xeon.

Well, homomorphic encryption is becoming a thing, and secure enclave/TPM chips have been a thing for ages. What would it take to give some kind of AI hardware the ability to have "private thoughts", i.e. cryptographically impossible to go and look at, just like human thoughts are (for most intents and purposes)? Could we let it spend some time on introspection - burning thinking tokens into the black box?

I'm not saying we _should_, just putting the idea out into the aether...

The only time I'm anti-3d-print is when $0.85 worth of filament shaped like a cat has an $15 price tag at the local tchotchke shop.

How could a person (of any ethnicity) be able to respond reliably enough and quickly enough to design nudges to be able to iterate back and forth on this kind of thing with any usable latency? I don't think it's possible.

Agreed. Getting to the Singularity requires that the AI be capable of improving its own iteration cycle time for doubling its processor performance, across the board - which means everything from physical design to fabrication to packaging and all the logistics surrounding that; getting the chip into a working host machine, online, and into the cluster... it's going to take a lot of humans for quite a while before we really kick off into the exponentiation.

The goal behind these efforts, fundamentally, is to make it impossible to organize efforts to dissent against whatever comes next. We still have the tools for mass organization but we lack unifying charismatic leaders who could use them in time.

Calling things "systemic" is unfortunately often just a way of offloading the problem into the pile of Things We Can't Fix. It removes individual accountability, in an era where we are increasingly able to assess the effect an influential individual actually has - because their dialogue is public and recorded, and the consequences of that can be studied.

I think there are plenty of individual men who are absolutely responsible for things becoming worse, and we do the world no favours by helping them shrug the burden of their actions.

Perhaps one needs to go a level up: if making the program is now semi-trivial, it remains to be proven if using the program to actually perform is. If I have a Star Trek replicator that can reproduce a perfect Stradivarius for me, is it any less impressive when I play a beautiful song on it?

If we want to get excited about a mixing board... we probably need to see someone using it in ways that traditional mixers don't facilitate.

Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.

Yes, and we haven't even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they're still basically just OCR'ing screenshots?)

Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow world on their industry specific apps...

Yes, this one. Look at our governance; look at our coordination-at-scale; look at our collective problem solving. It's abysmal, beyond hope. If we have global scale problems, we are not capable of solving them effectively. We are literally not intelligent enough to handle the problems we are creating. Between rivers of garbage and CO2 levels and war, we have proven ourselves to be woefully unintelligent at the scale needed. If we are lucky, our thin window of survival depends on getting a hell of a lot smarter, real quick.

Consider this: All that hardware that's going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it'll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you've never seen.

Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.

When you press the gas pedal in your car down (which used to just be a cable to the throttle body), does your car instantaneously increase in speed to match the pedal position?

All you're doing is letting more air in - the RPM is a function of the power the engine generates; more fuel and air than is currently needed for the current load at the current speed = increasing RPMs.

If you put the clutch in, a little blip of the gas is all that's needed to get the RPM quite high very quickly. The moment there's load on there, the same blip will not do very much at all.

3000? Here I am wishing there was some Wankel Rotary representation and you're shifting at 3000? What are you driving, a Peterbilt?

Sounds like an answer from a non-parent, honestly. There's a lot more to it than that, and virtually every couple I know with children thought about it a lot before going ahead.

The number one reason is because they see other families and the love and joy that their children bring into their lives. This is inspiring, and brings people around to making the decision, even if they know the sacrifices they will have to make.

Boiling it all down to pure biology is stripping parents of agency to fit your worldview.

That's the smoking gun -- he was absolutely right. It's not ice cream, it's slop!

So they should prorogue the entire Parliament and they all take a month off together. Why the fuck should some particular province or riding or whatever miss out on representation on an important issue just because their rep is out for a week on an island somewhere? Could they not have a proxy / surrogate??

The trouble is that most conventional ways of building a new service are trivial to block. What is needed now is unstoppable messaging and social networking built on top of existing services and protocols that won't be blocked right away, services with more legal protection - like email with GPG, or some kind of steganographically encrypted layer on top of Instagram.

Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent

It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.

In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.

At least we're giving out free verification cans