nkoren

Yep, you export a lot of nice flowers and vegetables, and import a lot of meat.

This makes fine economic sense in the context of well-functioning system of global trade. But if that system were to shut down and you had to produce all that meat locally... it wouldn't work so well. And the flowers wouldn't make a good replacement.

If people ate money, that would be true. But the important thing for self-sufficiency is not the monetary balance of trade, but the caloric value of trade. It is typical for smaller countries to export high-value refined agricultural products (wine, cheese, etc.) while importing lower-value bulk commodities (grains, oilcrops, etc.) This can cause a vast disparity between the economic and caloric balance of trade. In the case of the UK, it imports about twice as many calories as it exports, so the disappearance of trade would have a major impact. If food waste were eliminated, starvation could probably be avoided. But a few years of malnutrition, while the domestic agricultural sector reconfigured itself for self-sufficiency, would probably be unavoidable.

The amount of food that a country exports is orthogonal to its capacity for self-sufficiency. Your example of the Netherlands is a perfect illustration of this. In monetary terms it's a net exporter, but in caloric terms it's a net importer. The latter is a better metric for potential self-sufficiency, and by that measure, the Netherlands is actually the eighth least self-sufficient country in the world[1].

Yes, the UK could undoubtedly reconfigure its agricultural sector to become more self-sufficient. But even on a wartime footing, doing so would take several years. Meanwhile, the slack in food reserves is several weeks. It's that differential between weeks and years where there's the potential for malnutrition and starvation.

1: http://www.fao.org/3/i2493e/i2493e03.pdf

I co-own a company that is a supplier to both SpaceX and many of their customers. I haven't worked on a launch license myself, but between what my company does and various friends in the industry, I'm familiar enough with the process.

You're right that the relationship between the launch provider and and customer is complex but not particularly collaborative. The GP point is simply that SpaceX doesn't build that complexity into their commercial pricing -- which is awesome. (Their pricing for government customers is much less transparent, precisely because the relationships are MUCH more complex and collaborative).

For Waymo or other LIDAR providers, the relationship with the customer is certainly NOT more inherently complex than the relationship between a launch provider and their customers. They're being opaque about pricing for strategic purposes, which I'll avoid speculating about, since they're also one of my company's customers...

I'm guessing you haven't bought a lot of rocket launches.

Launches are often bought years in advance (although SpaceX is reducing that to months, it's still not days or weeks).

For payloads, they need to be certified for things like ITAR compliance, mass, mass distribution, power/thermal requirements on the pad, deorbit / debris mitigation plans, etc. etc. etc. The launch provider needs to care about all these things, since they'll be on the hook for many of them. It's not a simple relationship.

I'm an architect / urban planner who used to live in Phoenix (Tempe, actually). There's absolutely no reason a city in that kind of environment can't be walkable, even in the height of summer. There are two key components:

First, you don't just need mixed-use, but density of mixed-use. This is why London, where I now live, is walkable. There's a good cafe within 2 minutes of my doorstep. A doctor's office and a grocery store and a bakery within 3 minutes. A park and a pub and several more shops within 4 minutes. A hardware store within 5 minutes. I very rarely am required to walk for as long as 10 minutes. Even in an environment like Phoenix, these distances would be perfectly walkable. I've also spent time in Reykjavik in January, and found it quite walkable for exactly the same reason. This has nothing at all to do with climate.

Second, what does have to do with climate is shade. Currently, cities like Phoenix are actually much hotter than the surrounding desert, due to the "urban heat island" effect. This is primarily driven by the abundance of asphalt and other high-thermal-mass, low-albedo surfaces. But cities don't need to be designed this way. If you look at traditional Middle eastern urban design, you can find cities that actually create "urban cool islands", and are (relatively) livable without air conditioning. Key components of these techniques are:

- Very narrow roads / alleys, such that buildings are continuously shading each other and sunlight doesn't reach the ground

- roofs painted white to reflect the sunlight & heat back into space

- "cold sinks" to capture cool night air

- Wind catchers and various other devices to funnel prevailing winds into the alleyways, and to convert thermal updrafts into air movement even when there aren't winds, creating siphons to circulate air out of the cold sinks

- courtyards with pools and vegetation to create evaporative cooling from the moving air.

These techniques and others have been well-understood for several thousand years. They're detailed in a lovely book by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, called "Natural Energy and Vernacular Architecture". Highly recommended.

However, all of the above is incompatible with low-density development and streets that can carry large amounts of vehicles. The former precludes the necessary density of services, and the latter precludes any of the environmental adaptations that are necessary to make the desert livable. But these are man-made planning choices, not dictates of the environment. Those choices can be un-made.

Self-driving is a Hard Problem. I'm sure that there's an incredible amount of sophistication going into a system like this, and I have sincere respect for all the engineers working on it.

Nonetheless, o, the hype! Some caveats:

1. 100 vehicles is not "production."

2. "Please ... drive safely while paying constant attention to your surroundings." is not Level 3 Automation. The point of Level 3 automation is explicitly that it should allow the driver to not pay attention to their surroundings under limited circumstances, while the vehicle fully does the driving. The human remains the fallback mode: they must stay awake and alert so that they can take over control if the vehicle requests it. However they are NOT required to maintain a constant supervisory function. If they are, then that's Level 2 automation.

The problem with Level 3 has always been that it requires the vendor to take liability for unsupervised autonomous driving (like levels 4 and 5), but only some of the time, and the driver to take liability the rest of the time. The handover from one to the other is fraught, with the humans almost certainly being the weak link, since they're not all THAT good at staying alert in the first place, and get much much worse when they don't have supervisory duties to keep them awake. For this reason, many vendors have (wisely, IMHO) chosen to skip Level 3 automation entirely.

So my synopsis of this would be:

1. Honda's engineers have come up with some genuinely interesting new capabilities for autonomous driving, albeit falling well short of what would be needed for full Level 5 autonomy.

2. Honda's management would like to convert those innovations into some good PR for the company.

3. Honda's lawyers, actuaries, and human-factors people have realised that there's no way in hell mass deployment of Level 3 automation is a good idea, and so to limit the potential damage, are only allowing 100 vehicles to be shipped, to pre-qualified and well-trained buyers, and then furthermore attaching disclaimers which knock this down to L2.

4. L5 Autonomy remains a long ways away.

Well, from a safety point of view, you'd obviously be much safer going with New Glenn or SLS.

There's very little risk if you never leave the ground.

Working microphones. They've sent microphones previously, which have either failed or been on missions that crashed.

Nit: propulsive landing was not only feasible but actually done in the late 1960s. On a human-rated Single Stage To Orbit vehicle, no less.

Okay, fine, so it wasn't to Earth orbit, but still...!

Yep, I'm definitely making no positive statements as to the absolute location of my brain, or its state of empicklement.

This seems rather optimistic to me. There are days when I count myself lucky to be able to debug my own code. And it's maybe about seven orders of magnitude less complex. And has comments. And unit tests.

I'd be willing to bet that once we've achieved the ability to scan and simulate brains at high fidelity, we'll still be far, far, far away from understanding how their spaghetti code creates emergent behaviour. We'll have created a hyper-detailed index of our incomprehension. Even augmented by AI debuggers, comprehension will take a long long time.

Of course IAMNAMSWABRIAJ (I am not a mad scientist with a brain in a jar), so YMMV.

That was not a dispute about payment.

Sadly, neither. Transport planner working in this Garriott-funded project: https://web.archive.org/web/20150508071259/http://www.austin...

If you need another data point, I worked on a (non-software) project for Garriott. He was awesome and I'd do it again in a second.

Anecdotal, but the only charger block I've ever had explode was from a MacBook. In its favour, it didn't fragment or catch fire. But as it shuffled off its mortal coil, the white plastic casing momentarily shone like the sun. Was pretty dramatic.

Podaris | https://www.podaris.com/ | London, UK / REMOTE

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We're a small and friendly (but extremely driven) team, and have been working remotely since before the pandemic. Come join us!

Contact: jobs@podaris.com

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Job Description: We’re looking for a full-stack engineer to join our growing team. You'll be able to make a big impact, joining a small but very enthusiastic team. For this role, you'll primarily focus on mathematical problems: computational geometry, parametric constraint solvers, network routing optimisation, etc -- problems that come up in the course of modeling physical transport infrastructure, as well as transport network simulation and analysis. However you should be enough of a generalist to be unafraid to dive into other areas of the application where needed.

Technology-wise, Podaris is built on Javascript/ES6, Meteor.js, OpenStreetMap, and OpenLayers, a mapping library. Your expertise with Javascript is more important to us than your experience with the particular libraries that we use. Experience with building large single-page apps is particularly helpful. Experience with OSM routing engines, transit data formats like GTFS, and GIS tools/databases is also a strong plus.

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Role: Customer Success Associate

Job Description: You will learn the Podaris platform to a very high level, then assist in training new customers and supporting existing customers in their projects. You have an innate aptitude for self-learning new and unfamiliar software, and have excellent verbal and written communication skills, which make you adept at teaching people who don't have such an innate aptitude. You have an interest in all aspects and disciplines involed in creating transport systems and the built environment. You're especially knowledgeable with regards to transport planning and operations, but find it easy to talk to urban planners, architects, civil engineers, and more. You've at least dabbled in many different kinds of design/planning/engineering tools, and have some experience with GIS in particular.

When not directly assisting our customers, your responsibilities will include beta-testing new functionality, improving documentation and training materials, and creating case studies that can be used for sales & marketing purposes.

Forwarding this to a friend of mine who owns a BDSM-themed coffeeshop...

It looks like that book is from 2006, predating widespread recognition of Göbekli Tepe's significance. At the time, from my recollection, the mainstream view as that human culture at 10k BPE was nowhere near being able to produce the kind of social organisation that a complex like Göbekli Tepe would require. Was the book ahead of its time in recognising the potential for something like Göbekli Tepe? Or does it need a new edition, in light of what's been discovered?

Yep, there are no good choices here. Parler is an organizing venue for Trump supporters attempting to overturn a democratic election and/or storm the capitol, which also has a rather anti-democratic feel to it, no? So you can think of it as a trolley problem with "democracy" strapped to both sets of tracks. Since democracy will be a casualty, to one extent or another, in both the "do nothing" and "do something" options, the service providers must ask themselves: which scenario will hurt democracy worse?

Damnit, last year I walked straight past that mochi shop without even realising it. And now I'm hungry.

(Seriously, though, the snacking in Kyoto is epic. Lovely temples and all, but when I go back, my first stop will be at a yatsuhashi shop, then mochi, then those red bean fish cake thingies, then maybe a cucumber on a stick. Damnit, now I'm REALLY hungry. Anyhow, these are businesses worth keeping around for a thousand years. They're just that tasty.)

what i'm curious about is how the 2007 zoomquilt2 has an easter-egg for the 2015 zrkadia.xyz in it...? Did the former inspire the starting frame from the latter, or was it retroactively retrofitted?

They've got an orbital plane planned at 80 degrees, which will get pretty close.

Old-school angels were just as likely to rip your face off as serve you tea and cookies. Read the older Abrahamic texts, and it's clear that to encounter an angel was often a terrifying experience, even when it went well.

Obviously their marketing department has given angels quite a rebranding over the last thousand-odd years, but still...

It's been a long, long pandemic...

Holocaust denial is inseparably bound up with being intolerant of the right for Jews (and Roma, and Homosexuals, and so forth.) to exist.

If you are a holocaust denialist, then you are by definition absolutely intolerant, and I am perfectly fine with you being expunged from any community of the civilised.

Roman artists used vanishing point perspective, which to medieval artists -- who had no grasp of perspective at all -- was pretty amazing. What the Romans didn't do was use vanishing points systematically -- they would have multiple contradictory vanishing points in a single image. Brunelleschi's invention of 3-point perspective was much more systematic than what the ancient world had done, but it was very much inspired by the desire to reverse-engineer Roman techniques.

An important piece of context for the renaissance, which is often lost in modern discussions, is that it was not a movement which was attempting to be "innovative" or conceptualised itself as such. Rather, it was fundamentally backwards-looking: an attempt to recapture the glory of antiquity. People were digging up the ruins of a conspicuously more advanced civilisation -- which could do mind-bending things like draw in perspective, pour stone like liquid, and build vast spanning domes that lasted for millennia -- and wanted to reverse-engineer how those things were done. That was the genesis of the renaissance: reverse-engineering. Part of the reason Italy was the centre of this was because it had more tech to dig out of the ground.

Even the Enlightenment saw itself as largely backwards-loooking, again inspired by antiquity, this time in more philosophical terms. It's only since the industrial revolution that the framing has started to be more about "innovation towards the future" than "reclamation of past glory".

This is a surprisingly well-documented phenomena: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/10/151003-anima...