tyu1000

Google doesn't innovate? The software on the new Pixel 3 is nothing short of amazing from spam call answering to night mode photography. And it is all getting backported to earlier Pixel models as well.

There's a Youtube channel called something like 'AI Channel' that has relevant talks. LeCun did a big one a few months ago. Hinton has had at least one Google Talk.

A ton. I was involved in the successful opposition against a wind farm project in Canada that was proposed for just north of a major internationally protected migratory bird habitat[1]. Habitat destruction is just a big an environmental problem, and actually probably bigger, than climate change in North America. We are down to less than ten percent of native grasslands remaining in our continent which is the biggest slow-motion environmental disaster that doesn't get talked about much.

What's the point of renewable energy if not to help protect natural areas like the ones being proposed for development?

https://leaderpost.com/business/energy/chaplin-lake-wind-tur...

Destroying a virgin desert ecosystem with an industrial installation is not little environmental impact.

These huge renewable projects do have major ecological impact, why lie about it? Due to low power generation density they take up a lot of space compared to fossil fuel/nuclear plants and that's not including the large amount of power lines that have to be run to all these new facilities. There are well known negative ecological impacts from the solar farms in this area that others have pointed out.

Just because a desert or prairie ecosystem isn't as obvious a conservation target as a forest doesn't mean they are not valuable ecosystems that shouldn't be protected from development.

There's no free lunch in energy generation, every form of it has some ecological drawback. Look at this virgin forest that Georgetown University wants to cut down to put a solar facility up. How is this a net positive for the environment?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/georgetown-...

No, it's not. Downvotes are not for opinions you disagree with.

For sure, you may have very well got a good mattress at a good price. However, things you did like price-matching don't work in mattress-land because all the companies release the same mattress under different models, brands and SKU's, precisely to defeat those tools.

Online mattress sales became popular precisely because of those scummy tactics, as well as very generous return policies, where you can actually use your bed for a significant amount of time before you make a decision on it.

Wirecutter's mattress reviews specify sleeping style.

I went with Leesa, same reasons for going online, also has worked well for me.

Online mattresses became popular because of the multi-naming, multi-branded, high-margin existing world of mattress sales which was, and is, way scummier than online mattress sales are. Plus, how are you really going to judge a mattress by lying on it for a few minutes?

Wirecutter is owned by the NY Times and does very good reviews. You can also spend a few bucks to buy a Consumer Reports subscription for a month and access their huge testing database and years of experience.

This is a many-times repost but still a good read. I've gotten to the point where I only trust Wirecutter/Consumer Reports reviews of anything.

How did 'skilled' programmers recover when a daemon crashed in Sys5 init-based systems? The init script ends after startup so you are stuck with a third party monitoring service that will often clash with startup functions making controlling system state really hard. systemd was worth it for that feature alone.

Linux userspace was a bunch of crufty, unmaintained tools from xinetd to logind (literally had no maintainer until system came along) to update-rc.d that additionally were not taking advantage of a lot of new kernel features like cgroups. systemd has done a great job moving the base layer of linux userspace forward.

The old world of cobbling together bash, sed and shell metacharacters was always hacky, insecure and broken as shit and we are way better off now with systemd.

Yes, systemd makes being an application developer on Linux so much easier. You can declaratively control state of your daemons, recover from crashes, add process limits, control startup order correctly and on and on.. Much more readable and usable than bash scripts pulling in random libraries and using endless greps to find out system state.

Ars is probably the best tech site on the web.

Large parts of the U.S., Japan and Canada all have good nuclear. Gates' has always been about pushing research in the area to get better nuclear, which he outlines clearly in this note.

Roobios is truly awful.

I agree. Tipping is now approaching 20-25% in my Canadian city, it's adding on so much cost to going out. It's about time to rationalize this space and get some better models.

This was discussed here extensively a few months ago.

I like business news in general. You make money in finance by being right and people in the industry will gravitate towards accurate sources by definition. In general, business news tends to have the best qualified hosts as well, who can actually understand macroeconomic concepts.

This is all covered in the article!!!

I'm a NBA fan, it's been funny to see Steve Ballmer portrayed as a business titan using his know-how to turn around the Clippers rather than as a college buddy of Bill Gates who might have been the worst tech CEO of the late 1990's.

The U.S. feeds not only itself but a huge chunk of the world. Agricultural innovations primarily coming from the United States (but also Canada and other industrialized countries) throughout this century and last saved the planet from the Malthusian famines that were widely predicted in the 1970s due to expanding human populations.

No doubt there can be lots of improvements in all agricultural sectors around the globe but having too much food is much better than having too little.

Canada, EU and the U.S. all have massive agriculture subsidies. This article was actually about Canada, you realize?

The EU subsidies for Iberian fisherman to allow them to catch and catch regardless of economics have been the prime mover in destroying fisheries up and down the North American and African coasts. It was, and is, one of the worst environmental crimes of the last century, perhaps only matched by the EU subsidies for diesel vehicles that have contributed so much to climate change and point-source pollution.

Ranching is way better for natural habitat than cropping. Cattle in the North American prairies graze on native grasses where on cultivated land (in Saskatchewan, for peas, wheat and canola) all native grasses are ripped up for crop and riparian and wetland areas are destroyed to increase acreage.

An interesting topic but there were some really silly speculations that ruined a lot of the piece. Big farms can't combine in stages because they have more diverse terrain? Multiple combines harvesting together are a picture from a horrible dystopia?

I've lived in Saskatchewan a long time. Big farms are way better than family farms; they take a lot less expensive government infrastructure to service and are way more capital and operationally-efficient. Combines also always harvest together; the crop all has to come off before the weather turns so friends and family all come out and work monster shifts to get everything done.

If you are going to present a story as evidence-base, stick to the evidence.

Yes, business news is my favourite because to make money you have to be right about things. The guests on Bloomberg TV are just incredible compared to any other media sources, top financiers, economists and etc.. who are comfortable with math, science, history and economics.

There's also for a long time been a tacit protectionist agreement with Boeing that as long as Japanese airliners buy a lot of jets Boeing will produce a lot of components in Japan.

Articles on Bloomberg about this already on who pays if they are found liable for huge amounts of damages, ratepayers, shareholders, taxpayers or bondholders. Likely to be a combination of all four in some amount, if the worse comes to happen.

Completely agree. 'Climate change' is just something thrown around now for people and their political units to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. 'Climate change' didn't force people to build housing in California forests and right on Florida beaches, local land-use, urban planning and transportation decisions did.

Good for them. France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests regardless of what any EU legislation or sense of fairness says, Ireland is well within their rights to do the same.