People are far more terrified of flying, in general, than they are of driving. However, driving is far, far more dangerous -- with flying commercial being one of the safest modes of travel.
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
I am seriously saddened by the complete takeover of mobile computing by Apple and Google. There is no freedom on your own device to choose your own software, except inside the very narrow constraints allowed.
I would if I could. Which non-Android Linux phone can I buy here in Brazil? Importing from outside Brazil doesn't count unless it has ANATEL certification, customs rejects any non-certified phone.
If not for online banking I probably wouldn't even have a smartphone, however none of my banks supports anything other than recent androids. I feel stuck
pieces of paper is certainly better than bank database entries, but it's still fundamentally the same game: you need to work for something that they can print.
Fair point, but we still need people (like Linux enthusiasts) in Australia to buy these phones and complain to the manufacturer to add support for any missing features needed for 000, and work with the carriers to whitelist the devices. If no one buys these devices in the first place and no one complains about it, Linux phone makers would have little incentive to resolve the issue.
Maybe the Aussie Linux users could get together and work together with Linux Australia[1] to act as an intermediary and work something out.
I don't believe Linux Australia is the first port of call. Rather, conferences/meetups that are supported by Linux Australia would be the way to go. Basically, it needs to be very grassroots, and start with (capable) people who are genuinely interested in this and not distracted by other things that are a waste of attention. Any other strategy will likely be even more difficult and less likely to take fruition.
The crap part is a lot of niche phones got banned because you need to prove it can call triple zero not by default, so it'll be a real pain, and carriers don't really care.
What freedom do you need beyond replacing the OS, which is possible on all phones Google sells? If you want to replace the radio firmware, that isn't something that would be possible without that duopoly either.
The Pixel line is, from what I can see, a tiny part of the smart phone market share.
So, yes, I can buy a phone that I can mostly control (at the risk of losing access to some draconian apps). But most devices being sold don't allow consumer control.
Actually the Point and shoot market has largely dried up, even the 'fancier' point and shoots.
Apple did a very smart thing, using Sony BSI[0] and Stacked[1] Sensors in their phones.
As the 'Camera Snob' in the family my Brother recently asked me to help look for a small point and shoot for his wife for their child's events, and I was shocked at how few options there are compared to a decade ago (And how little most have improved since!)
To be clear, the 'ILC' (what many might think of when they think of when they say DSLR) market has continued to advance and the tech is better than ever, but the simple built-in lens point and shoot market has gotten very small outside of certain markets.
[0] - Back Side Illumination, basically a way to build the sensor that allows more light to hit it, but has some yield implications
[1] - Stacked sensors is again another sensor-build optimization, but it allows for faster readout of the full sensor with less rolling shutter, makes 'computational photography' feasible.
Or passes to buses, trains, planes, concerts, sports arenas, and possibly soon government identification.
There was a recent story about some guy who had been buying season tickets for decades by paper ticket. The stadium shutdown the paper ticketing and left him without an option, except to purchase a smartphone.
Must be a Europe thing, as RealID pissed enough boomers off here in the States that I doubt anyone would push harder than that, and outside of very stupid ticket apps that occasionally won't let me print, I can't recall the last time a paper ticket and my drivers license didn't work. I also can just walk into a bank branch and raise a stink whenever I need something banking related, I guess all of this feels really contrived.
I called Capital One to replace a card this month (either there's no online flow or it wasn't available to me). The default flow to verify my identity before they'd replace the card was to send a notification to the android app. My android version is too old. The alternative flow (which took them 20 minutes to figure out) was to send a text message with a link to an online ID verification service.
Is it COMPLETELY impossible that you could receive that link on a dumb phone, send it to a PC with a webcam, and then take a selfie photo and an ID photo? No. Is it likely to be an incredible hassle? Dear lord, yes. You can't upload photos, so you'd have to finagle with a webcame to get a shot of your ID on a surface followed by a selfie of yourself. Is it possible that in other similar situations, you'll be required to use an android app instead of a website? Yes, I've had that happen.
I think you are grossly underestimating the degree to which smartphones have become absolutely mandatory for many tasks.
Which is not a valid alternative for the card replacement use case as that's time sensitive and might happen when you are in an entirely different country where your bank doesn't even have any branches.
> The phone numbers never stopped working. You just stopped calling
The bank managed to not fix the problem the last 4 times my grandmother called them. Every single problem required an appointment to fix (I suspect they're not even allowed to do anything with any account over phone given how many times this has happened).
Yes, her bank is bad and I've told her to switch. But I wouldn't expect any other bank to actually have good customer service.
> Every restaurant I’ve been to like this has a menu somewhere.
And the best restaurants have staff and chefs that can deliver things that aren't even on a standard menu...
Actually, this reminds me of a time when I saw a person with communication difficulties order at a McDonald's counter. Without missing a beat, the staff member pulled out a large pictorial menu from beneath their counter for the person with a disability to point to. It seemed like a totally normal occurrence to them, but a very novel one to me as the next person in line.
> Every restaurant I’ve been to like this has a menu somewhere.
Yeah have fun being that guy for every restaurant visit.
There problem with relying on last-resort alternatives is that sooner rather than later you'll be in a situation where they have been optimized out and you are left with nothing.
On MP3 players: I specifically got bone conducting headphones with on board storage so I could listen to music without carrying another device with me. Look for ones that are targeted towards swimming, they are the ones that tend to have on board storage.
On small point and shoots, I have a Sony ZV-1. It's marketed as a video camera, but I mostly use it for photography. It's great quality, and pocketable.
On compute, I don't really have a phone at all. I carry a Daylight Computer DC-1. Which as a device I recommend, but unfortunately the company backs anti-vax efforts which I found out about recently :\
If your daily life includes interacting with a bank then in many cases you absolutely do need a smartphone many banks no longer have websites that can be accessed with a web browser.
You you also don't really NEED a roof about your head or a shower or a daily meal even or contact with any other human being. Not really as strong of an argument as you seem to think.
Many so called dumb phones are just Android phones with buttons, real dumb low powered devices are being phased out because you don't get support for VoLTE Emergency
If it can't call 911 you're not allowed to sell it as a phone. Phone calls use VoLTE which is newish technology. Therefore it's illegal to sell older technology as a phone.
Allowed or not, if you bought your phone before the regulations were in place you'd still have no connection on some models, even 4G phones
> https://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/Guides/Check-if-p...
"But it's not just 3G phones that won't work on Australian mobile networks; certain 4G phones won't work either if they don't support Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE) Emergency Calling."
What is more surprising is that competitors do not arise. Democracies in general have totally messed this up. The USA should be fined for exerting a monopoly onto other countries. And then fined for penalising US customers with that monopoly at home.
Other countries are free to find a way to incentivize building home-grown equivalents and prioritizing that software or even applying tarrifs to foreign software.
There's definitely skill rot that happens -- but there are also new skills to learn. Dependency on tools is not a new problem, though, is it?
Agents definitely run amok on code bases, create bloat, needless complexity, etc. However, they enable many people to do so much more than they could without them, at least in the moment, that they're not going to go away.
Yeah, I am also feeling the rot and do not like it one bit. However, the world does not revolve around my feelings, so I have adapted and fully embraced it. That being said, I think AI took away 90% of the enjoyment I got from the job of Software Engineer. It isn't just the code writing, it was the space to go deep and immerse myself fully to solve a problem. I think there is still a need to problem solve at different levels, but with AI the velocity has increased so much - the space to focus on one thing for any amount of time has also been drastically reduced (this could be because I work for a company and may be company specific. I also do freelance dev, and find much more enjoyment there, but still not the same as pre AI).
Yup. I have embraced LLM usage since it's obvious this genie is not going back in the bottle and they are objectively force-multipliers at certain tasks. But I didn't get into software engineering to be productive, I fell into this career because I loved building things and it just sort of evolved into a pretty lucrative hobby.
AI is completely sucking the enjoyment out of my work.
It's like they invented a robot that can build whatever you want out of Legos. You'll never have to touch your Legos again! /s
The problem I'm seeing is that most of that additional output is just increasing pressure on the real bottlenecks such as design, QA, operations, support, etc. Which is why we're seeing this dual phenomenon of programmer productivity increases at the same time as the productivity of the overall business crashes out.
At my last employer we were contending with real customer fatigue and attrition. The application was changing so rapidly that it was overwhelming both our ability to uphold quality standards, and customers' ability to keep up with the feature churn.
Or, to put it more succinctly: nobody actually wants all this slop.
It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.
This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs
> In 2019, the loss was $862 million, but for 2020 there is a huge profit of $721 million.
> However: A closer look at the figures published last week shows that Tesla is still making losses with actual sales of electric cars - around $500,000 in 2020.
> In 2020, carbon certificates brought in $1.6 billion, without this revenue the numbers would still be below red.
With a "profit" margin that jumpy and a history of unrentability, i think it's fair to say that Tesla only exists today because of subsidies. It's not just tax benefits, as you frame it, but in this case EU-CO2 certificates, a direct "revenue" stream.
Can you say point to any other industry that hasn't used subsidies/ selling to the gov? Oil and gas, semi conductors, compute... Everyone sells and gets loans from the gov... Tesla like the least.
The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.
I think they're cutting strategic investments that they don't have personal investments in, as suggested in their banana republic handbook. They seem to be fine with fossil fuel investments for example.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start investing again once they destroy the competition and create rival companies in their stead.
Right now they seem to be swatting away wind and solar and propping up nuclear companies that are in their pocket.
The titles read like they're straight out of The Onion:
"Trump Media To Merge With Nuclear Fusion Startup"
wtf, I missed that one. I’m really sorry for anyone living in the US but the country you knew is dead, whatever the new country is, the old rules don’t apply. It’s now closer to a 3rd world country where literally everything all the time is corruption, as a core fundamental value of the administration
the way the us govt has behaved internationally i wouldnt be surprised if countries/people actively boycott made in america.. the market for us goods and services would definitely have shrunk.
The government should give incentives to do things that benefit the future of the country. All auto manufactures had the same incentives but instead of building actual good vehicles they instead shipped more production to Mexico and continue to build the absolute most dog shit vehicles in the world.
Not a single US auto manufacturer, outside of Tesla, has a good EV, nor FSD. Waymo is buying thousands of Chinese cars because of how shit US car manufacturer are.
They are the worst of the worst. They shouldn't even be in business they are that bad at building cars which they literally invented.
This is such a braindead take. Ford could have taken advantage of those same EV incentives. Any other new startup could have too. Tesla got nothing special.
I once tinkered with the game streaming set up available via Steam, so I could do it in a way where it streamed the normal complete desktop setup. I used it to operate my desktop from the laptop.
It worked relatively well, but wasn't perfect. It was as close to what you're describing as I've seen, though. This was a few years ago; something like this might work even better now.
Your comment illustrates the tension very well, I think. Businesses don't generally want customers who aren't their core market; those people though, often want one slice of a business's offerings. This can lead to big distractions for businesses, as putting in the effort to serve the wrong market is a waste of time. The publishing industry really fell for this when the internet became widespread; they dreamed of huge audiences and big ad numbers. Turns out, that was not a model that worked, at all. The model that works is focusing on serving a niche, and charging a subscription fee, so you can get predictable revenue.
That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :)
You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed.
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