curveship

it's an emothickon

That's definitely 1999-era HTML and layout, except for the "This is an archived page" header, which is the only CSS on the page. The rest is all well-known tricks from the time: tables, image maps, a few embedded images. Heh, it even has the blockquote trick to pad the margins. Brings back some pretty horrid memories.

The term I've heard for this phenomenon is "mathwashing."

Thanks for your perspective, very interesting.

I'm really surprised that all it takes to be declared qualified is the signature of someone else who's qualified. That leaves lots of room for slippage and social pressure, like the dip you mention. It also leaves no one specifically responsible for the crew's level of qualification. A cynic might say that was the point of the system: we know this is going to fail, so make sure no one is directly in the line of fire when the shit cannon goes off.

I really wanted Bourdain to become a salty, profligate old man, throwing barbs from behind a stiff drink and an ever-craggier face.

Sad news.

Here we go. We'll now have the first traffic fatality trial where it's not drivers-trying-drivers but people-trying-a-megacorp.

(Disclaimer: I'm a bike advocate, so I may have a different perspective on some of this than most.)

Our car-based transportation system is far and away the most dangerous thing any of us accept doing on a daily basis. 40,000 die a year.

But when cases come to court, everyone on the jury has in the back of their mind "that could have been me if I lost concentration at the wrong moment, or made one bad judgement, etc etc."

So penalties are comparatively light for traffic fatalities. Big punishments are only meted out if the case is so egregious -- repeated drug use, flagrantly reckless behavior -- that the jury can be convinced that the driver is different from them.

In other words, drivers don't get punished for doing something dangerous, because everybody on the road is doing something dangerous. They get punished for doing something more dangerous than the norm.

In this case, there's no question that the "driver" is different than the jury -- it's a computer. Now the symmetry that made jurors compare themselves to the accused is broken.

The result, and what self-driving car advocates don't get, is that self-driving cars don't just have to be safer than human drivers to be free of liability, they need to be safe period. In a trial, they don't benefit from the default "could have been me" defense.

That's a HUGE requirement. In fact, it's probably impossible with our current road system. It won't just take better self-driving cars, but better roads and a major cultural change in our attitudes about driving.

As a bike advocate, I welcome this shift, but I also see how deluded many of the current self-driving projects are. Software moves fast, but asphalt and mentalities move slow. We're not years away from a self-driving transportation system, we're decades.

And this trial is just the beginning of that long story.

Perl 6 feels like what happens when your answer to all bike-shedding questions is "both!" and your answer to the follow-up question "how will we tell them apart?" is "we'll add a secret codeword."

Still, I have to love the fun some Perl coders feel in their language.

That's not Linus' position. The "API contract" for the kernel is "we don't break userspace code," not "we don't break userspace code that follows the specs." He would bounce (and flame) the fix you're suggesting.

.find() and .findIndex() are new in es6, but the others are all es5.

US divorce rate is lower than it's been for 40 years.