notacoward

"Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.

> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.

How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?

I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.

While it's true that this particular driver probably violated existing law, it's also true that this particular maneuver is inherently mistake-prone. The driver still has to look three ways - across the intersection (for left turners), at the crosswalk, and behind them for cyclists (or fast pedestrians). It's too easy to miss one while checking for another, even for a diligent driver following all laws. The statistics on "right hooks" and the pedestrian equivalent don't lie. Right on red is just a bad idea.

Maybe, at least some places, it's a vicious cycle. I don't like that phrase generally, but it seems to fit here. More people driving means more vehicle vs. pedestrian contention and accidents, which means fewer people walking, which means more people driving, 'round and 'round we go. I do see this playing out at a couple of schools near me. The number of people driving their middle-school kids less than half a mile is insane, and it's not just at the school either. Any street that has a convenient cut-through to the school grounds effectively becomes a second pick-up line at 2-4pm. Walking or running near there has become noticeably less safe since we moved to this neighborhood five years ago, from the increase in traffic alone even before other factors are accounted for.

One possibility might be a combination of the "mostly urban" and "big SUV" factors. To put it another way: where are people driving those larger vehicles. I don't have numbers, but it does seem like vehicles that were once common mostly in suburban/exurban/rural environments are now more common in cities as well. Poor visibility plus higher pedestrian density seems like a powerfully bad combination.

Mostly, though, drivers have just gotten worse. Corner-cutting is one of my pet peeves, and a good example here. I used to see someone cutting a corner across opposing traffic - usually someone turning off an arterial vs. someone trying to come out of the side street - less than once a week. Now, even though I drive less, it seems to be everyone all the time. If they're not cutting the corner, they're swinging wide to the same effect. Ditto for running red lights. Where I used to see one person running it by half a second, I now see three running it by multiple seconds. Turning where there's a "no turn on red" same way. I've stood at a rotary and counted how many cars were not using it properly, endangering others. Yeah, I know, get a life, but the fact remains that drivers are worse.

The only real question IMO is why drivers are worse. I have more theories, of course. Breakdown of the social contract, people under more time pressure, phones (though that was already examined), etc. But those kind of aren't essential to my point so I'll leave them aside for now.

Git is not just for saving personal history. It's also, and more importantly, a collaboration tool. Your contex window is no substitute for that, and can't even be relied on to be either complete or accurate over what might be years of development.

A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.

It's also worth noting that leucovorin is an important drug for counteracting the effects of methotrexate (chemotherapy drug), and this thinly veiled attempt to drive profit for Dr. Oz's company could create a shortage. This kind of thing has happened before, eg. with some of the bogus COVID treatments. In other words, this is not just unhelpful. It might actually kill people.

There might be a bit of history involved. I'm GenX - very early GenX, at that. I discovered Monster in 2002 IIRC, back when energy drinks really started to take off. (Red Bull is the only one I remember seeing much before that, unless you also count Jolt, and even then it was nowhere near the pervasive thing it has become today.) I tried everything I could find, and Monster was the only one that didn't taste like absolute crap. I think the siberian ginseng is the key BTW, to complement caffeine's characteristic flavor.

So, back then, most consumers would have been GenX. Millennials would have been between 6yo and 21yo with only the very oldest likely to be buying such things. GenZ wasn't part of any market segment, and Alpha didn't even exist yet. Some of us GenXers stuck with it; at 60yo I still drink a can instead of coffee every day and none of my labs show any ill effects. Maybe we're not the primary demographic any more, but we're certainly still in there.

So ... which of us speaks for all GenX males in the world? ;)

First, network effects. Amazon was able to grow because there wasn't already an Amazon that they'd have to pry users (and sellers) away from. No replacement will have that luxury. Even harder to wean people off Google search, let alone Chrome, let alone Android. In social media, many people are unwilling to leave all their friends (and family) behind to go somewhere and be a stranger again.

Second, funding models. Because of that network effect, nobody will dump the ungodly amounts of cash on an Amazon or Google or Facebook replacement that they dumped on the originals. They can't grow, so they can't compete, so they can't grow, etc.

Third: regulatory capture. Meta is the clearest example of this, secretly funding PACs and lobbyists to get regulation that they are well able to comply with but no smaller competitor possibly could. It's an effective moat.

"If it was done once it can be done again" is just wishful thinking. It's not generally true, and especially not in internet-facing tech. The soil is already depleted, or even poisoned. Reining in the incumbents is a prerequisite to any alternatives getting on their feet.

I was on as many as three on-call rotations for a few years. One had only two people for a while, so I was on every other week. The two things I most remember are:

* Arranging my whole life around on-call requirements. Bringing my laptop and backpack every time I went out. Designing new running routes that would use every street in a neighborhood and keep me close to home so I could respond within a 15-minute window. And yeah, the drinking thing. It pervaded my life in many ways I hadn't expected.

* Time zones and geography. These were always problematic, but especially during on-call. Often I'd narrow a problem down to a particular component that I didn't know well, so I'd try to contact the sub-team responsible for it, but nobody would respond. Then I'd try to turn the right knobs myself, and as often as not get yelled at for it in the morning. No, my afternoon, because my coworkers were three hours behind and late-commuters to boot. Of course they'd never hesitate to schedule meetings or ping me for trivial things well after my dinner.

I had taken the job, initially working on a project for which I was already a maintainer, because I wanted to avoid becoming an "architecture astronaut" by getting closer to operational reality. Indeed, I did learn a lot about how my own code behaved in real life. I don't have a problem with on-call requirements in and of themselves, but the way people and organizations handle the details is kind of <vomit emoji>.

Great points. My own "have to say this every time" is that Waymo only operates within the boundaries of a few cities. Most people's experience of self-driving cars is not with Waymo. It's with vastly inferior technologies, most especially Tesla's. Waymo might be great, but I get really tired of fans dismissing others' misgivings as some sort of Luddite thing when it's entirely justified by experiences people have had where they live. If people want to say that autonomous vehicles are already better, they need to stop sneering long enough to show how that works at a freeway interchange with multiple high-speed merges and lane drops back to back, at a grocery store parking lot when it's busiest, near any suburban school at pickup time. Without that data, "safer than humans" is mere cherry picking.