shaboinkin

I wonder if this will result in a situation where Apple will find some other means of getting paid for all of the money they spend on producing the software that allows access to their hardware. How else do you develop apps for iOS, even if you create your own store, without directly using the software and tooling they provide?

Slightly tangential, but I wonder how much energy savings could be had if street light timings factored in the energy it takes to get cars moving from a stop to the posted speed limit from one intersection to the next. Terrible light timings around my area mean 20-30 cars all start getting to move only to stop a short distance later because one car on a side street happened to approach the sensor when a larger intersection turned green, which leads to a snowball affect where the timings at the next major intersection don’t consider the odd side street breaking the flow, causing more and more timing issues. This affects not just gas/electricity usage but also tire and brake wear.

Risk aversion could be looked at in the same lens in my opinion. It’s possible to be risk adverse in a modern society as we have risk takers to do it on your behalf. Policemen and women, firefighters, warfighters, astronauts, test pilots, athletes, etc. But if you’re a deer in the headlights and unable to be willing to push yourself past your preconceived fears and limits, you’re holding yourself back from your true potential. And why might that be the case? Did something happen in one’s life that causes them such behaviors where they’ll always prevent themselves from entering into uncomfortable situations? Anecdote, but there’s someone I know that absolutely avoids anything that could possibly be uncomfortable for him because of an accident that happened in his childhood. It’s all mental.

Counter point: Apple exists in their size because of the US’s willingness to keep shipping lanes and trade routes open by use of force and US diplomatic efforts to allow for trade to exist in foreign nations. It’s debatable if this still holds true or is the correct approach given the shitshow going on right now.

My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to spend money on it to remove ads. Maybe someone could tell me what actually is a fair value of tapping into literally every single video uploaded in YouTube’s existence on demand? $16 a month seems reasonable to me.

Anecdotally, my company has a device driver posted on Windows Update. I inherited the project and was digging through Microsoft’s hardware dashboard trying to find information on the stability of the driver. I ended up finding that our driver was crashing rather frequently. Looking closer, the name of the driver shown was curious as it contained the name of our driver as defined in the inf file, and appended at the end was “(WeTest)”. I looked through all source code looking for a reference to this string with no avail. Eventually I googled “WeTest” and find out WeTest is something owned by Tencent. I double checked all drivers that were ever posted to the server from our account and found no reference to “WeTest” in any of the driver packages uploaded. I emailed our Microsoft contact and got no answers as to where this driver came from and why it was visible from our account. After a few months, this driver finally was removed from our dashboard and our administrator for the account had to submit government documents to Microsoft to show he worked at where he said he did. I won’t give specifics on who’s or what’s, and anyone is more than welcome to dismiss what I’m saying without evidence. But your comment, “when Microsoft’s update servers get compromised..”, made me want to share this experience. Maybe it was some terrible software bug on Microsoft’s end that managed to combine information from two different entities, but we were never given an explanation as to how this happened.

From watching talks by the various US think tanks (CSIS, CFR, Hudson, etc), the common theme whenever the topic of AI is brought up is that the US is in strategic competition with China where it essentially boils down to economic superiority where the idea is to have US technology spread globally and not China’s. Oh and military application of AI.

I have a hunch the hyper won’t slow down anytime soon if these groups who have the eyes and ears of the government are suggesting to go full steam ahead in the technology.

It sounds like you’re making the assumption that things will remain static because the alternative is unfathomable to even consider.

Sure, but we’re talking about hundreds of miles of coast line all being affected, within various regions as the article points out, at relatively the same time. Thousands of coastline if we want consider a worst case rate of increase. The leaching of whatever is soaking into the water will likely occur in localized areas at similar rates. It seems reasonable to me it’ll introduce shock to the ecosystem if considered in geological timescales.

What I wonder about sea level rise is what happens to all of the development that gets swallowed by the sea? I’m not optimistic that there will be proper cleanup of the stuff that was built up over time. If I recall from the LA fires last year, the burnt down homes left some toxic stuff behind that require proper disposal. The same stuff in those homes presumably exists in the buildings and infrastructure that will be taken by the sea. How much pollution is going to be introduced into the environment? And what long term consequences will result from that?

That 25% turns out to over 77 million people. Reducing voting results to percentages is a bit silly in my opinion. We both major parties, including minority parties, are composed of autonomous individuals with individual worldviews that are shaped by their unique life experiences that are capable of sharing their ideas with others while simultaneously consuming new ideas, including those from faceless actors who may have a vested interest in seeing a particular group rise to power, then act on them.

I have yet to see either major party present some message where some level of respect is required to even acknowledge that someone thinks differently than another, irrespective of the validity of their ideas, even if it’s completely illogical. The mainstream discourse I read typically descends into insults, which doesn’t help anything. However, I feel we’re past a point in which this is even possible given the polarization of viewpoints. That snowball has been rolling for over two decades it seems.