temporaryvector

The problem isn't so much signing up, the problem is that from their website, without signing up, I have no idea what their service does and what are it's features.

A small paragraph and maybe a screenshot would do wonders for my willingness to try their service. But I'm basically complaining for the sake of complaining because I dislike this trend.

I've always been a bit curious, do these types of programs make any attempt to identify whether they're running in a VM?

I agree with this. I have though about it extensively, as an introvert who hates large cities, and I think (at least for me) a city between 500k and 1 million inhabitants spread out over a sizeable area is ideal. It has some of the benefits of a large city and some of the benefits of a small town, and I think it strikes a good balance between being anonymous in a crowd while having enough space for myself to live comfortably. Such a city would also have the population to find enough people with similar interests/hobbies to have clubs and meetups.

I'm overall surprised at how unpopular/unknown wxWidgets is when the discussion turns to cross platform UI toolkits.

I've used it a lot, as well as other popular toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc.) and I find that wx is, at the very least, the least bad option and overall programming in it hasn't been a pain, regardless of which binding I used.

I guess my only complaint would be that it's a bit harder to do something way outside the norm when compared to Qt, but at that point it might be better to use native SDKs or straight up OpenGL or something for your GUI.

While not exactly a convertible, the Honda e sounds right up your alley.

It's probably the only electric car I'm looking forward to anymore.

The thing worth mentioning is that becoming a famous author and writing quality books are different goals, achieved through different means. Cynically, I would say that they're unrelated, but in reality I'd say writing quality books is one avenue towards becoming a famous author but likely the least reliable one. Similarly, getting rich writing books is also another separate goal, which can also be achieved without the other two.

Thus, I disagree that goals like "becoming a famous author" entirely out of your control. There are definite steps one could take towards such a goal, but as with anything in life there's never a guarantee. Granted, you do have less control over the outcome if your goal depends on other people, like becoming famous, but those steps still exist and could include things like networking extensively, spending a lot of time self-promoting, polishing your image, hanging out with the rich and famous, etc.

The problem, I think, is that a lot of people tend to think that goals like "becoming a famous author" and "writing good books" are the same, or that the latter will automatically lead to the former, and when they figure out that the strategies for getting there are different they become disillusioned.

The complaint isn't about the capability for mass surveillance, but the normalization of it, in the public mind.

The capability has existed for a pretty long time, mostly out of the public eye, with occasional bursts of outrage when something caused it to become public, quickly forgotten afterwards.

The capability is there, that genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in. This isn't really about the technology, it's about the legal frameworks and social attitudes surrounding this capability that are worth talking about. Putting your hands up in defeat is not useful, and at this point probably neither is trying to prevent the technology from spreading. I am unsure what the solution is but the conversation needs to happen, and in all likelihood the end result of that conversation will be that corporations can't be trusted, just like they couldn't be trusted with food safety, for example, thus the FDA was created. What actions will be taken after that, I cannot predict.

>You can definitely live with a voice-only phone

This is likely to be untrue in the immediate future. This is probably already true in places like China, where mobile payments are the norm.

As a personal example, and I know this does not yet apply to the US, but where I live it is impossible (or so inconvenient that it might as well be not possible) to do some banking operations without an Android or iOS device, as even accessing my bank's website requires me to have the app installed for token generation. I'm sure if I shopped around I could still find a smaller bank without such a requirement or live with the limitations, maybe finagle a way to use an emulator or something equally inconvenient, but I'm quite certain that this will not last and a smartphone will become essential. A lot of other things are also quite inconvenient without a smartphone around here.

I know the US and Europe have a distinct resistance to the smartphone (or even the computer) becoming required to live as anything but a homeless vagrant because their economies and infrastructure developed before smartphones were even an idea, which gives them the luxury to resist these technologies on moral grounds, or even on the grounds of not wanting to learn the new thing. On the other hand, countries whose economies developed in lockstep with cellular technologies and smartphones (China, India, much of Africa, South-East Asia, much of Latin America, etc.) don't have that particular luxury or simply take a much more pragmatic approach to the whole thing. In these places it is already incredibly inconvenient to get by without a smartphone and will likely become impossible in the near future, if it isn't already.

When smartphones and the internet do become essential to life, I can only hope that the laws of the land have managed to catch up by then. I am not particularly optimistic on this aspect, though, and I suspect it will take some kind of major disaster and/or abuse of human rights (or more likely, a series of them) to happen for another "age of enlightenment"-like period to happen, focused on information technology this time.

EDIT: spelling

>Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.

I think that was kinda the main problem for me, actually. When you have a PDF article or book or a plain webpage, you can jump around without much penalty, and you can skip ahead then go back and so on, you can skim parts and can check if something relevant appears ahead. At least, that's how I read scientific articles: read the introduction, skim through the text, go back to read the more interesting parts and jump around until you grasp it and so on. Any supplementary data or figures provided I usually have open in another window for quick reference as I'm reading the text.

The best UX for scientific articles for how I read them is still paper for the text and a computer for anything else. Second best would be a good PDF reader.

Thus, for this kind of interactive visualization, I would have preferred it if they had made a good visualizer and an accompanying article, instead of mixing the two into a single thing. Feels like they added unnecessary friction to both sides of the presentation and overall the effect would be better if split. For example, an apparent problem is if I want to jump back to a piece of text I read before I have to remember where in the TOC it was (can't just scroll back up) and then wait for all the 3D inserts to load when what I want is just the text.

A project that I think did this mostly right is GeaCron (geacron.com), at least the visualization part. It's not really comparable since GeaCron is a world map, but with it I can visualize a particular point of interest and then read up the information at my own leisure. I've wasted hours with that map this way.

I don't want to diminish the effort of these authors, for it is impressive and the 3D-inserts are great and I still enjoyed it despite the UX problems, but as someone who is a bit passionate about visualization in academic environments, I often see projects like this that I feel could be so much better if they didn't try to reinvent certain wheels.

For me, it's a pretty interesting article on a topic I very much enjoy and they did some very impressive work, but it's ruined by some pretty bad UX.

Reading this felt like a chore. I would greatly prefer a PDF file or flat website with the text and a separate viewer.

>A lot of car guys just aren't going to rip apart their wiring harnesses and do testing to make sure it'll work with their onboard sensors.

I'm not so sure about that.

My go-to mechanic is an older gentleman, late 60s, and oftentimes I'm surprised how quickly he updated his workshop to include electronics. He went from barely having a multimeter and not knowing how to use a computer in the early 2000s to having a well equipped electronics bench with oscilloscopes, scan tools, soldering equipment, etc. He told me he went to a bunch of courses to get updated on modern car technology because his clients started bringing newer cars. Keep in mind this is in a developing country (Mexico) so he has to keep repair costs down to keep clients, because the more affluent people will go to dealerships to get a proper fix. A lot of his repairs that I've seen involve what I'd charitably call "bodging" using parts that aren't original or intended, but they get the job done on a budget.

Similarly with car guys I hang around here, there has been a noticeable uptick in electronic knowledge, maybe not to the level of custom ECUs yet, but stuff like making an arduino controlled radiator fan or making a custom box to read the CAN-bus to get the steering wheel controls do stuff they weren't intended to do is pretty commonplace.

People working with cars are already used to complexity and learning new things, after all, so I don't think electronics will scare them off. We don't see as much of it yet because of all the lockdown and manufacturer's insistence at straight up replacing parts, but now that modern-style fully electronic cars (2010 or so) are becoming affordable enough to be "project cars" for average car guys, we'll see more and more stuff like this. A car guy might not want to rip into the wiring harness on his daily driver that he paid 15k for, but a 3k shitbox he bought as a second car for fun? Well, people are already doing that.

Legal alcohol limits are a guideline and not a solid rule. Ideally, they were designed with the idea that personal responsibility would play a role in your decision to drive after having a beer.

After all, you can have zero alcohol in your system and still be impaired in some way like other drugs, sickness, donating blood, lack of sleep, etc. This is why DUI arrests usually involve some judgement on the side of the police officer, and they can make the decision that you're driving impaired even if you are under the legal limit.

I am ambivalent on the idea of reducing legal limits. For one, it's never been easier to avoid driving drunk, with Uber and the like, and anecdotally it seems that the propaganda against drunk driving is working, with it becoming largely unacceptable among younger people these days (although this would be purely anecdotal, I have no evidence either way). Additionally, seeing how I don't drink, any reduction to the legal limit wouldn't really affect me much. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of zero tolerance laws and I think they always do more hard than good, and additionally I don't believe that farther reducing the limit will have any effect on drunk driving. I also don't much like the idea of farther restricting the decision making power of police officers, there needs to be a balance here: enough restrictions to prevent abuse but also enough freedom to allow officers to account for circumstances and not turn them into law-enforcing robots.

Increasing police budget to get better enforcement of existing laws would be another approach but doesn't seem like a good use of money. I think the most cost effective way of reducing impaired driving related fatalities has been, and will continue being, education and public transport when it comes to urban areas. Ride hailing apps and self-driving vehicles will eventually do the rest.

One kind of legislative change I'd consider taking a look at is reducing or removing penalties for sleeping in your car, particularly in rural and suburban areas. Letting someone sleep it off in their car is far better than them driving drunk, and I think any fears of homeless people setting up camp in their cars, which is the origin of many such laws, is vastly exaggerated.

Taking a look at that report, it seems to be missing an important statistic when it comes to motorcycle crashes.

What is the fatality and serious injury rate when comparing when the motorcyclist is at fault vs when the other vehicle is at fault.

An accident involving just a motorcycle, intuitively, seems a lot less likely to be fatal to a properly geared person. Often times such an accident will be because of operator error and result in a low-side crash. Crashing into something on the road could result in serious damage, but that's a lot less likely than losing traction and falling off. If I recall correctly, the Hurt report supports this.

Similarly, in a two-vehicle accident where the motorcyclist is at fault, the motorcyclist is likely to see it coming and attempt to prevent it in some way. Additionally such a statistic will also include motorcyclists low-siding and then their motorcycle (or them) sliding into a vehicle.

Overall, it seems believable to me that while a in majority (56% isn't even that much more) of motorcycle crashes the rider is at fault, if we take a look at only fatal crashes and crashes resulting in serious injury, cars will bear the majority of the responsibility.

All that said, I also find that report to be a bit alarmist and disingenuous with statistics, particularly when compared to the Hurt and the MAIDS reports. I would assume this was done in the interest of "scaring" riders into safer behaviors and not with any malicious intent.

It took some time to find a combination of medicine that worked for me, and I was pretty lucky as far as that is concerned. So my first bit of advice to anyone considering medicine is to stick with it and follow directions. It's also important to find a psychiatrist who will work with you, in my experience (your mileage will vary) it takes roughly a month or sometimes two to see if something is working, so sticking with it (unless you start having really serious side effects) is important even if it appears not to be working. Also, a good psychiatrist, in my experience, will give you a phone number so you can reach him at almost any time with questions and concerns.

As far as medication itself goes, I started with Atomoxetine (Straterra) and that barely worked for me, I also tried Methylphenidate in extended release form (Concerta) which does work but came with an annoying amount of anxiety. What works best for me is Lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), which is basically extended release amphetamine. I take 70mg daily in the morning and it works really well and doesn't produce any side effects for me. 70mg is considered a large dose, but seeing how I can sleep well and even take naps during the day (if I want), and have no anxiety, irritability or tachycardia when taking it, it seems to be an appropriate dose for me. A friend of mine suspected he had ADHD and took a much lower dose of Vyvanse (10 mg), and he was shaky and irritable right away, so in the end his diagnosis wasn't ADHD but depression, which can have similar symptoms.

Also when I started, I took fluoxetine and clonazepam to help with depression and anxiety that was caused by living with untreated ADHD, but I'm not taking that anymore because I don't need to, following doctor's advice, of course, never stop taking anti-depressants by yourself, withdrawal can be harsh if you don't take care and taper the dose off gradually. These helped me keep my mood in the right space so I could get started on working towards fixing my problems. Now I'm just taking Vyvanse, and while the dose might decrease in the future, it's likely that I'll be taking it for the rest of my life, or at least until heart problems make it impossible to keep taking it.

I hope this helps, even if it's more information that you asked for. The point I wanted to make is that while medication is there to help, it doesn't magically make the problems go away (even if the right combination can feel that way), and the same symptoms can mean many different things, so psychiatric medicine can involve a lot of trial and error, especially if you're unlucky. I found it very important to keep careful track of how my state of mind changed as I took the medicine and to report it as accurately as possible to my psychiatrist.