byw

Is $200 close to what it costs the hospital, or after subsidies?

Opus in January

So pre-nerf Opus?

The trick to longevity in things is to acquire skills in repairing.

I'm curious if Rust (WASM through JS interop?) also has access to `window.location`, and if the API has some more safety mechanisms.

Maybe they can also make the boxes out of concrete for a lot cheaper?

Except even in volume, you've probably spent more than the car is worth (labor will be the killer, not hardware), or enough that the person whose economics dictate an older car can't afford the upgrade.

I'm not sure why that needs to be the case. Open Pilot is essentially a working aftermarket kit, but they can't sell the whole kit legally, only the hardware.

Open Pilot essentially created an aftermarket advanced adaptive cruise control that works better than most brands outside of Tesla. They just can't sell it legally as a whole package, so you buy the hardware, but the software is open source.

The difficulty of modifying the body, is mostly a financial decision I think. The body is by-and-large optimized for assembly rather than repair and modifications - that's why body shops charge an arm and a leg.

Crumple zones are model specific you can’t just change those without making new car.

Yep, and I think that's the problem. Cars should be designed in a way that you can make this kind of safety upgrades. There's little technical reason why with a more modular body and platform, the manufacturer can't design a new crumple zone for retrofit, run finite element analysis, and crash test it.

They may need to rethink fundamentally how mass-market cars are made, like using more fasteners instead of welding in the body and frame, or using plastic instead of sheet metal when they are not necessary, like for the body panels.

That old malfunctioning airbags should be able to be replaced easily.

But then it would incentivize the customers to keep their old cars instead of buying new ones.

On the flip side, I bought an used 08 Sprinter van over the previous, more reliable generation, mainly for the side airbags. It turned out the one I bought didn't have them.

It was a $120 option, and most buyers opted out. A few years later they were made mandatory.

I think it's a shame that we can't add new safety features into older cars.

I feel like there's very little engineering reasons why we can't, and it's mostly regulatory hurdles, that removes any economic incentives to do so.

I've recently read an article about what constitutes the right balance of regulations when it comes to aviation safety, and that while regulations have made modern planes extremely safe, overly stringent rules are also preventing planes from adopting modern safety features.

I wonder if it has more to do with larger training data than the languages themselves.

My impression with the visa situation is that while technically green card is very difficult, in practice most expats have no issue renewing their work visas, so effectively living as long term residents - buying properties, getting married, and sending their kids to (mostly international) schools. I've also seen quite a few who worked for a few years and then started their own businesses.

In terms of how well expats integrate, I've seen people from across the spectrum. There are definitely those who are meshed into the local social circles. Foreigner privilege is a thing, and I find that how you view social status is a strong determinant in how well you integrate. Those with a more egalitarian mindset seem to do well in this regard.

I'm not sure if this is a solid argument.

Most of the art, music, literature before the twentieth century were created under censorships of authoritarian regimes, and they don't lack vitality. Creativity often thrives under constraints.

The main difference is the classics were often created by a single person, while modern entertainment are created by large groups through industrial processes. The latter are capital-intensive, and investors are risk-averse. The bigger the market, the bigger the investments, the bigger the risks, and censorship is not insignificant a risk.

I think as the cost of production shrinks with technology, there will be an explosion of "high-production-value" works created by smaller groups or individuals, many from the "soft-authoritarian" countries. Traditional entertainment industries may gradually fade away, or pivot to some new medium.

Probably not enough space for people. Often people aren't allowed to stay in their cars.

More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.

Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.

The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.

Cost of living can be a lot lower in Taiwan, if your property is already paid off.

Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.

Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.

Similar for Ferraro Rochers I think. Like Pringles, they are definitely not the cheapest options, even in rich countries. But there's always a market for the occasional splurges.

Btw, Thailand is solidly upper middle-income. I think you'll find them even in low-income countries.

Any devices that fare better in this regard?

The robot brain could be layered so that more basic functions are embedded locally while higher-level reasonings and offloaded to the cloud.

where we can integrate with system accessibility APIs directly

Is this something Flutter doesn't do?

One of the most jarring experiences I have with Flutter Desktop was it lacked MacOS Emacs-style key bindings for text editing (ctrl-a, ctrl-e, etc.). Not sure if Dioxus solved this?

What I found hilarious is in the Dexterous Hands video, the robot deftly places a walnut on the table, then proceeds to smash it with its bare fist.

I mean, humans also have tons of failures modes, but we've learned to live them over time.

The average human have tons of quirks, talk over each other all the time, generally can't solve complex problems in a casual conversion setting, and are not always cheery and ready to please like Scarlet's character in Her.

I think our expectations of AI is way too high from our exposure to science fiction.

Even within China, the north (wheat-growing culture) is noticeably more individualistic than the south (rice-growing culture). The south is also significantly more traditional.

Japan and Korea, despite being in North-East Asia, are rice-growing, due to their oceanic climate. Culturally they are also closer to Southern China.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w

One interesting result of the study is the culture change within one generation.

I owned a bunch of mid-century Danish/Swedish furnitures, and they're generally pretty light. They tend to have slimmer profiles for the "modern" appearance, so less material. Also solid wood tend to be lighter than engineered wood.

I wonder for drivers who drove with regen-only for too long, do they lose the reflex to hit the brake?

I'm honestly not sure why Siri sucks so much. Apple could probably hire 10,000 employees to manually train for various scenarios brute-force (10,000 x $200K (salary + admin) = $2B), and it would still be chump change to them.

I feel like there's way too much VFX in Marvel movies that most of them are unnecessary. If the VFX artists worked reasonable hours and cut down the VFX by half, they'd make movies just as entertaining and profitable.

But if the VFX workers are paid fixed wages and not by profit sharing, half of them would just lose their jobs while the other half work just as hard.

I feel like employees should fight more for shares and control of the companies rather than just marginal wage increases. It seems like the sensible thing to do in the grand scheme of things for all parties, but it's rarely done. Companies default to selling shares to the highest bidders, without considering the cost of mis-aligned incentives.

I guess they are the corporate memphis of architecture.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Corporate_Memphis

I'm not sure about other parts of the East Coast, but when I was in Toronto, while the older houses are bricks, many newer ones are wood-framed with a brick facade. What surprised me was that many owners had no idea, especially if they bought second-hand.

but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days.

Are the apartments traditional wood-framed or cross-laminated timber? CLT is an entirely different beast that performs more like concrete or heavy timber in fire. I would put them more in the category of composite material.

I think CLT are already popular in parts of Europe, but in NA they are quite rare. They are usually only for very premium apartments or government buildings. Most wooden multi-unit buildings in NA are built the same way as houses and are quite flimsy. Though in the past couple years they tried to mitigate it with heavy stuffing of sound insulation to make everything sound more solid. One major difference is you don't hear footsteps as much. Older wooden buildings are a nightmare if you are sensitive to noise.

Pre-war houses (middle/upper-class ones) in NA are also quite solid. The structural quality difference between pre-war and post-war houses are night and day.

To me these "traiditional" style buildings in Europe would be considered "modern" by North American standards.

Structurally, it feels like North American houses have been built the same way since the colonies started (sidings, frames/studs, gabled/shingled roofs). We even try to keep the houses look as close to the colonial styles as possible, with plastic/aluminum sidings and windows imitating wood.

In Europe it seems like they moved completely over to steel-frame, concrete/composite walls. Roofs mostly metal, windows large and not flimsy. I heard one explanation is the trees being all cut down in Europe during the industrial revolution, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story. Dimensional lumber there are easy to buy and not that much more expensive. Ocean shipping is dirty cheap.

If I were to take a wild guess it has more to do with modern fire-safety standards (can't spread to another room), which the lumber/construction industry in NA have probably lobbied against.