dwyerm

This isn't a novel thing, as far as I can tell. A decade ago when I was working on routing of over-the-road trucking, our maps provider moved the entire United States a couple meters and it broke all our road restrictions.

The problem for us -- and likely for those in Australia now -- is that converting physical address descriptions and lat/long becomes a little more fraught. We described road restrictions as being "on the road that is found between X1,Y1 and X2,Y2." A separate layer would snap those X,Y coordinates to the road network and find the road between them. Before the move, that meant converting to "Highway 6 Southbound from milemarker 16 to milemarker 28"

But when you moved the world, X1,Y1 no longer landed on Highway 6, and instead snapped over to the frontage road. Your restriction now read as "Highway 6 Southbound, down to exit 21, around the corner to the frontage road, then down the frontage road". And your restriction that used to say "stay off this one section of road" now says "stay off the highway, the frontage road, and don't use this exit."

Anything and everything made with Unity.

Only if you're the one paying.

The ADA requires 'paratransit' service for persons whose disabilities prevent them from using accessible, non-commuter, fixed route bus service. In many cities paratransit is handed off to taxi services.

Are player IP addresses stable enough to be used in this way? I've always considered my own IP to be dynamic, despite rarely changing.

Highly recommended by me, too: Zoz at DefCon 23, entitled "And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y

...which is strange, since PTFE is naturally white. I think we've become used to seeing it on silver and grey frying pans.

But that said, what's wrong with a dark-colored toilet?

You might look through the source code for Wordcram[1]. It is built under Processing, and is relatively easy to understand, I think.

[1] http://wordcram.org/

I've been pondering the same economics on car-, bike- and scooter- shares. I'd love to know if Car2Go's ridiculous little SMART cars were treated better or worse than their Benz replacements. I wonder if Lime's electric bikes get shoved off the pier less than Ofo's cheapest ones.

What you saw as a positive feature, I saw as the death of Friendster. My friend added "The Burning Man" as her friend, and I suddenly had thousands of friends neither of us had ever actually met. The activity of this pool completely swamped the output of any of the 'friends' I would actually meet up with. I had a HUGE network, but no friends on Friendster.

This wasn't entirely bad to meet up with people outside of your circles, but you needed some way to control the firehose. And, you know, I think that's still not a solved problem. I think I would be more keen on social networks filtering me feed if I had more control over those filters.

Or worse, if you accidentally find this feature, will you know what you just did? Or will you suddenly be dumped into somewhere that looks like it is still a web browser but has suddenly stopped responding like one.

It reminds me of all the old Windows users accidentally dragging their start-bar and covering the whole screen.

I'm guessing that Mrs. B. was smart to stay out of the Denver/Boulder area. The Furniture Wars were fought in those foothills. You can still see the corpses of Weberg and Levits stores all down the interstate. Jake Jabbs took no prisoners.

Now, in addition to Jake's American Furniture Warehouse, there's the whole Furniture Row business holding the territory. Now IKEA is trying to find a way in.

Whole books have been written about the Furniture Wars! It's kind of crazy.

There's also "This Person Does Not Exist[1]", which has been discussed a few time before[2], here.

[1] https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144280

Huh. It didn't even occur to me that they could also be using the app on my phone to do the same thing, and do it more accurately.

We're changing to auto market into the cell phone market? Oh no.

"Well, I get Free Miles(tm) with the Chevrolet, but it throttles at 70MPH and the radio only plays Pandoa. Or I can get the exact same car from Crysler, with no throttling, but the miles come in bundles of 1000 and radio apps are $5/month."

Is your OS time at least battery backed? I can tell you that nightmares start when all your clocks go back to 1970 on boot, and you need a clock to validate certificates on boot...

For what it is worth, I'm pretty sure that Amazon is already doing this at their Amazon Fresh drive-up stores. When you drive up, a sign lights up to say that your order is coming soon. The experience degrades a little bit if you arrive in a car they've never seen before -- a human stops by your window with a tablet to check you in.

Saving you from the clickbaity title: Debian etc, Suse, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

The bottom half is filled out with Canonical, Google, RedHat, Cisco and Adobe.

...or maybe even offer those features to Google Voice's dialer, as well.

For me, personally, the way Amazon has captured me is more in the cart than in the fulfillment. Yes, it is nice to get things to my door practically overnight, but the fact that I can make that happen without typing my personal and financial information into a skeevy website that could be anywhere is the real value to me. PayPal (...and Apple Pay and Google Wallet and Samsung Something and Venmo an Beanz and and and...) is the technology that should be making this friction go away, but it appears to be difficult to provide this without turning evil.

So, to your idea, I also appreciate the idea of one, trustworthy, site that would do all of that for me. The thing is, Amazon is that site, for the most part.

Although I have a lot of stories from my time there, my view of this particular event was mostly from behind a desk. I don't think I can offer much personal insight to it.

But I strongly recommend a video that covers the second race. Not to be confused with the 2009/2010 Citizen Pictures video, this one was put out by a studio in Aspen and I think was produced for the Outdoor Life Network.

The problem is that I'm not sure how one would legitimately source the video today. But if you stop by my place I'll offer you a beer and arrange a showing...? I'll look it up tonight and let you know if I can find a source.

I did race operations for the Leadville Trail 100 for a decade, including when the Tarahumara first raced.

The first year, Rockport was a sponsor and loaded them up with their best trail running shoes. The Tarahumara didn't perform well, although that could also be because of other gear issues and that they were not sure that the aid stations were for them. The second year, they stopped by the local landfill for old car tires, and made sandals from them. They set records that year. It was a bit of an embarrassment to the title sponsor...

In retrospect I also wonder why we didn't just do a bulk update. I think the problem was that we discovered the geocoding problem and started correcting for it before we understood where the problem was actually coming from. By the time we discovered it was a simple constant offset, we'd already damaged our own data with the one-off fixes.

Worse, the offset was right there in black-and-white in the release notes that we failed to read.

By the way, I apologize for being flippant about it. Location is just one of those things -- like time -- that too many people think is simple, but actually has devilish details that bite the unwary. You are fortunate that lat/long is sufficient and I hope you remain wary.

You are fortunate that lat/long is sufficient for your use-case.

In my experience, the problem is that it isn't as exact as you'd think, especially when your measurement passes back and forth between reality, the idealized cartesian lat/long, and node/distance understandings of road networks. At a previous company, our map provider moved the entire United States three meters to the west and we spent the next week re-adjusting endpoints that were suddenly in medians, on overpasses, etc.

tl;dr: Nothing's easy.

Same. I'm running an NEC E-series. The 'smart' features it has are an honest-to-god serial port for plugging it into automation. It's been a decent display to me. The only thing I would warn consumers about them is that you generally can't go see them in a showroom, so you've got to take some chances.

Just out of curiosity, how do you think you missed the rest of the URL?

I have a suspicion that the trend towards browsers being 'helpful' with the URL field is contributing to mistakes like these.

Did you miss the mandatory binding arbitration and class-action waiver in your terms and conditions?

Well, personally, I had the "bliss" image from the Windows wallpaper collection in my head while I was writing this. But I'm cognizant that most of the photos of hillsides I took in Ireland had sheep in them.

Agreed. The prices are meh. The discoverability is terrible and seemingly getting worse. I even feel like the customer service is also screaming downhill. Still, I'm nearly exclusive with Amazon because I give them money and they send me product, and there's no friction in that exchange.

Consider for comparison my recent experience purchasing a wedding gift from Bed Bath and Beyond. They had done everything right to capture my purchase: They hosted the wedding registry, kept the new couple's address hidden, and by not allowing me to select "I'm buying this somewhere else" made it difficult for me to get the item cheaper from another retailer.

Despite all of that, I still abandoned the cart and came back to Amazon. BB&B requires Verified By Visa, and I require my credit card provider to not be stupid about security, so my card was declined with no recourse.

Mind you, Amazon has declined my payment before, too. But they only did it once, more-than paid for their mistake, and haven't troubled me since.

Amazon is a monopoly like Visa and Mastercard are monopolies. They enrich themselves while facilitating commerce. While I'm uncomfortable with that power they hold, I wouldn't want to be without it.

This reminds me of Janelle C. Shane's work on AI[1]. Computer vision's been learning based on the photos that people take, not the visions that people see, and this is giving AI a preference for photogenics instead of reality.

People generally don't take pictures of rolling green hillsides. But they very often take pictures of rolling green hillsides with sheep on them. So if you ask the robot to draw a picture of rolling green hillsides, it will include sheep. Or, if you ask it to draw a picture of the savanna, it will want to include giraffes.

Now you're being asked to find a bus in a photo without a bus because it's a street scene, and every street scene has a bus in it.

I haven't read her book, yet, but her Twitter[2] is often full of amusing anecdotes like this.

[1] https://aiweirdness.com/

[2] https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane

If you're ever in my part of the world, you should visit the Connections Museum[1]. It is truly humbling to see how far we've come. At this museum, you can dial a phone, hear the 'thinking' of all the electromechanical switching crossing the room, before the phone starts ringing.

[1] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/