into_infinity

The 30 minute limit had little to do with heat:

https://www.fujirumors.com/yes-eu-import-duty-reason-fujifil...

I didn't buy an EV early on, when Tesla was really the best choice, because I didn't want to spend a lot of $$$ just to be an early adopter of an immature technology.

I did buy an EV recently, but at that point, Tesla really doesn't have a competitive edge. They made EVs cool, but other manufacturers now have cars that have better interior styling and better performance for a comparable price.

One of the problems is that you don't know what you're buying. You might end up with a reasonable HOA or a terrible one. Even if it looks reasonable today, it might change tomorrow.

Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They're large enough that you're in the minority, but small enough that they don't have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you're using your own property.

I've heard that "just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs" argument many times over, but... I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I'm yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors' supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that.

Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn't mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes - or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes.

I think we're conflating two things. A seller has to refund / replace / repair any merchandise that is defective or not as advertised, and that's true in the US and in the EU.

A seller does not necessarily have to accept returns if you changed your mind, found the item cheaper somewhere else, or just don't like it. Pretty sure that's also the case in the EU.

Bail is supposed to motivate you to show up in court, or have whoever paid the bail drag you there, despite the potentially unpleasant consequences that await. Forfeiting it for other reasons would seem like a bad idea - if the money is gone either way, what's the motivation to stick around?

But, if you violate the terms of your bail, you can end up back in custody.

To their defense: given the company's business model, there's probably no other way of handling it. They make money at a massive scale, and as an individual user, you're not worth enough to provide customer support - or really, any special consideration.

The problem might be the business model itself. Google is not attached to any one of its billions of users, but they can cause a lot of pain if they randomly cut you off - especially in a world where email is essentially online identity. But then, I'd wager that a good 90% of us are employed in places that want to replicate that model at any cost... glass houses and all.

Google generally does stuff like that when they believe somebody else had access to your account and made changes. This sometimes involves the attacker enrolling for (their own) 2FA or changing recovery methods to lock you out. So, the action of removing 2FA is in itself not unreasonable.

It's possible that their logic has some sort of a bug, especially if it only happens when you visit a specific service - and in that case, getting on HN might be the best way to get it looked at by a human... but also make sure you don't have any other issues going on.

You generally still need electricity for radiant heating - there's a pump moving water through the radiators.

But I think it's pretty easy to understand why it's unpopular. First, AC is popular in the US, so a system that can reuse the same ducts is a lot less expensive than something entirely separate. Secondly, it's a lot simpler and cheaper to service. If your hydronic heating system freezes or develops an airlock or springs a leak, you might be looking at five-figure repair costs.

What I find a bit startling in this article is not as much that it rejects the old (half-baked) paradigm, but that I was holding out for that big reveal of a solid alternative... and it never came. The article offers three choices:

1. Invest in negative security warnings. This is fair, but how would that really work? HTTPS seems like an odd example, given how binary it is. How do you generalize it to online safety? Blocking known bad sites or behaviors is a never-ending game in a world where it costs next to nothing to set up a new phishing site or roll out a new malicious binary.

2. Unphishable credentials. This is reasonable - but what about attacks that don't care about credentials? Again, malicious downloads and plenty of other things that are happening today.

3. App-level content moderation. Sure, but this works only as long as you stay within walled gardens of a small number of platforms and are not an interesting target. What if you go to an URL not ending with .google.com or .facebook.com? What about specific, targeted populations that aren't adequately protected by the heuristics used at that scale?

And it will never be, because they will be always worried about PR, about regulators, about cannibalizing legacy business, etc. A new player who isn't held back by this has a good chance of disrupting the market with inferior technology. It happened over and over in the history of tech.

I'm sure there were quite a few SGI, Sun, and IBM executives laughing at that amateurish thing called Linux...

I think the examples you bring up demonstrate fairly precisely why Google should be afraid. Google is at a stage in its corporate life where they are extremely risk-averse. Risk-averse to cannibalizing existing revenue, to upsetting regulators, to getting bad PR. It's why they publish papers about their in-house tech but never have the guts to put it out there for the general public to experiment with.

A contender who shows up with a brand new way to access the knowledge on the internet, but with none of the regulatory / PR / lawyer / legacy product baggage of Google or Meta, is a serious risk. And on some level, it doesn't matter if the "OpenAI assistant" gets things wrong every now and then if they can manage expectations accordingly - something that Google, with their legacy brand and reputation, can't really pull off.

It is pretty unusual in most parts of the world for landlords to get access to one's credit records. Credit reporting is a pretty US-specific phenomenon, even if you're applying for a bank loan or a credit card.

You usually present proof of earnings and possibly references from previous landlords. And if you get unlucky - well, same as in the US, in many of the nicest markets, you're facing an uphill battle to evict people.

I think we can only speculate about reasons, so everybody is gonna project. Maybe the Facebook culture is uniquely bad. Maybe Carmack isn't an effective leader. Maybe it's just how large corporations work. Maybe he was dealt a bad hand.

Meanwhile, I admire that he had the guts to see the issue, say it out loud in a self-critical way, and call it quits. Most people don't.

This is less about "customer demand" and more about having to meet minimum video length for mid-clip monetization slots. Strictly an artifact of how YouTube works.

Sounds authoritative while being wildly inaccurate?

They speed up the second part of the video. The "flying apart" bit happens at much lower speeds and would be boring to watch in extreme slow-motion.

"Your dream sounds like a manifestation of your worries and anxieties.

The presence of giant butts everywhere can represent the feeling of being overwhelmed by fear and insecurity."

Indeed.

This laundry basket is an example of externalities being quite reasonable, though. It lasted 20+ years and that's not an outlier for items like this. I'd wager that making it out of anything else would have a worse environmental impact. Metal is far more energy-intensive. Fabric is far less durable.

Throwaway plastics are far more of a problem, although the scale of the problem is often overstated for ideological reasons. For example, we're not at risk of running out of landfill space; and while plastics in the ocean are worth fixing, but there's little evidence that they're destroying ecosystems or harming health.

Plastics are essentially a distraction. The vast majority of emissions that actually harm the environment come from other industries, but these problems are less tractable, so we get preoccupied washing yogurt cups and banning plastic straws instead.

It is unlikely that you needed long exposures outdoors. The luminance levels in full sun can be easily 100x higher than indoors, with a corresponding reduction in exposure time.

Unless you look sketchy, dealerships take personal checks.

It's an ancient website, although it's both a bit too specific and not specific enough.

An example of insufficient specificity: "rubber". Both silicone rubber and SBR are rubbers, but they behave very differently (and almost nothing bonds silicone). Another example: "plastic". Again, this spans both easily-glued materials such as ABS, and hard-to-glue commodity plastics such as HDPE or PP, where almost nothing sticks.

An example of excessive specificity: pretty much everything else. Low surface energy materials aside, gluing ceramic to plastic isn't hugely different from gluing metal to ABS. The real question for most gluing projects is whether the joint needs to be flexible, how much of a gap you need to fill, and how good it needs to look.

These are remarkable photographs captured using a simple technique... but the writing seems incredibly stuffy:

  "Yet the photographer’s claims of 'true color' elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it."

Sure. Buying and selling stuff that's "deplatformed" by Paypal / Zelle / Venmo (nothing illegal, their lists of prohibited items are as long as they are silly). Paying roofers and other local contractors who often aren't set up to take credit cards, especially if you venture outside a major metro area. Paying for a car without financing. Refunds from my own bank.

A more interesting consideration is how much data is going to be collected, retained, and monetized down the line. And probably handed over to law enforcement.

That's pretty unfair, SBF has an MIT degree.

Why is it a virtue to make things hard? The analogy of "if you truly want to learn programming, you have to do it with punch cards" feels apt.

Instant feedback is good for learning. I sometimes feel that old-school photographers are just kinda bitter that it's a lot easier to take competent photos today than it was 20 years ago, and think it's not real unless you're carrying a light meter around.