letitbeirie

back seats included

I ended up buying loose seat belt buckles for my wife's car from a pull and pay to stop this. Evidently nobody at Toyota has a dog.

The irony there being the "cars are evil" politicians are typically the strongest advocates for EVs, but EVs (being new) are the cars most likely to be affected by these annoyances.

I would love to replace my 2007 GTI with something cleaner and quieter but I genuinely don't see anything new as that big of an upgrade - my car has physical buttons for every feature, it doesn't (intentionally) make any stupid noises, and it's a stick shift in the US so it's essentially theft-proof.

Are you young enough to have grown up in a house without a land line by chance?

I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.

Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists

But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.

I wear my seat belt anytime I leave the driveway but I still want one of these things.

My car can't tell the difference between a person and my backpack on the passenger seat, but it dings regardless.

actually do more harm than good

I've wondered about this too.

I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data brokers have on me is garbage.

If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't, because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just expending effort to clean up their data.

Specifically, the data I don't want them to have.

Therefore the difference between the horn being readily accessible and being hidden away could be the difference between life and death.

Being readily accessible is a must. The point I was trying to make (poorly; it was late) was that having the horn button in the middle of the wheel is about the worst place imaginable if you lay on the horn to avoid a crash and it happens anyway, because some portion of your arm is probably going to be broken when it gets crushed between an exploding airbag and your rapidly-decelerating body.

It's weird that Tesla is being called out over the horn.

In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers - only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash.

But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.

...

I'm not sure Tesla improved the situation, but it definitely seems like the situation has room for improvement.

Operational Technology.

It's basically IT but for industrial operations instead of commercial.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/internet-of-things/w...

Devs who haven't worked in industrial controls won't believe it, but the overwhelming majority of critical OT software still doesn't.

Visual Basic as a language is just C# for people who want to type more to do the same thing.

Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.

Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.

solar electricity is already cheaper than natural gas

Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.

as battery storage prices drop

Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.

We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.

We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.

Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace

Depends where you are.

In the US natural gas is a byproduct of shale oil extraction and we have a limited capacity to move or export it so it's almost priced as a waste product.

It's unlikely that electricity will be any cheaper than gas soon either, since that's where 40% (and growing, as our coal and nuclear fleet are retired) of our electricity comes from.

I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.

I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.

They're allowed to have limits like "local driverless taxis don't operate outside SF city limits or below 35 degrees with precip in the forecast" etc. at level 4, but to meet level 5 (per the bet) it has to be able to "drive everywhere and in all conditions," [0] which adds a lot of really difficult edge cases.

Situations that come immediately to mind:

- Driving in the hurricane lane on the shoulder during an evacuation

- Reversible lanes and streets

- Sizing up an icy hill and figuring out whether it's safe to keep going

- Ferries

- Knowing a baseball entering the road from behind a parked car will probably be followed by a child

- Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.

[0] https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/...

Modern Google is an embodiment of many of the flaws which allowed them to crush Lycos 20 years ago.

Non-software engineering has needed a git-like version control system for decades now but there are two giant hurdles:

- Designing a UI for resolving merge conflicts is non-trivial and a lot of the visual cues git diff viewers use to highlight conflicts (colors, marker text, etc.) don't translate well into a CAD viewer

- The Autodesks and Bentleys of the world work in proprietary binary files so any solution would only work for one vendor, and sometimes only one flavor of one vendor

It will be like salvaging pre-1945 shipwrecks for their non-irradiated metal.

This phenomenon was really useful for sneaking booze into football games as undergrads.

Two airplane bottles in your pocket, belt loop, etc. - somewhere obvious but not too obvious - can absolutely blind a ticket taker to the 6-8 you have taped to the back of your calves.

It's hard to know how much time has to elapse before all the problems have been teased out though.

Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if the industry had written it off after that incident they'd have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.

I wish they'd be a little less one-size-fits-all.

Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.

Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.

My situation is basically the other side of the same coin: I built out my network 7 years ago using Edge gear instead of UniFi.

The hardware is solid and the software isn't flashy but it's reliable. It's exactly what hackers and tinkerers want, so naturally Ubiquiti has all but abandoned the entire product line.

They haven't discontinued it (yet) so I could still replace any piece of it if I needed to but their software version history doesn't exactly paint a picture of a product that's cherished or actively invested in:

2019/03/28: v2.0.1

2019/05/30: v2.0.3

2019/06/25: v2.0.4

2019/07/16: v2.0.6

2019/12/04: v2.0.8

2020/03/09: v2.0.8-hotfix1

2020/11/18: v2.0.9

2021/02/02: v2.0.9-hotfix1

2021/06/13: v2.0.9-hotfix2

2022/07/17: v2.0.9-hotfix4

2022/12/20: v2.0.9-hotfix5

2023/01/22: v2.0.9-hotfix6

2023/07/31: v2.0.9-hotfix7

we had to be constantly thinking about failure modes

This to me is the biggest difference between writing code for the software industry vs. an industrial industry.

Software is all about the happy path ("move fast and break things") because the consequences typically range from a minor inconvenience to a major financial loss.

Industrial control is all about sad paths ("what happens if someone drives a forklift into your favorite junction box during the most critical, exothermic phase of some reaction") because the consequences usually start at a major financial loss and top out in "Modern Marvels - Engineering Disasters" territory.

Ironically back in the answering machine era you could screen your calls as they were coming in, short-circuiting this entire loop.

Especially all of those "atoms for peace" projects that had nothing to do with nuclear power.

Widening the Panama Canal with nuclear bombs, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/20/archives/a-new-canaldug-b...

A single failure is enough to contaminate an area for hundreds and thousands of years.

A single coal seam fire can do that too. A dam failure can even render an area uninhabitable forever.

Nuclear isn't quite as green as many of its advocates claim but its environmental skeletons in the closet aren't born out of plant accidents (which are few, far between, and generally well contained in Western plant designs), they're born out of the chemical horror show that is the rest of the uranium fuel cycle.

Not saying they won't try, but there are enough label-represented bands on Bandcamp that they would obliterate their back catalog (along with any network effects they're enjoying) overnight.

Something like this seems like it would be good at solving normal public transit systems' last mile problem, but to make the economics work you'd need to run very short trips or be able to take more than one rider at a time.

Short trips with one passenger each would have to be incredibly short - at $1.50 per trip you'd have to be making 10 of them an hour just to cover one minimum-wage salary in a lot of places, so obviously we need these cabs to be carrying more than one fare at a time.

To make that work, you'd need to have some set of pre-determined, pre-published locations for passengers to find cabs heading to a particular destination, and you'd probably need a list of pre-vetted destination locations where you know you can drop them off without getting stuck or blowing the budget.

In other words, buses.

We don't need any new technology

We need grid-scale energy storage.

Right now we have about 30 GW worth of it on a grid with 1200 GW of generative capacity.

Until that changes, every solar and wind installation is going to come paired with a gas peaker plant.

tying OKRs to bonuses

Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law