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sewer_bird

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That’s not really super meaningful in terms of interplanetary travel. For example, for most of the year Mercury is the closest planet to Earth. Change in orbital velocity matters more than distance

It's not really inferiority: the commonality of the other countries is that they typically follow a different regime of negotiation of the road. In specific, the USA and other anglophone countries are extremely strict about what motions are allowed on the road: the expectation is that everyone stays precisely within the lanes and drives a bit robotically.

This, however, is actually not that common in most of the world, where the road is much more 'negotiated': speeds are slower but the streets more chaotic. I wonder sometimes if it's more like treating the vehicles as horses rather than boxes of death, or something similar: it's a markedly different mode.

I imagine his point is that self-driving cars rely on the robotic driving customs of parts of the West to do as well as they do, and that he's skeptical of these vehicles' ability to interact with more dynamic streetscapes filled with e-scooters, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, people carrying stuff, and so on.

(Source: living in China/Asia)

Can corroborate, also in Shanghai: I had much preferred Ofo to the Mobikes because they were a 'normal bike' without a belt chain. But then... time passed and rain poured, rusting up the chains and riders bending the wheels in innovative ways. Sometimes I'll luck out on a fresh Ofo bike, and then it's fine, but for every one of those there are 8 bikes I have to ditch because the chain won't go back on or the wheel isn't even planar.

Indeed! I keep my to-do lists in vim and have added a few lines to my syntax file to recognize/color a couple extra checkmarks like

- [?] question - [o] blocked by someone else - [~] in progress - [H] on hold - [Y] Is X true? (yes) - [N] Is Y true? (no)

It can be both. The article says there's the idea of sussing out that the different businessmen are "the same kind of person" with similar 'desires'. That's why the article mentions cases of men trying to signal wanting to have wanton sex, but actually going to lengths to not engage in it.

A total extinction event is pretty unlikely: a nuclear war could perhaps end our civilization, but there'd still be folks around, even if their lives were harder. It's believed that we've already as a species gone through a very small population bottleneck, and homo sapiens can probably survive a nuclear war of even the worst kind.

That said, a thousand years is a long time to research a Death Star I suppose.

Racing for Realism 9 years ago

Could be: a lot of the 'branding' of the actor these days is about curating what films they show up in. Like, if Johnny Depp is in a movie, you know generally what kind of film it'll be. The AA (Artificial Actor, haha) would benefit from having an agent, much like real actors, to keep consumers' meta-dissonance down.

That said, actors swap between wildly disparate roles all the time and no one seems to care!

I don't see a contradiction between Equality of Opportunity and welfare programs. Indeed, they seem to be proposed hand-in-hand by most people, so I'll set aside for a moment the emotional content of your argument.

I do not see how invoking 'authoritarian capitalism' serves as a refutation that cultures of human beings creates winners and losers.

The distinction to make here is that Equality of Outcome requires everyone to have the same outcome. Feeling as you must do, surely you would prefer a reduction in inequality, not mandatory equality?

Equality of outcome's implication is a culture engaging in an authoritarian and quixotic pursuit of perfect human misery. It is hard enough to ensure a specific outcome for yourself, let alone another, and even less so to make two people come out exactly the same. Equality of opportunity at least acknowledges that culture produces winners and losers.

"feels like Vim, just different enough for you to be frustrated" is true, but I like the Lua built-in: it's a fantastic language for this kind of thing, and feels more inviting to a new plugin-writer than, say, Vimscript might.