situationista

I recall being told the IKEA catalogue is the only publication ever to surpass the Bible in terms of annual print run (200 million at its peak)

Argos is great, but doesn't have a patch on the old SkyMall catalogues you'd find in US carriers up to around 2010

Related to current Starlink outage? probably not, but interesting coincidence

There used to be one of these in Dubai too, but it closed down during the pandemic. I remember a very surreal dinner there in circa 2016.

Ironic that for all the elite lineage captured here, the one that he ended up stuck with is a very plebeian surname of non-hispanic (Ligurian) origin.

I don't read this as a problem of fraud within Oxfam. They audited the World Bank and found there was fraud in the bank. Or am I missing something?

I once coded a machine that could make photo-books of your neighbour's living rooms.

It was inspired by Ed Ruscha's "34 Parking Lots in Los Angeles" artist booklet from 1967, and the output looked pretty similar, but with photos of domestic interiors instead of parking lots. So far so ordinary, but the difference was that you could tweet any UK postcode at the machine and a couple of minutes later it would spit out a custom-generated, printed-on-demand booklet of living rooms in that neighbourhood.

The way it worked was when it received a postcode, it went to Gumtree (popular UK second hand listings site) and looked for second hand sofas for sale within a radius of 1km. It then scraped the photos, imported them into a document, generated a PDF on the fly and sent it to a laser printer with a built-in binding machine. The results were insanely good. Always hoped I'd get to show it to Ed Ruscha one day.

The project was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but still kind of pointless from a utilitarian point of view :)

[1] https://gagosianshop.com/products/ed-ruscha-thirtyfour-parki...

The services in question are provided by the local municipality - and they don’t receive extra government funding for this. So unlike a regular citizen who registers on a real street, from whom the city typically collects taxes, a homeless citizen brings costs without bringing many “benefits” (from a purely economic perspective).

As for why they mandate the creation of these fictitious streets, it’s because Italy’s administrative system is obsessed with linking people to an address in a way that is absolutely alien to many foreigners. When you change address the police literally come round to check you actually live there…

Do you have any reliable evidence to back up your assertion that the activity in question "wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations"? The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...

Rainforest conservation can hardly be described as being "done right" when it is paid for by selling/burning more fossil fuels elsewhere.

Just to make sure it's clear to everyone who's commenting about how great this is - in return for UAE paying to protect Liberia's forests, it gets to burn more fossil fuels while claiming to be reducing its carbon output. Not sure whether this is bad news from a climate perspective, but it certainly isn't good news.

I have a question. Blambla or Bibiano?

The Boeing in question is a prop plane, not a jet.

Arguably yes, since that curation is paid for with the cut Apple takes on sales in the Apple store.

I tried googling DDP but couldn't find it - do you know the URL?

In my humble opinion, contrary to your claim a lot of things about NFTs make less sense than what you suggest

I have the distinct feeling that Elon's motives are genuine, that he genuinely believes he is on a mission to save humanity, and is genuinely convinced that he is the only one who is able to do it. The problem is the last point - he's developed something of a saviour complex, and has convinced himself that if what is at stake is important enough (reverse climate change, become interplanetary species, restore free speech) he somehow has a moral obligation to take it upon himself. Whereas earlier in his career financial constraints might have hemmed him in, not that he's the richest man in the world he's becoming tempted to use that power in an Emperor of the Universe fashion, attempting to fix everything he believes important. If he stuck to solving just one existential problem, such as electrifying transport, he'd probably be quite well respected in the long run. The richest man in the world, who already holds massive power, also buying up the "de facto town square" was never going to go down well. We need more people with Elon's vision, drive and determination, not one Elon with more and more power.

I own a Tesla and regularly make very long trips. Travel in an EV requires a completely different mindset from ICE and takes a little getting used to. I'm not surprised that a one-off road trip experience was less than smooth, but once you get into the habits of EV travel it's already a perfectly satisfactory experience.

This is also known as the Jevons Paradox - increased efficiency leads to increased and not reduced use.

Part of the rationale for labeling certain gas power plants as "green" is that they solve the problem of uneven supply from wind and solar. As far as I understand it, these plants are intended to supplement renewables and make them a more viable primary source.

I've always observed that in India honking the horn is not just about overtaking - it's an acoustic indicator of your position, making it possible for those in front of you to plot your presence without taking their eyes off the road in front (which usually requires their absolute and undivied attention). Additionally, as the article points out, many vehicles don't possess funtional rear-view mirrors, and are therefore dependent on acoustic signals to know what's going on around them.

Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.

Also see this interview with Mark Sabbatini, the editor of the Arctic newspaper Icepeople who was recently expelled from Svalbard, previously discussed on HN a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20626734

There was an interesting article on heat pumps in the NY Times yesterday - they are similar to AC units but far more efficient, requiring far less electricity to run. Plus they work as heaters in the winter. I use heat pumps coupled to solar panels and draw very little power from the grid, if any.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/climate/heat-pumps-climat...

I guess what I'm saying is that as a Tesla owner I don't find this video representative of normal use - in general FSD is very good. The other video on the other hand is much better than my experience of everyday use. Best case or worst case scenarios aren't representative of the "current state", imo.

All true. But you could argue it's beside the point, because che cheaper ones have other significant drawbacks (e.g. range, no driver-assist), and technically better ones are way more expensive. It's the combination of price-point, range, software and scalability in production that's difficult to achieve - any single one is relatively easy metric to beat Tesla on.

Yes, but this video of two days earlier is also its current state, and it's pretty incredible: https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1370974296730824704...

Cherry-picking best or worst-case scenarios isn't particularly helpful - in terms of plotting likely future scenarios, which is what ARK is doing here, the point is that it's still unfinished but improving pretty darn fast.

From a quick glance at the video looks like they're illegally tapping power from the grid, and got shut down.

Most countries which require a test for entry stipulate it must be a PCR test rather than a rapid (antigen) test. I’m currently in Lisbon waiting for the results of a 24h PCR test in order to board a flight to Azores, for example.

Interesting to note that back in April, when COVID-19 had only just been declared a pandemic, Dolly Parton donated $1m to research into a vaccine. That research effort eventually became the Moderna vaccine. [0]

[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/17/entertainment/dolly-parto...