staktrace

I've found that one of the more subtle cons to thinking in public is that you become more attached to the opinion you have expressed. I'm not sure if that's because you are forced to defend it more vigorously or just because it's "written down". But I do find that I'm less likely to change my mind on a particular topic after blogging about it.

This is a good point, and I agree. If there was a close call you can't actually say for sure if it would have been a collision without the software.

I get what you're trying to say, but if anything, you're just making the case for Tesla software.

Consider that there is a range of drivers, from "good" to "bad". If most drivers go decades with zero collisions, that's great, and it probably puts me closer to the "bad" end of the spectrum. By your own admission drivers like me should explore avenues to reduce our risk. Why is Tesla software not a valid avenue?

If you're a "good" driver, you don't need it, and that's fine, you can get some other car or drive with autopilot off or whatever. But for us "bad" drivers, the software makes us safer (both personal risk and to others on the road) so why not use it? What other avenues would you suggest exploring?

So if something appears in your path, the right course of action is to accelerate into it?

You mis-parsed what I said here. My sentence was probably too long. Let me try using shorter ones. Say you are driving. Suddenly a squirrel appears on the road 50m away. You apply brakes "hard" to avoid hitting it. This amount of braking is what the car does. You can still press the accelerator. The accelerator works as expected, cancelling the software's braking.

if you have 1/4 second time to respond.

Under what circumstances would you have this short amount of time? IMO only if somebody is following you too closely. Again, remove the software from the equation and insert the aforementioned squirrel. You brake hard for it. The person behind rear-ends you because they were following too closely. Who is at fault?

Nice assumption

Thank you

It does work, yes.

There's been a number of occasions where I would have been in an accident had it not been for the software saving me. Obviously it is possible that one day the software will result in an accident that would not have happened had I been driving alone, but thus far that has not happened, and so, thus far, I can conclude that the combination is better than me alone.

Self-reply to add: despite (occasionally) experiencing phantom braking and my wife once experiencing the "loss of power" scenario due to a defective drive unit, I'm still very happy with the Tesla overall. In my experience it is the best car I've owned despite the flaws that seem to disproportionately make the headlines.

To reply to your first question: if the car decides to emergency brake, you can still override it by pressing the accelerator. In my experience, the braking that happens is "hard" but no more hard than you would do yourself if something suddenly appeared in your drive path, and if you are paying attention you can press the accelerator within a second or so. If the person behind you has adequate following distance it shouldn't be a problem.

If the car loses power entirely then it gives you a few seconds warning in which you may or may not be able to cross to the shoulder before the car coasts to a stop. In this scenario the braking is not "hard", but obviously there is no real way to recover and you'll need to get towed.

I have not experienced any scenario where the car does not respond to steering or acceleration commands when it was physically able to do so.

Your experience is not universal. In my case the combination of me+software is certainly safer than me alone, and also less taxing for me.

Try looking at about:support to see if there are any third-party modules (antivirus etc. loaded). That has been a cause of problems like this in the past. More likely on Windows and I saw you're running macOS, but worth a shot.

This is awesome! I just wrote a blog post along the same lines (https://staktrace.com/spout/entry.php?id=883) and I would like to join forces with you. Let me know if there's anything concrete I can do at the moment, otherwise I'll just keep an eye on your work and help where I can.

(Second tip: get to know people, and let them get to know you, well enough to ask for advice)

First tip: don't ask for advice from people who know nothing about you. The less context people have about your specific situation, the more generic and less useful their advice is going to be.

https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/develop/03_how_ln_work... is a reasonable explanation of you're interested in the technical aspects.

I think there's probably some middle ground here. Like say the national economy is 100% on Bitcoin and then as long as they have a balanced trade with other countries (i.e. no long term trade deficit/surplus) they can deal with those obligations in fiat currency. But I'm just guessing here.

Network size is a virtue too. Specially for things that benefit from network effects!

Maybe you should try to actually read up on what the lightning network is before you argue against some ill-informed strawman version of it.

You argue it is stable by arguing you never need to convert it to fiat. If your economy is running 100% on Bitcoin it doesn't matter what the exchange rate to USD our any other currency is. (Note I'm not actually arguing this is the case in El Salvador, just pointing out that there is a theoretical argument that could be made.)

Note: this is from April 2020.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your problem statement. But it seems to me that you are using (and paying for) N units from your regular provider. And then your community solar operation is selling S units to the grid and giving you a monetary credit (the result of the sale) instead. Some customer (due to fungibility, it could be you or anyone else) is getting those S units, and paying the community solar project (indirectly via the grid). And those S units are displacing some other set of S units that were previously generated by fossil fuels, which is (presumably) one of the main goals of this entire exercise. So maybe the answer to your final question is actually "only N units were actually generated, because the fossil fuel plants ran less and produced S fewer units".

In statistical terms the answer is yes,

Not actually. Statistics from a larger population "cannot" be used to predict outcomes from a smaller subset or individual from the population. ("cannot" in the sense that you get nonsensical results if you do). See e.g. the ecological fallacy.

To me your comment seems based on a misguided idea of what Mozilla is about. I recommend reading https://civilityandtruth.com/2020/08/13/mozillas-uncertain-f... for some good background.

Pull to refresh has been implemented, but still needs some polish before being released. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/9766

I wrote a tool to do the opposite thing: allow writing "shell scripts" using Rust. Still early days but https://github.com/staktrace/khaki is where it lives.

FWIW, as a Mozilla employee, I think this is one of the best summaries I've read of the state of Mozilla.

This is a relatively narrow view of the Internet, though. You're talking about a web-standards silo kind of thing, which I agree is bad, but is not the sum total of the problems affecting the Internet. See https://internethealthreport.org/2019/ for some more context on what I'm trying to convey. I don't agree with everything in that report, but hopefully it demonstrates that there are threats to the Internet that Firefox can't fix just by being a great browser.

(301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24122250)

So you feel that it is better to do many things and fail at all of them than it would be to do one thing and succeed at that because that one thing has no meaning in the world that would result?

I feel it is better to do many things in the hopes that one or more of them succeed, than it is to succeed at a meaningless task. The former takes courage, the latter can be interpreted as cowardice.

All those other things that Mozilla has done to date have not moved the needle for me even a little bit.

I don't pretend to speak for you, but I choose to believe something different: that Mozilla's other work may not have moved the needle in a way you care to notice, but that without their advocacy and legal work the Internet would be a worse shape today than it currently is. I think that if you were to choose to care about that (and you're well within your rights to not care), you would notice a difference.

Maybe this is just my personal perspective but all this activism has not brought Mozilla much other than a bunch of controversy and in the end a browser that is not quite top notch, when it very well could have been.

In the end I mostly agree with this. But I still think trying to make the world a better place and failing is better than not trying at all.

Has that been mentioned in a meeting somewhere?

Not explicitly, but I do recall meetings where the announcement was along the lines of "we are choosing to make a dividend payment to fund the Foundation work..." which implies some amount of adjustment based on needs.

Money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation (which they do via dividend payments), and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.