Roundabouts suck ass at peak traffic times because you can get stuck behind an endless convoy if you’re coming from the wrong direction.

Green waves mean the people on the main road don’t all have to slow down and waste a bunch of fuel (and cause more emissions), but the people on adjoining streets still have a chance to get onto the road they need to get on.

And of course if you don’t do proper green wave planning, people get the choice of speeding or waiting at every red. The worst possible option. But if you already have the lights, it’s much cheaper to adjust the cycles properly than it is to install tons of roundabouts.

I suspect the Spetznaz have either been found not as capable as once thought, or largely used up as a resource already

9/11: never forget… that Trump’s building got bumped up in the height ranking, yay!

Well the part of the article that quotes the actual job listing:

Part of that role, compensated at between $180,000 and $230,000, will be to “identify, assess, track, and investigate global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends, including deep-dive research and OSINT collection on specific threats, actors, and events” (emphasis added).

But yeah, not a good look especially if you consider who decides what “terrorism” and “crime” mean in the US right now.

And now for a tangent I wrote that you can just skip if you’re not interested:

The part about specifically tracking AI activists was that they watch for anti-AI protests anywhere where their executives go so they know to stay out of the way, but… How do they not realize that they’ve brought this upon themselves? Market AI as “doing everyone’s job” and “super dangerous” and of course people will be pissed at you. Dario himself is the one constantly parroting how the next Claude model is so dangerous it needs to be kept in adamantium chains and whatnot. Like your industry is already pissing people off with the data centers and the cost of computer parts, why you gotta tell everyone you’re working to put us all out of jobs?

Jfc I’m a software engineer with no marketing or PR experience and I think even I could do better PR than all these companies supposedly worth billions. If OpenAI is already farming outrage, just position yourself as the more responsible alternative and you’ll still get sales without your execs needing to fear for your lives… Occasionally release a smaller, less capable version of Claude as open weight to win mindshare among developers, the people actually burning tons of tokens right now. Like Alibaba does with Qwen, just don’t release the full size model like Alibaba does if you’re afraid people are going to run it in competition with you.

The local ‘OF stardom’ is currently technically breaking the law. This would legalize what they’re doing and tax it as legal income. Worst case scenario, nobody registers their income, nothing happens. Best case scenario, a bunch of them will register their income because that means they can do their business 100% legally whereas before it was illegal anyway so why bother reporting it for taxes.

There’s very little, if any, potential downside for making porn legal if it’s already being produced and already available… like it is in most other countries. There’s some potential upside, even though it remains to be seen how much will actually be realized. It’s a nobrainer to do this IMO.

Most countries tax income regardless of source so moving abroad won’t make your OF account untaxed magically. And hiding your income is always a risk in most countries, unless you have a day job or something to explain your ability to pay for your expenses.

I have no idea how it is these days, but in the 90s there was a lot of trafficking going on in eastern Europe. Curtailing sex work in general might’ve been seen as a necessary evil to reduce that. Make your country as boring as possible to predators.

But yes, true on the conservative Orthodox folks too.

This, btw, from a man who according to this very same article

In 2011, he told an interviewer he was not a “political person”, lacked “an ideology”, and hadn’t voted since 1972.

Which IMO illustrates just how pissed he had to be at Israel.

Even Microsoft knows Windows is dead. That’s part of the reason for the push for office365 over locally installed applications. It’s not dead as in everyone will stop using it next year, but it’s dead as in it might only have 10 years left as THE dominant desktop OS, maybe more, maybe less.

What they’re really ingrained in business with is their ERP bullshit. Migrating a bunch of users from Windows to Linux is cheap and easy compared to migrating all your data AND users from Dynamics to SAP or Odoo or something. It’s such a headache, you basically never do it in-house, you contract that out to a company that specializes in the ERP you’re moving to. Because it’s not just data you’re migrating, it’s business processes too. Bunch of custom modules usually need to be created, yay!

For the 10% of places where something lawn-like just grows naturally, without extra watering and extra work, sure. But for the other 90% of lawns…

It’s much more than 10% of the places where lawn is grown. Much of mainland Europe has native grasses used for lawns everywhere.

I dunno. Maybe walking barefoot in the summer isn’t that important?

Neither are most things, but life is about enjoying the little things, and that’s a very enjoyable one for some people. And it’s free (well at least if you’re privileged or cursed enough to have a detached home with a garden, I grew up in such a house and hey, a few decades later the same lawn is still going strong unlike the rest of the house, it’s been watered on average maybe 5 times a decade if not less).

This hatred of lawns seems like yet another super America-specific thing, as North America has a lot of dry areas I guess. You know that super controversial Kentucky bluegrass that’s not native and all the anti-lawn folk hate? It’s native to basically all of Europe, parts of Africa and parts of Asia. Most meadows here have tons of that, along with clover which is also in some lawn mixes (and great for the bees, who are also not invasive here), dandelions which nobody plants on their lawns, but are unavoidable anyway, etc. Your average lawn is basically a mix of many of the same plants that would naturally occur in a meadow, but trimmed short.

Or car batteries. EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and road wear goes up by what was it, the 4th power of axle weight? Even at the exact same capacity per volume, an increased capacity per weight is a huge advantage. Not to mention that the car itself needs to have beefier suspension, tires and brakes for more weight (even though yes, on the braking side, EVs get regen braking - they still need to be able to stop quickly if something happens to the drivetrain). Also no danger of battery fires.

If this works out AND charge/discharge rates are good AND production scales fast enough, this could be huge in a few years. Of course it might also not be.

The incredibly unbelieveable smells-like-bullshit donut battery hit an even higher Wh/kg (not by much) in the new VTT test, but there’s still no guarantee that every test’s been on the same type of cell. Current leading theory is that they’re just taking a bunch of completely different cells to be tested and the solid state one might not be the same one that did all the other tests.

Do people… water lawns? Well obviously don’t grow them there then. You leave a patch of ground completely alone around here and much of what ends up growing there is still various types of grass, some of which we also use in our lawn seed mixes.

And what’s a natural alternative that’s nice to walk on barefoot in the summer?

I should rewatch it tbh. Been a long time, I’d forgotten that line.

Ha, didn’t know that. Interesting then that it shows me neither Lake America, nor any of the Estonian localized names anywhere. Perhaps it’s an opt-in somewhere on the OSM website.

If you’re loaded and live where there’s enough sun all year round, it’s not a bad idea. Particularly if you can get enough production and storage to last through a long winter night after a short winter day and then throw in a backup generator, you will never need the grid again.

It was fun to figure out what serpentine belt I needed.

I’ve been sold the wrong serpentine belt once or twice from an in-person store, never from an online catalogue though.

I cross-reference the OEM parts catalogue and if necessary, images of the part being replaced to the factory repair manual. 99% of the time, parts by VIN are accurate in the OE catalogue, but occasionally someone has retrofitted some newer or older part in a pinch, in which case the parts store guy is just about useless anyway. E.g my car doesn’t have the sump drain plug it should, meaning someone has changed the oil pan for a slightly older one. My engine was in production from 2003 through 2008 in that exact configuration and mine’s a 2007, so a few things had already been revised in that time (the engine got a bigger update in 2008, at which point it got a new engine code)

This has always been my problem with the future of self-driving cars too, and of course several people have argued with me that I’m stupid.

I don’t trust any corporations now and I don’t trust that the government will always be benevolent - if you’re in the US, it already isn’t, at least mine is still fairly sensible, but that could change easily too.

One of the biggest problems is that self-driving cars either are, or one day will be safer than human drivers. Which of course is a great thing! But then there will be a push to ban manual driving. First we’ll get I, robot, where manual driving is frowned upon. It’ll happen step by step.

Also: a fast means of transport for me and my family that doesn’t stop working when comms go down and isn’t restricted to a specific route, is what keeps me feeling much safer living <200 km from the Russian border. Buses or trains need to wait till they get enough people on to fill them, otherwise it’s inefficient. Self-driving cars likely won’t go anywhere. Bicycles and feet are great for day to day life in a livable city, but they don’t let me cross 4 national borders in 16 hours.

Now that’s odd. The Avalon doesn’t fall into the trap the Mazda did where the engine was way underpowered. I wouldn’t call that engine or transmission super modern by any means, assuming the 2GR V6 and 6 speed auto, but not ancient tech either.

Ah, yea never mind, I checked your history, you’re a Putin and genocide sympathizer. I thought you just have no common sense, but you’re obviously not asking these questions in good faith. Good bye.

Not hard at all. It’s as simple as not collecting information that isn’t strictly necessary to run the service.

Only guaranteed if you run your own instance

Dont have to do that here either.

Yeah, there’s this thing called defederation. You could lose access to communities you’ve been actively posting in, etc.

Only a stopped clock is guaranteed to be right twice a day. A clock could run just a little bit slow or fast and it’ll rarely be right.