I bought a Model 3 back in 2020 and got the self-driving option mostly on a whim. Until recently, it was a handy feature on freeways but a gimmick on surface streets. Ever since the update a couple months ago, it actually does drive itself. I can't remember the last time I intervened. If I did, it was probably to make the car do something dangerous or technically in violation of traffic laws, as you have to be aggressive sometimes in city driving.
You also have people like John Carmack saying, "I have made multiple two hour drives without touching the wheel." His main complaint is that the car makes him touch the steering wheel if he's wearing sunglasses (because it can't track his eyes to determine whether he's paying attention).
I don't think owners will rent out their cars as taxis any time soon, but the technology really does seem to be there.
The technology really isn't there. Individuals' subjective experience of safety is totally irrelevant when you're talking about a system as huge as "automobile travel."
Even 99.999% reliable miles is still dangerous at 3.2 trillion miles per year
Would the comparison not be human drivers? If it's 99% percent reliable I would say that's far safer than humans and makes far more sense already? What am I missing
You think humans are only 99% reliable on a per-mile basis?! That would mean your average person crashes every ~100 miles, or about once every two days.
You can not just go around asserting comparative advantage when your baseline is so far off it is farcical.
I did not have the same experience with the free trial. It tried to crash in to curbs, and really drives in ways that make you think it isn't really planning very far ahead: driving towards parked cars and swerving at the last second instead of making an early correction to move over in the lane slightly, driving too fast for conditions, hard braking at stop signs, stopping very early, or very late for stop signs. This is in addition to all the other bad behavior: getting confused about where lanes are and blaring the alarm sound, taking no regard for other cars when merging, trouble following curves smoothly and respecting limit lines.
It was a couple months ago, whenever the free trial for everyone was. Bay Area peninsula suburbs. The neighborhoods that Tesla engineers live and drive in frequently.
We must have the old version in Australia because we bought extended autopilot for our 2024 M3 Highland and it drives for about 10 seconds before drifting into the left or right adjacent lanes and making everyone nervous.
And it tried to kill me on the freeway when it pretended it was going to merge and then just kept driving straight into the gutter.
In fact I have been thinking about asking for a refund because it is LESS capable than our 2020 Corolla’s adaptive cruise.
Really crappy situation to be waiting for someone to fix software that you paid for. If EAP is actually OK overseas, why don’t we have it here??
In Australia, self-driving features beyond lane keeping are banned, and lane keeping is limited to imparting a maximum lateral acceleration of 3 meters per second squared. Because of these restrictions, all Teslas in Australia are using a gimped version of autopilot from 2-3 years ago.
Well if two people say it on the Internet without providing any documentation, evidence or references to larger-scale reports, that sure proves the claim, doesn't it?
That's why you click on the "Following" tab, not the "For you" tab. Also, how is that any different from any other social media platform? Heck, I just opened Apple News and it recommended me a Buzzfeed article titled, "People are sharing moments where they saw millionaire's spoiled kids get humbled by the real world, and it's a trip".
It isn't any different, that is the point. They are all manipulating super-smart you far more than the NY Times was ever capable of doing. The fact that you think you organically found who to follow is really something.
What would finding someone "organically" look like? Even before social media algorithms were a thing, or even before social media was a thing, information was not laid out in some random fashion, or in a way that made any of it equally likely to reach anyone. Seems like a fallacy to me.
Agriculture is almost certainly a prerequisite to domesticating horses (as they must be selectively bred in captivity), so hunter-gatherer tribes like the Clovis never had a chance to do so.
Pickets and hobbles are things; they don't require settlements.
EDIT: I'm an idiot, there are two even simpler things:
Shish kebab is a thing; it doesn't require settlements. When it comes time to sacrifice, are you more likely to eat the individual who's easy too get along with, or the ornery one?
Rocky Mountain Oysters are things; they don't require settlements. Hence the tripartite nature of Indo-European gender: Bull/Cow/Ox, Stallion/Mare/Gelding, Ram/Ewe/Wether, etc.
Sorry, I don't think you can say nomads or semi-nomad got any of their five snout from agricultural societies, there is no proof of that.
Especially since most of those agricultural society got their law and political organizations from nomads (Turkish 'torük', ancestral law, while influenced by Islam, is definitely from Gotürks' 'türük' which was at the time likely already thousand of years old). Rus political system was also heavily influenced, if not copied from the horde (or rather, the 'ordo', since our vision of what is a horde is now so wrong it isn't funny).
You have to know that the political organization of central Asia nomads stayed stable from before the Xiongnu until the 19ty century, and their administration was as good, if not better than the Ottoman one until cheaper method of making paper was found in the 15th century.
Domestic reindeer (which, in Europe, is all of them - except for a small non-domesticated group in the southern mountains of Norway, and the Svalbard reindeer).
Domestic reindeer were domesticated by a nomadic people, or at least not an agricultural one. When that's said, they don't look "tame" like cows or sheep, but on the other hand anyone who's been involved with bringing in sheep which have spent the whole summer by themselves in the mountains will want to discuss how "tame" sheep can be.. (source: Myself, as a child I joined in the "hunt" every September for many years to help collect my grandfather's sheep)
I think it's the other way, right? ..That farming/agr and livestock are both examples of domestication (of plants and animals). The root of the word "agriculture" is specific to plants (ager, agr = fields).
Other way around. Horse domestication was around 5000 years ago. Agriculture started around 12000 years ago and by around 8000 years ago had spread pretty widely.
Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented. I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body. Yes the new body is strange and interesting in some ways, but on an emotional level it’s like driving a different car.
The regulations are different. The FDA only gets in trouble if they approve a drug that turns out to be harmful, not if they fail to approve (or delay approving) a beneficial drug. On net, the FDA has caused far more harm than they’ve prevented. eg: Banning the importation of infant formula from the EU, or delaying the approval of new beta blockers by a decade.
> In compliance with the Montreal Protocol, its manufacture was banned in developed countries (non-article 5 countries) in 1996, and in developing countries (Article 5 countries) in 2010 out of concerns about its damaging effect on the ozone layer.
The sentence immediately after the quoted section provides additional nuance, reading as follows:
> Its only allowed usage is as a fire retardant in submarines and aircraft.
There is no reason to continue the use of R-12 in inhalers when R-134a is a drop-in replacement, though you're welcome to do your own research if you still disagree with the legislation.
> There is no reason to continue the use of R-12 in inhalers when R-134a is a drop-in replacement, though you're welcome to do your own research if you still disagree with the legislation.
I disagree with that statement. As mentioned above if it causes the drug companies to be able to re-patent the same drug again at 20x the price, then it’s not a drop-in replacement.
If this is a propellant used in life-saving medicine and this regulation increased the price then it’s a bad regulation, period. If there’s already an exception to be used as a fire retardant then medical applications can be included in there as well. The immeasurable output from an inhaler isn’t going to damage the ozone layer.
Over time you can migrate the production to the newer chemical and still achieve the same effect without hiking the price, since the drug companies won’t charge 20x the price if the cheaper generic still exists.
Politicians unfortunately do this all the time where they create a regulation without going through an analysis of tangentially related cause and effect.
You’re correct that the patent should’ve never been awarded, but the regulation still caused a problem today - something that could’ve been avoided if a cause-effect analysis was done. This is a problem statement that is applicable to most regulation today.
That’s why you an analyze cause and effect. You should target the highest driving factor and ban that, not blanket ban and catch things in the crossfire that don’t make a statistical difference to what you’re trying to improve - that way you don’t cause ill effects elsewhere.
If the only remaining allowed use for R-12 is in inhalers, the manufacturing volume might be so low that you end up in a similar situation to today: Fewer manufacturers (likely just one), higher prices, and supply-chain issues.
> Several inhaler manufacturers formed the International Pharmaceutical Aerosol Consortium, a lobbying group dedicated to, among other goals, persuading lawmakers and regulators to ban inhalers with CFCs. The group spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars, and in 2005, the FDA ruled that CFC inhalers would be phased out beginning in 2009. As a result of the ban, newer albuterol products — including Proventil HFA (which was approved in 1996), Ventolin HFA (approved in 2001), and ProAir HFA (approved in 2004) — would be free from competition from inexpensive CFC-containing generics. HFA inhalers were protected by new patents on both the HFA propellants and the devices themselves, and they generally cost much more than generic CFC inhalers.
"Product Hopping in the Drug Industry - Lessons from Albuterol"
Well, patents are only supposed to be granted if an idea is non-obvious to someone skilled in the field. Replacing an illegal propellant with a legal one should be obvious to anyone in the field, so this patent deserves to be challenged.
and while we're at it, maybe punish the ones who granted it? perhaps even make the people who did it, and anyone who knew of it, and didnt try combat it PERSONALLY liable for it?
You can read about it in the wikipedia page [0]. This refrigerant isn't manufactured anywhere anymore because it was creating a hole in the ozone layer.
The first I know about is the montreal protocol for the ozone. Countries (all 19X of them) agreed banned CFCs and pharmaceutical products weren't excluded.
It is true, which implies your understanding of the situation is confused. I dislike bigPharma as well, but I at least point the blame canon at the right target and not just indiscriminately point it at the person I dislike the most in the fight.
Semaglutide was invented before 2008. Its patent expires in a few years.
It takes a long time to get drugs through trials and get the FDA to approve drugs for new uses. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on drugs that never make it through trials. If you don’t enforce their patents, companies won’t make new drugs.
Probably never because every generation of Starlink satellite has been dimmer than the last. Despite being significantly bigger, the v2 minis are only 19% as bright as the original satellites.
Honestly, I can see why astronomers are pissed (they need to use software to delete satellite streaks from long exposures), but they really aren’t particularly visible except at dusk and dawn. They reflect the sun as they rise/set on the horizon, but that’s about it.
I live in an area where we can just barely still see the milky way, but light pollution is encroaching steadily.
The main problem is all the empty office buildings decided they need to leave their lights on 24/7. (Check out a light pollution map of Silicon Valley to see which megacorps are the worst offenders).
LED lights are probably a bigger problem though. They’re free to run, so people leave them on all night. Global light pollution has been growing exponentially in the last decade (faster than the population).
That's part of it. Part of it is that sodium bulbs are power hungry, so they tend to be provisioned to be dimmer.
Also, many LEDs have reflectors on top that prevent them from shooting light into the sky. These aren't required by building codes from what I've seen. Similarly, I don't think buildings are designed with this in mind.
Office buildings with massive glass atriums / skylights tend to be particularly bad offenders, since indoor lighting is often designed to bounce light off the ceiling.
I think a lot of men don't realize that for most women, the feeling of walking around alone in a normal place is equivalent to a man walking around in a very sketchy neighborhood. Almost any man can overpower a woman and, if he really wanted to, kill her with his bare hands. But if a man wants to attack another man, his chance of success is only as good if he has a weapon of some kind.
It is for this reason that I encourage women to carry weapons and train with them. Even if it's just pepper spray, it's better than nothing. And like a fire extinguisher or a tourniquet, it only has to come in handy once to be worth all the trouble of keeping it around.
Furthermore, self-defense classes will pay off even if never directly used. Knowing you are better able to defend yourself is a great confidence boost and balm for anxiety - it lets you carry yourself differently (emotionally and physically), which decreases your chances of being seen as a target.
I think any man born before about 1990 could tell you that. The lack of understanding comes from the attempts to teach children that men and women are exactly the same. That well intentioned approach has left a couple of generations very confused about some very basic truths like this.
This sort of thing happens all the time in SF. There are a lot of crazy people in some areas of the city. If you stopped for every one of them (even the ones a lane or two away) you’d never get anywhere. Heck, I’ve had someone run in front of my vehicle, then pull out a collapsible baton and try to rob me. I pinned the throttle and they jumped out of the way.
You also have people like John Carmack saying, "I have made multiple two hour drives without touching the wheel." His main complaint is that the car makes him touch the steering wheel if he's wearing sunglasses (because it can't track his eyes to determine whether he's paying attention).
I don't think owners will rent out their cars as taxis any time soon, but the technology really does seem to be there.
1. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1814687334366912530