Swizec is a software engineer, instructor, blogger, vlogger, conference speaker, and author.
He's published several books and video courses including ReactForDataViz.com, ServerlessReact.Dev, Data Visualization with D3.js, and the work-in-progress SeverlessHandbook.Dev . He has trained the engineering teams from multiple Fortune 500 companies on React, Redux, GraphQL, Serverless, and other modern web technologies.
My work has been featured in Business Insider, LifeHacker, Huffington Post, and several dead-tree magazines. I’ve spoken on BBC Radio, appeared on Slovenian national television, and given talks all over the world.
> where a preselected tip is selected. Default should be no.
A lot of this push to higher and higher and preselected tip options comes from POS software providers (Square et al) and credit card companies. They make money on transaction volume. Higher transaction -> more fees
> You really shouldn’t make speeding up to make the light a habit
I agree! In this particular case we were dealing with bumper-to-bumper traffic, a light that takes many minutes, and very few cars making every green light. It took us 20 minutes to wait our turn. I really didn't want to wait for another cycle. 2 more cars rushed behind me.
> Then there's the collision detection thing. It's basically guaranteed to beep at me whenever I enter my parents' narrow street with cars parked on both sides.
Some of my worst driving experiences have been with collision detection + auto brake.
You try to enter a narrow steep hill driveway and it slams on the brakes with half your car hanging out into [potentially] oncoming traffic. Thanks, car
Or you try to speed up across a wide open intersection because the light is about to turn and it slams on the brakes because there's cars on the other side waiting for the next light down the block. Plenty of room to stop after you've cleared the intersection mind you, but hte car really really doesn't like that you sped up from 25mph to 31mph when it thinks you should be slowly coasting to a stop.
On the other hand, driving a motorcycle, I love other people's auto brake. Makes lane splitting (at reasonable speed deltas) easier because every Tesla will tap the brakes when you cut into its lane.
Anyway, I wish driving assists had rush our mode. They're pretty decent in average conditions but ho boy tightly packed aggressive rush hour traffic is hell in a modern car. So much beeping and constantly fighting with the assists.
> This must have had an effect, beyond health. Surely?
Watch old music videos and TV or movies, everyone looks so old! You’ll have 30 year olds running around looking 50.
Then you look at modern media and think “Wow look at that 30 year old baby” and the person is pushing 50. Everyone looks so young these days! Cigarettes age your skin super fast.
> And if they want to keep their jobs they have to comply.
Worse still, many mariners are effectively prisoners and can become trapped if corporate decides to cut them loose without also providing passage off the vessel
> the point from GP was that both cars brake/ decelerate at the same rate
Point is that’s not always true. If they are the same type of car, and the car happens to be the kind with downforce, then their rate of deceleration greatly depends on air speed. A downforce car decelerates faster at higher speeds.
This is why you often see race cars lock their wheels towards the end of the braking zone, never at the beginning. The driver has to release the brakes as the car decelerates because there’s less friction available. You go from pulling 4G at the beginning of the braking zone to pulling the usual 1G once your speed drops enough for downforce to become negligible.
Alos! Many non-race cars actualy produce lift. Meaning the faster car decelerates at a slower rate than the slower car (0.8G vs 1G), making the effect from OP even more pronounced.
> The blue car, using ½mv², shed (~70²=) 4900 units of energy (we'll hand wave away the constants). So the red car, which had (100²=) 10000 units of kinetic energy to start, also shed 4900 units, which means it had 5100 units of energy when it collided, and so was going (√5100~) 71
But if the cars produce downforce this is no longer true because you brake harder (more friction available) at higher speeds!
This is how F1 cars pull 4G when breaking. Some custom cars (like one of Ken Block’s last monsters or the Valkyre) use active aero braking to even greater effect.
> While vehicle sizes are indeed trending upward in Australia and Europe, giant SUV and especially giant truck penetration in both countries is still far behind US levels
Many big SUVs are flat out illegal in Europe, you’d need a small truck license. It’s hard to comprehend how large American cars are unless you’ve lived in both places.
For example:
we took an Uber to the airport for our annual pilgrimage back home. We had 4 suitcases this time because new babies need gifts. In USA we got picked up by a sedan and everything fit in the trunk. In Europe we rented an SUV and had to break down the rear seats to fit everything.
> big companies need to self police and if a child can reach their service they have to pay the child like lets say GBP 10k per instance?
HIPAA has been super effective this way. As we all know, American companies don’t give two shits about user privacy or even security. But wave the HIPAA flag and everyone starts caring real hard and taking extremely cumbersome steps to comply with patient privacy.
Very simple: Each HIPAA violation comes with a financial penalty for the business and personal penalty for every person involved in the leak. Very effective.
> (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)
We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).
The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.
> I lean very heavily towards outcome based prompting. Say exactly what do you want achieved and then maybe give some constraints, ie. what definitely not to do.
I do this when writing stories/projects/issues/epics for humans. Works great.
If you read any management book published in the last ~70 or so years, you’ll find that “Make sure people understand the goal” is the ultimate hack. They even use this in militaries!
“go take that hill” works a lot better than “walk 50ft to the right and shoot at those bushes”. You always get what you ask for :)
While researching my book I read papers from the 80’s saying this. If you get a good enough spec and define the contracts and architecture, you then just hand off implementation to juniors/offshore/etc
> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality
Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this.
Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The Architecture Problem (it’s not [2])
> As far as I could tell, nothing was substantially different from the Ellsworth translation and the Fable translation.
Crucially the full translation was part of ChatGPT’s training set. Recall is a pretty solved problem in machine learning.
How well does it translate a French novel published yesterday? Where neither the original novel nor any translations are in the training set yet? Or might not even exist!
I tried asking ChatGPT to translate a letter I wrote in Slovenian this weekend. It got the general gist but missed a lot of the nuance. Completely missed several of the little touches of tone where the right choice of synonym conveys a whole bunch of information.
> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.
Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.
Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only
To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!
He's published several books and video courses including ReactForDataViz.com, ServerlessReact.Dev, Data Visualization with D3.js, and the work-in-progress SeverlessHandbook.Dev . He has trained the engineering teams from multiple Fortune 500 companies on React, Redux, GraphQL, Serverless, and other modern web technologies.
My work has been featured in Business Insider, LifeHacker, Huffington Post, and several dead-tree magazines. I’ve spoken on BBC Radio, appeared on Slovenian national television, and given talks all over the world.
Publishing regularly on https://swizec.com