> The whale itself has never been sighted: it has only been heard via hydrophones, but its call has been detected since the late 1980s in a pattern that matches the migration of the blue whale and the fin whale. Those species call at 10 to 39 Hz and 20 Hz respectively.
So not only lonely, but sings in a falsetto by whale standards; a weirdo. A lonely fellow with a distinctly high-pitched voice.
I was wondering about this. I wonder if there are insurance products to close this gap? Or maybe some banks offer accounts with different kinds of purchase protection.
I'm with you. While I'm no fan of the risk involved with missing a CC payment, there's a mountain of difference between credit and debit when it comes to fraud. It's literally you trying to get your money back (debit) versus some giant corporation trying to get _its_ money back (credit).
I get that's an apples-to-oranges comparison, considering that labor and material costs (not to mention subsidies and regulations) are probably not the same. But even at $40k, it would be cost-competitive with other EVs if nothing else.
One route is to provide incentives, if not regulations, to force innovation on US automakers. The goal would be to yield products that are head-to-head competitive with imports.
> It seems to me though that the current strategy seems to be very short term thinking - trying to just hold back the tide.
I'm seeing that too, but from a different angle. The era of big trucks seems to be as much an effort to extract cash from the economy as it is taking advantage of a peculiar set of EPA and DOT regulations. Basically, "gettin' in while the gettin's good." It's not a long-term strategy because, at some point, people can't afford these behemoths and will go for the used car market next for cheaper goods. EVs may get caught up in that too, considering that they're aimed squarely at the sub-luxury tier and above. As we have no good cheap EV options at the moment, I think it's the same story.
Since you're using HTMX, I have to ask: do you have any tips or idioms for composing complex forms and UI without things getting out of hand? I love the approach, but I'm having a bad time figuring out where the ideal balance is between too few or too many HTMX-replaced areas in a page. Thanks.
I feel like the idea of fixed-point is under-utilized and very under appreciated. There are loads of applications where this is a better choice, let alone more performant.
Just a guess: if you want to scale a sprite at anything less than a whole ratio (e.g. 1.5, 0.7, etc), you have to choose pixels to drop out and pixels to repeat , on some pattern that looks good. There are going to be scaling ratios that look like a hot mess, especially at a low resolution like 320x240.
Water consumption and localized atmospheric heating have been cited elsewhere as drawbacks. There have been some articles citing noise/vibration pollution (subsonic?) but I'm not completely convinced on that front. Personally, I would add electric grid load to the list.
In the worst case, if your local municipality sides with business over the little guy, that means potential brownouts and water shortages for you.
I completely get the concept and agree - this is great way to build this kind of durability in a workflow system.
That said, my gamer-brain wants to call this "Save-scumming at scale." Which is to say, a lot of people already know that this approach works, but maybe they haven't made the connection to abstract CS stuff.
Another strategy that can be used to build robustness is to build your workflow out of idempotent operations. That can be useful for situations where the workflow state is too large to back up. Instead, you just run the job from the top and it's a bunch of no-ops until you start making progress again.
I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.
At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.
Interesting article. I appreciate the range of perspectives here, and the overall pitch to keep the most experienced in frame along side new-fangled advancements (AI).
The "speed" loop reminds me a lot of RAD. In fact, AI might be _the_ thing that helps us deliver on RAD's promises from decades ago.
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
> Imagine being able to list your eBay items locally without having to have people needing to come to your house, or better yet, getting a cut of what you wanted up front since they're basically a pawn shop, and then they list it on eBay and turn a bit of a profit with a local pickup option available.
I kind of assumed there were already local businesses that already did this? Seems like a decent side-line for any drop-shippers out there. In any event, moving that activity into a local strip-mall would be super convenient for everyone.
I came in here to comment the same. Our brains are wonderful pattern recognition engines and the reader would absolutely be able to more readily see the correlation between hex and character representations this way. It might even accelerate learning hex values in the process.
We may see Canonical or other commercial Linux vendors come forward with a government or enterprise-flavored solution for all this. But the important thing to keep in mind is that they're not selling Linux per-se. As the GPL prohibits this, these companies sell support for their Linux distro instead. That revenue goes into improving Linux and maintaining their distro (e.g. Ubuntu). But even with all that money changing hands, that they do not own Linux, the Linux kernel, or any other shred of GPL licensed stuff.
> The whale itself has never been sighted: it has only been heard via hydrophones, but its call has been detected since the late 1980s in a pattern that matches the migration of the blue whale and the fin whale. Those species call at 10 to 39 Hz and 20 Hz respectively.
So not only lonely, but sings in a falsetto by whale standards; a weirdo. A lonely fellow with a distinctly high-pitched voice.