I’m not talking disingenuously, I’m all pro-electric. In fact it looks like my next car will be a Taycan, unless something changes unexpectedly.

But counting engine rebuilds as an inevitable matter of life is rather disingenuous too. My other (“hobby”) car is a 1977, so that’s 47 years now, and still on the original engine and transmission. This is not an uber-reliable statistical anomaly: it’s an unreliable piece of shit (a handmade sports car from a small manufacturer) but despite that, the block is still solid and original. Engine rebuilds are not common, unlike batteries which have an ever-degrading chemistry no matter how good they are.

And I strongly disagree on good design being a single point mass of over 700 kg concentrated in one block. The “skateboard” around suspension components and chassis is the most common design for a reason.

Fair, but in its lifetime, the maintenance for my 20-year-old car has cost less than one single battery swap. Last year was a bad one and it cost me £500 between maintenance and repairs. A battery swap for a Tesla is well, well above 10k. A Taycan’s batteries cost about £20k to replace and it’s nothing to do with being a Porsche; it’s just how much the batteries for a long-range EV cost to replace. They are expensive, and scattered across the whole floorplan so replacement is a nightmare.

I agree that the motors are pretty bulletproof, but total cost of ownership is still unfortunately quite comparable if you keep an EV for the long term. It’s just a different “payment plan” for the maintenance, where you get hit with one single massive bill after X years. This is worrying because people might choose then to scrap a perfectly good car with a damaged battery - it’s the EVs way of programmed obsolescence.

This assumes everything works fine. It’s probably an edge case, but on my Nexus 6P an update somehow messed with my encryption keys, and the screen lock pattern that I’d used for over a year stopped getting recognised. I can’t remember the solution but I vaguely remember having to factory reset. Whatever the solution was, it wasn’t too different to what a thief would do… I was bypassing the screen lock after all.

Also while they’re repairable and they have that going for them, Google also promises 7 years of updates, so they’re not even unique on that selling point.

The least unreliable LLM I’ve found by far is perplexity, in the Pro mode. (By the way, if you want to try it out, you get a few free uses a day).

The reason is because the Pro mode doesn’t retrieve and spit out information from its internal memory bank, but instead, it uses that information to launch multiple search queries, then summarises the pages it finds, and then gives you that information.

Other LLMs try to answer “from memory” and then add some links at the bottom for fact checking but usually Perplexity’s answers come straight from the web so they’re usually quite good.

However, I still check (depending on how critical the task is) that the tidbit of information has one or two links next to it, that the links talk about the right thing, and I verify the data myself if it’s actually critical that it gets it right. I use it as a beefier search engine, and it works great because it limits the possible hallucinations to the summarisation of pages. But it doesn’t eliminate the possibility completely so you still need to do some checking.

In reality you mean? Diversity, Equality and Inclusion.

In their minds, anything that isn’t white, straight, cis.

My partner and I got invited to a wedding with a funky, everything-goes sort of dress code. For £50 we bought enough clothes for two blade-runner-esque outfits (we added some bits of our own so the ensemble wouldn’t look too cheap) and a big goose plushie (bigger than an individual pillow). The goose was £14 and not cheaply made at all! That one was genuinely a nice suprise.

My partner and I are super happy with the recipe website mob.co.uk for it’s functionality. It has no BS life stories, lets you tick the ingredients off and use the ingredients page as a shopping list, it’s concise and to the point…

Anyway, searching by “chickpea” it’s showing me 3 pages worth of recipes with chickpeas which look pretty good, such as “Roast Sweet Potato with Chickpea & Coconut Curry Recipe”. For some reason linking to the search results directly doesn’t work but here’s a link to the search page in case you want to take a look: https://www.mob.co.uk/search

The reason is better is because a number on its own doesn’t provide any representation whatsoever of the passing of time. It represents the current observed time, but it does nothing to represent graphically how much of the day is left.

The arguably best representation of the passing of time is a 24h analogue watch/clock, even if that has its own set of issues which make it a terrible way of displaying the current time.

Absolutely not comparable to floppy disks. The hands are a representation, not a technology. Technology-wise, most modern “analog” wristwatches are quartz, and therefore digital, not actually analog. Yet we choose to make them with hands because that provides a better representation of the passing of time.

When you bought e.g. half-life, it would come with the ability to run a server.

If a game needs a server, that functionality should be added into the game, not kept separate. I mean it might be a separate executable, but it should be part of the game “bundle” because the server is part of the game.

Scooters come with brake lights, indicators… And as far as I know, in most countries the scooters and bicycles are in a similar or same category so the same helmet laws apply to both of them.

The problem is enforcement and education - bikes are usually owned, not rented, and people have been told for years why it’s important to wear a helmet. A bicycle is a large thing that you leave locked, and you can lock the helmet together with the bike. With scooters you’d have to take the helmet with you so it’s perceived as inconvenient, and we don’t have years of messaging saying “wear a helmet with your scooter”.

But to me enforcement is a big part of this. I live in a cycling city (mind you, a cycling city in the UK is still significantly more car-centric than central/northern Europe), and I have never heard of anyone getting fined for not wearing a helmet (neither on a scooter or bicycle). I routinely see people wearing dark clothes and no lights in their bike. If that’s in the regulations, then clearly the police have better things to do. If nobody gets a fine, and there’s no education drilling into people’s heads that the helmet is important, then people won’t bother.

never fixed until Android 6 Android 9

FTFY

It wasn’t until my Xiaomi Mi 8 that I could use my phone without babysitting wakelocks. My nexus 6P still had them, and the consequences were quite annoying thanks to the SD810…

I believe so. I have some roles in my team I’m hiring for, that have reading code and fixing small bugs as one of the requirements, but not developing code from scratch. (It’s a sort-of field engineering role).

We do test for both things (treating the “developing code from scratch” as bonus points rather than a strict pass/fail) and some people can find and fix bugs in a couple minutes, but are incapable of writing some basic python to iterate through prime numbers and store them in an array.

Oh that’s rich. So what they’re saying is somehow every other smartwatch company can engineer not only a way to solve the technical limitations, but a full smartwatch in under three years, while one of the most powerful tech companies somehow thought “naah, connecting to android is a lot more difficult than a self driving car or a VR headset with an integrated computer and video passthrough, we better shelve that idea”.

Yeah ok Apple.

An interesting perspective that I heard once is that it was the Fax Machine that killed the Concorde. Before faxes, people (businesses) had to physically transport documents, which meant that for large financial companies in Wall St and the London City the Concorde was a great business tool and worth the expense. When the documents you’re carrying enable signing a multi-million business deal in the same day, a £6000 ticket is a completely reasonable business expense.

The fax machine rendered that business need obsolete, and leisure travellers can deal with an extra few hours to cross the Atlantic.

I don’t think it’s bad, in fact I wonder the same. These are my colleagues because it’s the same path I took - I now work developing self-driving cars (I slowly transitioned from aerospace to manufacturing automation to robotics) and it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had, and it feels very much like engineering. I don’t care if I’m not a “manufacturing engineer” anymore; I really like my job and I like my title to reflect somewhat accurately what I do, but that’s the extent I care about it.

No, that’s precisely the opposite of my point. If you drive an Uber, you’re an Uber driver. People are “CEO” or “Judge” despite nobody having a CEO or Judge degree. Your profession is what you do, not what you happened to study in your teens to get there.

I don’t think what you study in your degree is the defining factor. Obviously this is country-specific but I feel you job title isn’t always linked 1:1 to your title.

I studied Industrial Engineering, which in Spain exists as a degree but not as a job position. Position wise, I’ve been a mechanical design engineer, a manufacturing engineer, an automation engineer, robotics engineer, and these days I’m mostly a software engineer. I’m definitely specialised in engineering, regardless of the tools I’m applying to solve the task at hand.

Hmmm. But all the people around me working in software studied multiple years in an Engineering field. In my case, I studied a 5-year industrial engineering and two masters afterwards; I feel very comfortable wearing the “software engineer” or more accurately “robotics engineer” badge.