AshDene

So, #trump was just charged with a crime that carries a maximum sentence of death (conspiracy against rights, given that someone died as a result, multiple people did during Jan 6).

I feel like I'm seeing a lot of "oh wow, Trump was indicted for a third time", and not nearly enough "oh wow, look at how terrible the crimes Trump committed were. He could literally face a death sentence for his crimes". I mean he probably won't, sort of like how most murderers don't, but he could. It's pretty hard to commit a crime that bad.

Yesterday I idly wondered why my (clothes) dryer has heating coils in it, instead of a heat pump based dehumidifier. The same amount of energy would generate the same amount of heat, in addition to extracting water from the air making the clothes dry faster.

Turns out someone patented the idea. Apparently writing down what a non-expert can come up with in two minutes of idle thought is worth a 20 year monopoly idea, and if that makes peoples appliances less efficient, well fuck them and fuck the planet.

The patent expires in 2025, maybe in a few years dryers will get a lot more efficient. Or maybe there is some non-obvious (to me) reason why it isn't a good idea, because someone patenting it doesn't mean it's a good idea, just that they wrote the obvious idea down.

and EV charging locations don't shout their presence with 50-foot ad displays along highways. That's engendered a general sense of range anxiety among many car buyers

Jonathan M. Gitlin telling it like it is for @arstechnica - I have to say I never considered the impact of the billboard like presence of gas stations on range anxiety.

I'm neither an expert nor an american, but the idea that RFK Jr running as a third party candidate will hurt the democrats seems strange to me.

His policies, which can be summed up as "deny reality", align very closely with the modern republican party, not the democrats. It's hard to imagine that he would pull more votes away from Biden than Trump. Are there some people who would vote based on name recognition? Maybe... but surely it can't be that many? Meanwhile "Trump but not a rapist" must appeal to a number of the evangelical republicans...

#politics

Today I was struck by how much time young kids spend playing with car and truck toys.

If we want to move towards walkable cities, public transit, and micromobility it may be a good idea to stop indoctrinating people at the age of 1 that cars and trucks are fun.

Of course they're natural shapes for toys. Extremely simple and stable, but slightly more dynamic then a literal wooden block... but it's not like they're the only things with that property.

Apple's Vision Pro is incredibly cheap. Low in price, not expensive.

It's easy to get sticker shock because so are all modern computers, and it's ever so slightly less incredibly cheap, but it's still incredibly cheap.

The general rule of thumb for pricing is to start by asking "how much value does this provide to the purchaser" and try and price it just under that. The average professional uses a computer as their main tool of trade, it is absolutely necessary for their trade, and makes them $$$/year. Apart from competition driving prices down, that's how much computers would cost. The vision pro is an order of magnitude below that price. If you view it as targeted at the class of people that fly around the world constantly (and thus can't use a desktop) it might even be two orders of magnitude below that price.

The average American owns 4/5ths of a car (including kids and so on in that statistic). The average price of a new car in the US is just shy of $50,000. That's an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. Indeed just the difference between the sale price and the base models of a car is an order of magnitude more than the Vision Pro costs. To suggest that there isn't a population that can afford to buy (new) computers at Vision Pro prices is ridiculous.

While we're at it, for a good portion of the population computers are more important than cars, despite the fact that they spend an order of magnitude more on cars than computers.

All this is to say, the money is there, Apple is just trying to capture it. Given that there are no serious (capable) competitors at this point, there's no reason to believe that they'll fail because of pricing.

#apple

Pet peeve of the day: Games with "puzzles" that can only be solved by trying a bunch of different plausible answers.

If you know the right answer (but not that it is the right answer), and the reasoning behind the right answer, but you still can't tell that it's the right answer without engaging the games mechanic to check if it's the right answer, it's not a puzzle. It's just a game a brute forcing answers.

#gaming

Reading car brained people make delusional comments about how a change that inconveniences them, but obviously makes everyone safer, is bad for safety is so fucking sad. It's obvious that they really have managed to delude themselves into thinking it despite how obviously stupid what they are saying is.

I really wonder what twitter's user statistics look right now.

How many lurkers made or logged into accounts to be able to lurk? Can they distinguish between this and fake accounts being made to scrape twitter?

How many people left because they don't want to tweet to a private audience?

How many people hit the login-wall and bounce off?

How much is Google's policy of not surfacing pages behind a log-in wall in search results hurting them?

How much has the prevalence of embedding tweets in news articles been effected?

It would be a fascinating look at how social media users actually behave, the kind of experiment that no one till now has been stupid enough to run...

Watching people get mad at MDN for including ChatGPT, and I'm mostly struck by how time-sensitive PR crisis management is.

It was a clear mistake, yes. Everyone would have forgotten about if it was promptly removed after that was pointed out, or even if the promise to remove it was made.

Instead, because they've let this sit for an eternity (4 hours), we're already seeing reactions like

I am warning my team about this feature and letting them know not to trust it.

and

By implementing and deploying this "feature", MDN has convinced me to stop contributing to MDN and cease donating to the Mozilla Foundation, because I am completely unwilling to participate in perpetuating the massive disinformation which this "feature" presents to users and the dramatic confusion and waste of people's time which it will cause.

Obviously, I will also stop recommending MDN as a good source of documentation. I will also need to remove links to MDN from everything I've written which can be edited.

and

This was very disappointing as a now-former MDN contributor and subscriber. The whole point of MDN was authoritative content but until there are some fundamental improvements in LLMs I might as well be supporting W3 Schools.

These might seem like extreme reactions, but no one is defending MDN, because MDN has given them nothing to wield in MDNs defence. Instead these reactions are only receiving "upvotes" (thumbs ups) and more users piling on.

A not lightning fast response time is doing irreparable harm to MDN's reputation, and is losing them revenue.

Context: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

Archived as of writing this comment: https://archive.is/MNjro

Unfortunately, unless Elon is lying, twitter will un-login-wall itself again in the near future: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1674865731136020505

I suppose it's unfortunate if Elon is lying as well, because it's unfortunate that people in power lie, but that's nothing new for him so I'll take it.

I'm new to this whole #apple development thing.

Am I right in thinking that I need to upgrade to the MacOS 14.0 beta to use the new SwiftData apis?

How bad an idea is it to use that beta on my laptop?

Is it safe to assume that 90%+ of users quickly upgrade to new MacOS versions after they're released?