You do realize that you are just re-implementing 10-15 year old tech without the quality control, well-defined limitations and user experience research that made these driver assists actually work?
And then top of of that, you're calling your amateur-hour driving assists "a self-driving car". How the hell do any of you even have have a driver's license, still?
Just wanted to add that same could be said of Tesla, who go even further with their marketing on coast to coast autonomous drives, cross country summons, and driverless taxis.
There's been a quite generally raised awareness of the importance of civil resilience here in Sweden the past two years. The perceived threath of a Russian invasion (or perhaps more likely network-based sabotage) has been the cathalyst of this.
Being a "prepper" has gone from being seen as border-line psychotic behavior to "being a responsibile citizen". As long as you don't go over-board and try to prep for more than 4-7 days lack of electricity/water/food - then you're still seen as suspicious. Small steps.
There was also this campaign just a week or two ago - every household received a leaflet telling them to prepare for any incidents that stop public services:
This stuff used to be standard operating procedure when I grew up in the 70s/80s - all this stuff was printed in the annual phone directories that everyone receieved. After Soviet collapsed we stopped doing it though.
There's also been an unusually large number of outages of networked systems in Sweden the past two years, all over the place. Things like ATC systems, banks, media/cable tv distribution systems. Perhaps the official, public explanations are true (typically some kind of "human error" or "software update problem"). I suspect there's an adversary who is not very shy.
How popular has the Norwegian series Okkupert been among Swedes? It seems war is weighing heavily on the mind of all the Scandinavian countries since about 2014 (except for Finland, of course, who have never stopped thinking of it).
The prospect of war weighs very little in Denmark, for the record. There was quite a shock in Denmark, when Sweden announced its 'war survival guide' a few days ago. There seems to be no indication that the Danish government is going to do the same, or anything similar. The argument being that Denmark is in NATO (Sweden is not).
Lol! I was interviewed about it by a Dutch TV team a few weeks ago and I had no idea what they were talking about! I got it in the mail last week, a little brochure called "What do to if war or crisis comes." I threw it in the trash and refused to take it seriously.
The value of being a part of NATO seems at best fluid with the current US president. That means that your NATO membership might not be as valuable as you thought it was. I'd even go to say as far as saying that Denmark and Norway are being complacent in case they depend on the US for reinforcements - with Trump at the helm.
On the other hand we all know that Trump will be gone by the next US election.
(Besides the current context I am incredibly frustrated with Sweden's unwillingness to join NATO. And just when were gaining some momentum to join, Trump goes and does his thing.)
So-so. I watched it. Enjoyed parts. Mostly cringed through it.
But just like the Danish/Swedish Netflix series "The Rain" in a similar genre the writing was painfully bad at times - I think this is what stopped it from being popular.
Everybody, anywhere in the world, should have at least 3 days supply of food and water stored at home for in case of emergency. Ideally, you should have it in a container, along with other emergency supplies such as a first aid kit, a radio, and a flashlight.
It is normal for emergency services or the military to take up to 3 days to get the essentials running again in the case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake.
When I used to live in an earthquake prone city, I always had a bag with a hard hat, gloves, a flashlight, and some other emergency essentials ready to go.
I live somewhere that is earthquake-prone, and watched intently when a large earthquake hit a city a couple hours away last year.
Food and water were supplied very quickly. But there were 3-4-hour long queues so you're better off with your own stock. In the following days, what people requested most be sent in as donations were the following "luxuries": toilet paper, diapers, and batteries to charge phones.
I actually bought a couple of huge water bottles and a battery-driven tiny radio recently, so I guess I can confirm what you are describing here. The radio after there was a false alarm of the official emergency siren, followed by news articles that recommended that the best way to learn why the emergency siren is activated, is one of the public service radio channels.
I figured, better safe than sorry.
Or a ex-member of the military. This[1] episode of Omega Tau aboard a Royal Navy ship really made me realize how much they train for Shit Happening - I think they simulated a fire or man overboard every other day. We civilians should probably do more of that as well.
I guess this solidifies the more and more common view that Apple's thought leadership is something from the past.
A few years ago, the messaging was along the lines of "just wait, this will just be a temporary pain - Apple is just being brave and taking the industry leader role as usual".
That Nobel Peace Prize for Obama was just so wrong. It was a Norwegian (Not Swedish) small celebrity/exposure hungry group of elderly people who abused the power of the brand for their personal gain.
(Liberal-minded americans downvoting this: please think twice. Not everything that seems to go against your instincts is downvote-worthy if you don't know the details. In this case the details matter.)
Very well put. It's important that we recognize the history that led us to where we are, even if it's not a super beautiful history.
I remember this particular period relatively clearly. There was intense debate everywhere, it was the most polarizing issue for a very, very long time. I was on the dove-side of the debate. I remember having some extremely heated debates with "hawks" (all online - these hawks somehow just disappeared after the invasion when it it got more and more obvious that there actually were no WMDs...).
That flagging scheme of yours allows a subgroup, in this case likely C# devs whose careers are aligned with the success of Microsoft to very efficiently silence any dissent. I don't think this is something that has caught you by surprise, so why do you allow it?
You've simply imagined this: "likely C# devs whose careers are aligned with the success of Microsoft". Once you frame it that way, it sounds terrible, but there's no evidence for it and the data I looked at doesn't support it. Your question "why do you allow it" has a similar framing. The answer is that we don't allow it.
The much more common case is that users don't want to see things that are clearly off topic for HN, such as teacup internet dramas. As I explained above, the overwhelming verdict of HN users is that there's nothing serious in this story. If they thought otherwise, it would certainly be on HN's front page. That's the flagging system working as intended.
I think he's a psycho (could be a good thing, wait) who cares about two things:
a) Tesla making enough money to make Space X work
b) Being able to establish a colony on Mars, using Space X
I think he's super honest about the Mars stuff. I also think he's being super deceptive about the Tesla stuff. Is that ethical or not? I don't know. From his larger point of view (risk of earth annihilation vs a bunch of rich americans dying in Tesla failures)... who knows.
It's interesting to see the HN reaction to this. The last time the EU fined Google a huge amount of money for anti-trust reasons the general sentiment here was that it was just socialist Europeans taxing American companies trying to make an honest living.
I guess Google is a lot less popular now compared to like two years ago.
> The last time the EU fined Google a huge amount of money for anti-trust reasons the general sentiment here was that it was just socialist Europeans taxing American companies trying to make an honest living.
That was a common sentiment amongst Americans.
As a European, you don't really think "yeah, screw those American monopolies... but I like the European ones"
HN has been slowly alienating the people who would disagree (mostly by downvoting without replying), it seems. If I were designing HN today, I'd probably make it only possible to downvote a post if you have either replied, or upvoted an existing reply.
I happen to believe the US should begin reciprocal economic targeting against the EU if they continue down the path of attacking our tech companies via massive fines as a means to offset their inability to compete. Indeed, this outcome is guaranteed to occur. The US isn't going to just watch as the EU continuously steals billions of dollars from its top companies.
They're so far behind in the EU, the US would have to stop all technological progress for at least a decade to allow them to partially catch up. When Britain exits the EU, the EU GDP per capita will nearly be 50% lower than the US. Realistically they have no means to keep up with the US over time, they simply don't have the financial capability to do it, I almost sympathize with their desperation.
The US is booming, it'll add a trillion dollars to its GDP this year alone. Meanwhile half the EU is a perpetual rolling economic disaster still, a decade after the great recession began. Populists keep gaining more and more traction in EU countries, with Italy looking like it might be the next to leave the EU. It really is hard to blame the EU leadership for trying to find some way to extract value from the US economic dominion, given how weak the EU outlook is.
Post history is relevant to assess if the person you're talking to has a very strongly set view on an extremely complex matter. If they do, that suggests that the reasons for the person spending time defending that view might not be motivated by exploration of ideas, but by evangelization of their view.
I think having an estimation of the person's motivation is important because conversations with people motivated by exploration of ideas can make for interesting, insightful and educational conversation, whereas the ones movitated by evangelization tend to be reduced to the same catchy but superficial arguments that they've learned over the years.
> Post history is relevant to assess if the person you're talking to has a very strongly set view on an extremely complex matter. If they do, that suggests that the reasons for the person spending time defending that view might not be motivated by exploration of ideas, but by evangelization of their view
Strange, perhaps we have different motivations for debating? My goal is generally to learn and understand why someone would think a certain way in contrast with my own way of thinking. Their motivations for the exchange are irrelevant to this, if at the end of it they agree with me that's nice but it's not the objective. Personally my favorite occasions are when I'm proven to be wrong.
> I think having an estimation of the person's motivation is important because conversations with people motivated by exploration of ideas can make for interesting, insightful and educational conversation, whereas the ones motivated by evangelization tend to be reduced to the same catchy but superficial arguments that they've learned over the years.
This is the part I'm finding confusing, the entire paragraph feels very hypocritical. How can you claim to be open to ideas while simultaneously dismissing the ones you deem unworthy? Is it that your own motivations don't matter but the ones you choose to speak to do? Superficial arguments don't matter when the goal is to understand the reason THEY believe something. If you believe you have heard it all before and choose not to spend your time on it then that's one thing, but you purposefully injected yourself into a discussion without adding anything other than a snarky comment that implied another poster was unworthy of being spoken to due to their more polarized views. How can you justify this?
This is looking less and less certain every day, not helped by the fact that the government has absolutely no idea what it wants or how to achieve it while increasing numbers of people point out that the "no deal" option results in total chaos: food shortages within a week etc.
I still believe even if happens, UK will eventually end up in a situation similar to Norway, Switzerland, with bilateral agreements, not changing that much in practice.
I have no strong opinion either way. But I was wondering if your belief isn't motivated more by your familiarity (with those scenarios) than anything else.
Personally I would note that in those examples you mentioned you have freedom of movement, which to me seems isn't a politically unacceptable solution in the UK.
Yeah, I am familiar with those scenarios, which kind of allow those countries to benefit from EU agreements without losing too much of their independence, in comparison with other European countries.
I am also regularly in the UK, and for many people it wasn't clear what being outside EU meant regarding European companies with HQ in UK.
Having such agreements would allow a kind of win-win situation, leaving EU while allowing many of those businesses to stay in UK.
That is just a personal opinion, in any case I don't have any vote in UK matters.
Off topic, but: I thought it was certain? That is, I thought that, once Britain invoked Article 50 (?), they were out in two years, guaranteed, no stopping the process, with the only question being what the new situation would be. Is there a path from here that doesn't result in exit?
I agree that the government doesn't know how to achieve anything positive out of the situation...
Even if that weren't the case, I think it'd theoretically be possible for EU and UK to have an exit agreement retaining full cooperation, the UK leaving and immediately applying for membership again. That process could be quick, if everyone (which in this case would involve all member states) agrees about it... but could also be a point where some governments might try to strip the UK of privileges from it's current membership.
I've just started using the Amazon Prime Video app on Apple TV 4k. It's web-based and frankly horrible. And not just horrible because of the technical constraints imposed by having to target a web runtime - there are some serious, glaring beginner type UI anti-patterns in the UI.
Is this experience indicative of what I can expect with an Amazon TV device? (I suspect so.)
You do realize that you are just re-implementing 10-15 year old tech without the quality control, well-defined limitations and user experience research that made these driver assists actually work?
And then top of of that, you're calling your amateur-hour driving assists "a self-driving car". How the hell do any of you even have have a driver's license, still?