If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?
It’s definitely a hyperbole number I made up. The point is that the technology isn’t equal or better, but different. It has other constraints and capabilities, but pretending an engine is an engine as long as the hood is closed gets us in the current situation where car builders struggle to recreate ICEs, but electric, consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations, and regulators don’t ensure the charging infrastructure that would actually required exists.
With an electric vehicle, you can get an extremely low-maintenance, easy to drive, fast accelerating, ecologically efficient car. That has its on merits. On the other hand, it has a lower range than an ICE engine, and is less reliable in cold weather.
> consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations
Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.
This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.
I think it’s unreasonable for people to think everything has to be business as usual whereas the true cost of a galon of fuel should have been 50 dollars if we facor in the environmental cost.
I think I don’t like that people see consumption as a birthright, and pretend there aren’t any consequences.
This is the main reason I never plan on buying one. I really hate all of the car-driven-by-a-computer functionality. I don’t want to drive a car where an internal computer can take over control of the vehicle, I especially don’t want one where the computer in charge of the car can connect to a network, I never want to drive one that has a mandatory always on connection. I also really want buttons, dials and switches, and think a yoke is such a stupid idea for a road car…
Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.
Yeah, and so far EVs almost universally have a couple "no-go" bullet points for me: touch screen controls, and always-online. Either of those just instantly excludes such a vehicle from my consideration. Uhh, unsurprisingly, I have no clue what I'm going to do when my current vehicle becomes unusable! Replace it with another old one, I guess?! >_<
I agree that it usually doesn’t fly with clients, unless you already have a good relationship and track record with them. But I don’t think it’s supposed to be a trick. On the client side somebody either has some funding for a project and needs to know whether you can deliver within the budget, or they need to go and apply for some funding to complete the project, but in either case the deliverable they’re committing to provide in exchange for this funding is the completed project, not a scope for the project.
From that perspective the “discovery project” is just a much worse version of “contact us for pricing”, it’s “pay us $5,000-$20,000 or more for pricing”. Paying a lot of money to find out how much something will cost, or what you’re going to get from it (if anything) just isn’t a valuable proposition to a lot of people, and doesn’t fit in nicely with their existing business processes.
I've been advised to charge for a discovery, but at a ridiculously low price, say $500. It's likely they can expense it without approval, shows they are serious, and, helps you feel good about putting effort into a serious proposal.
I’ve seen folks successfully implement a process where discovery is ‘free’ if the client hires them for the implementation. Otherwise discovery is $10K or whatever
I haven't had problems with discovery projects. The framing is usually that both sides genuinely don't know enough about what needs to be done, you'll produce a rough plan at the end of it, and you've agreed to a rough ballpark budget beforehand where discovery is helping you decide on the scope and specifics.
Otherwise, even for simple projects, the process is usually you do a couple of rounds of questions for a few hours, then you're forced to give a quote when you don't know enough which is bad for both sides.
People get weird about charging for discovery, but gathering requirements, evaluating the current situation, researching options and proposing a solution, is tricky and valuable work, and doing this properly can save a lot of pain later.
The deal is that you’d have to provide the customer not just with a price quote but a complete requirements doc based upon the discovery. They can shop this to other contract houses. Just a bid leaves them I’m the hole with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Back in the day a proper requirements doc was something a client would pay for. It’s a tangible thing with real value.
These days we sell design sprints that produce validated prototypes instead (thank god for Figma). This is a much easier sell and still gives the client the opportunity to decide if we implement the thing or if they hand it off to someone else.
I’m not a big fan of the “my opinion is fact” or “your opinion is wrong” headlines. They can be mildly funny in the right context, but it’s been done so much that they’re just a bit boring now. I’m especially bored of seeing this convention in conference presentation titles.
To say that some quality is embedded in a culture isn’t even close to the same as saying all people originating from that culture possess that quality. The extent to which India’s (racist) caste system is embedded in its culture is hardly up for serious debate, the influence it has in India has basically been proven by science at this point.
A hypothetical claim that all Indians are racist would clearly be absurd, but it’s hardly surprising to find a group of Indians practicing something that is openly part of their native culture.
Most tremendously wealthy people don’t want to be known for being tremendously wealthy. Unless being known for being tremendously wealthy is a part of your wealth accumulating strategy, the attention it brings is almost entirely negative. Being tremendously wealthy without millions of people constantly chirping about clawing as much of it away from you as possible, or demanding an explanation from you every time you wipe your ass is a far better outcome, and most people who are savvy enough to become billionaires are savvy enough to figure that out pretty quickly.
Health care costs is how individual people’s terrible lifestyle decisions end up impacting everybody else. If somebody wants to live some awful unhealthy lifestyle it really should be their own choice to do so. Except for the fact that it drives up everybody’s insurance premiums, and in countries where the government either partially or entirely subsidises healthcare costs, it gives the government an outright moral mandate to start nannying everybody’s health choices.
If somebody wants to live an obese lifestyle, I really think that’s up to them. But I’d be much happier about it if it didn’t cost me so much money.
Do you think addicts should receive treatment? Do you think that people who make bad decisions deserve to live? Do you extract the exact amount of value from society relative to the amount you put in, or do you take more than you give? Are you sure? Please explain.
Your perspective is frankly disgusting. I hope you don't have any vices. The point of a society is to pool resources together to improve the collective. Different people in different positions of power and ability have different needs. Hopefully you don't personally have any power to exclude people from that group. I hope that the powers that be don't decide that you deserve less for some reason.
I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin. But yes, I do think addicts should receive treatment, just as I think obese patients should (and do) receive treatment for all the diseases they end up with. But addicts, like the obese, impose many of the costs of their own bad life decisions onto others. It’s what you’d call a negative externality, and if some magic treatment came along to fix drug addiction, I would also be very happy to see that negative externality addressed.
Well the food addiction or sedentariness addiction diagnosis are a lot more controversial than a heroin addiction diagnosis, though I can see how they have some things in common. I think labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery.
The bigger difference though is that we all eat food, and for most of us includes at least some absolutely delicious food that would be incredibly unhealthy to eat in large quantities. We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t. We don’t however, need to take small doses of heroin every day to survive.
> labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery
What gives you the confidence to overrule medical professionals on this? (Note: I am not a doctor and have zero medical training.)
> We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t
One, I’d challenge we’re all similarly exposed. I grew up in a house with no sugary sodas and plenty of leafy greens with each meal. Many people did not.
Two, we know from drug addiction that there is no global measure of addictiveness. Some people can smoke a cigarette or cigar or two, on average, per year. Others get hooked after their first draw. There is no reason to suspect something similar isn’t happening with obesity.
I’d say it stops being a useful descriptor at that point. If any activity that a person can possibly find rewarding in any way can be addictive, then everything is addictive. Because for any activity that you can possibly think of, you’ll find definitely find somebody who likes doing it.
By this criteria, I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least one eating glass addict somewhere in the world. But if we can stretch the definition to include glass as an addictive substance, then it kinda stops meaning anything at all.
And when I say these innovative addiction diagnoses are controversial, I mean within the community of clinical experts, which they are.
Based on common sense. Not everyone has tried heroin, but most people have overgorged themselves - maybe eaten too much ice cream or candy or pizza. I am guilty of that, and make sure to make it a rare occurrence and keep myself in shape.
> Not everyone has tried heroin, but most people have overgorged themselves
You're assuming everyone who tries heroin becomes an addict. At first glance it looks like "approximately 1 to 12 months after heroin onset, an estimated 23% to 38% of new heroin users have become dependent on heroin" [1]. By coincidence, that seems to mirror American obesity prevalence [2]. (Obviously heroin is more addictive than food. Don't do heroin.)
> I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin.
Your opinion is that of a petulant child. Many years of research has shown that obesity is not this simple. Many chemical processes take place that influence one's ability to make better health choices, and many external factors put constraints on those choices as well. This is the exact same thing as hard drugs. Being obese is not a moral failing. When you say things like this, you show your true colors. You are not extending humanity to obese people, and it is very obvious.
I sincerely hope you reconsider your opinions. I hope you don't have any obese people in your life, or at least hope they don't read these messages. I think they would be disappointed to hear what you think of them.
And again, I hope you don't have any vices and are the perfect model of health, otherwise this would be a quite silly opinion to have.
EDIT:
I've been rated limited on comments so I'll post my last response here instead:
I have nothing further to say to this other than that you should consider talking to someone about your clearly deep-seated hatred for those who don't fit your model of participant in society; it doesn't seem healthy. Find an obese friend and show them your comments and watch their face as they read them. I wonder if you will find the humanity in their response that you are lacking here.
I would say that your suggestion that grown adults should be absolved of responsibility for their own decisions is actually a quintessentially childish idea. The fact that you are so deeply offended by any suggestion otherwise is even more childish.
You're both wrong. Obesity increasingly looks like addiction--as with any addiction, it takes two to tango. But once you have an addict, shame is an ineffective treatment. Debating giving an obese person GLP-1 drugs is akin to challenging methadone for heroin addicts.
I never suggested shame as an effective treatment. But refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation is not an effective way to discuss the problem. Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society. Which is why I would be very happy (and I would suggest everybody should be happy) if an effective way to address the problem was discovered.
The fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear. But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
> Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society
Granted. But why does it need to be said?
I'm a skiier. That lifestyle choice alone probably has a higher risk-adjusted cost to our healthcare system than if I were fat. I'd still miffed if prior to setting a bone my doctor decided to lecture me on the risks of skiing. I'd be positively furious if I got that from my health insurer.
> fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear
Why do they need to hear it? There isn't a need. What they need is to not be obese anymore. That's treatment. My point is skipping the lecture and going straight to treatment is how we solve most medical problems.
I was going to comment basically this. Everything you could possibly want to know about how LI systems work is documented by the vendors online. It’s really just network interfaces that forward intercepted traffic to aggregators.
The thing about CSPs is their core business is edge routing. A majority of their core assets are going to be internet connected routers, and you’d actually be able to collect more data by owning some of those. The additional information you can get from LI (and the reason you often need a clearance to work on LI systems) is information about who law enforcement are running intercepts on.
Also, LI is just a regulatory cost centre for CSPs. It’s hilarious (or scary, depending on your perspective) how poorly those systems are maintained, and how often the break.
The main subject of the article seems to have come to an amicable agreement with Nintendo, but for all of the “copyright infringement enabling tools” that do get forcibly taken down, the way to avoid that just seems so obvious to me. The emulators, or DRM bypassing tools, or whatever, all seem to get tripped up by the marketing. Releasing emulators or DRM cracks is protected speech and not a copyright violation, but releasing the same tool and saying “this is a tool for enabling copyright violation, here’s how you use it to commit copyright violations” just makes you a party to the subsequent copyright violations that it might be used for. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically how a lot of them get taken down. Just releasing your tools without all the legally dubious explanation seems to be such an obvious risk avoidance strategy.
or simply going dark and releasing updates along with a public key to verify authenticity of the author making the contributions as a torrent and not on any governed site that can receive take down notices.
And publishing software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs is protected speech and not a copyright violation. Releasing it accompanied by a statement that said something to the effect of "here's some software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs which you can use to pirate Switch games" makes you a party to the copyright violation. Just like I'm legally allowed to provide you with a hammer, but if I accompany that with the statement "here's something you can use to murder your neighbour" all of a sudden I'm a party to a crime.
DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent technological protection measures that control access to copyrighted works. Bypassing these measures can be considered a violation.
Court cases have often ruled against the First Amendment protections, ruling that publishing software to bypass encrypted is not encrypted. This is like handing someone a gun, and then watching them commit a crime. You're suddenly a party to it, even if you never encouraged or endorsed the illegal act.
Cases such as Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley and MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. have upheld the enforcement of the DMCA in situations where software was designed to circumvent encryption or other digital rights management technologies. These cases indicate that creating and distributing decryption tools for copyrighted materials (such as Switch ROMs) would likely not be protected speech.
You really have to be doing huge levels of throughput before you start to struggle with scaling MySQL or Postgres. There’s really not many workloads that actually require strict ACID guarantees _and_ produce that level of throughput. 10-20 years ago I was running hundreds to thousands of transactions per second on beefy Oracle and Postgres instances, and the workloads had to be especially big before we’d even consider any fancy scaling strategies to be necessary, and there wasn’t some magic tipping point where we’d decide that some instance had to go distributed all of a sudden.
Most of the distributed architectures I’ve seen have been led by engineers needs (to do something popular or interesting) rather than an actual product need, and most of them have had issues relating to poor attempts to replicate ACID functionality. If you’re really at the scale where you’re going to benefit from a distributed architecture, the chances are eventual consistency will do just fine.
