Well it kind of is. Tesla are not coy about their plans of moving away from selling consumers personal vehicles. If you think cybercab can eat any significant percentage of Uber/Lyfts lunch there is value.
It takes a lot of hubris to throw away ostensibly worldwide EV dominance. And selling Americans on giving up car/independence culture when compared with Europe or Asia will be tough.
They will undoubtedly crush in the robot and energy space though.
My personal beef with Thinkpads is the screen. Most of the thinkpads I’ve encountered in my life (usually pretty expensive corporate ones) had shitty FHD screens. I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.
FWIW if you buy new from Lenovo, getting a more high-res display has been an option for years.
I'm on the other side where I've been buying Thinkpads partly because of the display. Thinkpads have for a long time been one of the few laptop options on the market where you could get a decent matte non-glare display. I value that, battery life and performance above moar pixels. Sure I want just one step above FHD so I can remote 1080p VMs and view vids in less than fullscreen at native resolution but 4K on a 14" is absolute overkill.
I think most legit motivations for wanting very high-res screens (e.g. photo and video editing, publishing, graphics design) also come with wanting or needing better quality and colors etc too, which makes very-highly-scaled mid-range monitors a pretty niche market.
> I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.
Did you make a serious effort while having an extended break from retina screens? I'd think you would get used to it pretty quickly if you allow yourself to readjust. Many people do multi-DPI setups without issues - a 720p and a 4k side-by-side for example. It just takes acclimatizing.
I have a 14” FHD panel (158 dpi) on an old (7 year) laptop and there’s more issues with low resolution icons and paddings than with font rendering. I wouldn’t mind more, but it’s not blurry.
I just learned on Reddit the other day that people replace those screens with third party panels, bought from AliExpress for peanuts. They use panelook.com to find a compatible one.
Old Thinkpads are great! I used to have a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 with Intel Core i7 8640U, 16 GB of RAM, and 1 TB SSD. I installed Arch Linux on it with Sway.
The actual traditional Japanese food consists of obscene amount of carbohydrates taken with pickles flavored salt with little to no protein or fat intakes. The role of carbs and proteins is switched from a stereotypical European dinner, a meal is about how to deal with the grains. This naturally shortens body heights and take diabetics out of family lines. This had changed massively owing to Westernization of diet and had reduced stroke(brain and heart) deaths even as recent as last ~30 years.
This is apparently weird even to Chinese people; an image of ramen with rice and roast dumplings on sides amounts to a ragebait to them(as well as to experts in cardiovascular systems), while it's nothing more than a common lunch menu to students and young workers in Japan.
But I digress - my point is, the real traditional Japanese meal is more like half a football worth of rice with vegetable flavored salt, quite unlike idealized modern interpretations thereof.
Otherwise correct, but the real real traditional Japanese diet was barley (mugi), millet (kibi/hie) and sorghum (awa), not just white rice, which was an unaffordable luxury for many peasants.
It is true that rice was always the prestige food consumed by the upper classes, and the peasantry ate rice too, but it was only one of the five staples (gokoku) and was often extended with other grains (mugigohan etc).
Mugi/awa/hie were untracked substitutes for rice. Medieval Japanese warlords mainly collected taxes in form of bags of rice, and ignored other crops. So peasants mixed those grains into rice at varying ratios of up to 100% depending on local and yearly yields. That doesn't mean those grains were culturally considered defaults.
Your pdf is mostly about the 1870s and later. (Although it does mention the Tokugawa period, which began in 1603, it seems to do so for quite tangential reason.)
In contrast, people in East Asia started cultivating rice 9,000 years ago, and modern Japanese are probably mostly descended from these early rice farmers (who started out in China, then spread to Korea and then Japan) with a substantial contribution from another population called Jomon, which were already in Japan when the heavily-rice-dependent people started to arrive in Japan about 2,300 years ago and who lived mostly by hunting and gathering.
This is relevant because some people here are advocating for everyone to adopt a Japanese-like diet, which might not turn out so well for you unless most your ancestors have 8,000 or 9,000 years of experience getting most of their calories from grains.
We're not really disagreeing here? But wet paddy rice farming requires flat land, which in mountainous Japan is in notably short supply, so they planted other crops too.
This parallels China, where the warm, wet south is rice country but the colder, drier north grows other grains. The five grains (gokoku) idea is itself originally Chinese:
That's pretty close. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be: trains.
Car culture makes Americans fat and lazy. 40% of US adults are obese. 80% are overweight.
Walking and good food, yeah, that helps. But trains introduce short sprints into everyday life. It starts with "He's too late, he's never gonna catch it... well I'll be damned, he did it." and pretty soon, you're saying "We can catch it, just run!" Everyone on the train has a shopping bag, because trains don't have huge trunks like a car. You want groceries? Carry it. Good exercise. Trains also remove the road rage from your life, the daily stress of defensive driving in a fast moving freeway full of other angry drivers. Trains eliminate the premature death caused by road accidents which not only lower life expectancy directly, but indirectly as bread winners are taken from families. The car exhaust is gone too. Trains reshape how towns are built, with higher density and less parking. More walking! Everything mushrooms out from the decision to travel with trains. It's little wonder why Japan has the lowest obesity rate in the world.
I don't disagree, but to add I think the retirement culture probably helps a lot for longevity too.
The Japanese retirement attitude is "I've worked my ass off all my life. Contributing to the society all my life. Finally I have some time to spend on my hobbies! I should be active!" and they pick up quite active hobbies: if you go hiking mountains you'll see many old retired people with serious gears. Also still trains.
Contrast it to ime, western retirement which is more "finally I can relax" and people become sedentary. Hanging around in parks, cafe, or focus more on socializing and diet. And starts to rely more on cars and other senior services.
Yes. My Japanese wife’s father and mine are the same age. FIL had a heart attack last year and almost died. Yet he’s still the president of the rotary club, travels every two weeks across the country to attend events or give lectures. Recently hosted an international student exchange at his workshop and is still making new pieces of art to be exhibited.
My father spends all day watching football or horses and has visibly started going senile.
Feels like a much more likely explanation. Heard my parents talk a lot about people who retire, make their primary activity be vegging out, and then health issues start popping up. Japanese also seem to have a big culture of everyone needing to have hobbies.
The answer to that should be fairly obvious after Iryna Zarutska and Emily Carlson happened so recently. American and Japanese trains are not qualitatively the same. Vagrants and solicitors wander the local trains here like it is their asylum. Amtrak is a lot safer since they have conductors checking tickets, but that is still very loud and unruly.
If you'd like a more direct comparison to Japan, try Hong Kong, another place where I have spent a fair amount of time riding the trains. They also have world leading life expectancy.
Life expectancy in NYC is 82.6 vs 78.4 overall for USA. Lots of variables and such, but NYC must be doing something better than the rest of the country and I wouldn't doubt trains (and walkability) are a contributing factor.
I recently had an experience where I needed to do physical labor about 16 hours a day for two weeks, at the same time there was hardly any time to eat so I had to eat very small and simple meals. At the end of the two weeks I felt amazing.
Be careful with that feeling and don't underfuel, or at least keep it at "sane" levels. I feel pretty amazing and full after 62km/2700mD+ XCMs as well, as an extreme example... which is at least partially due to the immune system (and resp. inflammation/etc) being suppressed. Long, light/moderate efforts without adequate food intake and rest can lead to the same thing.
Stress hormones. Read up on cortisol's effects. XCM - cross country marathon (MTB race). 2700mD+ - 2.7km of vertical gain. A reduction of inflammation is a general effect of anti-inflammatory drugs, which tend to make you feel better. There's a LOT more than that (i.e. say, all the things that fall under the umbrella of "runner's high"), but the TL:DR is that significant physical activity / energy expenditure, combined with a lack of proper rest & nutrition leads to long-term undesirable effects that can definitely be masked and/or disregarded.
Did a major house cleaning a few years ago, got me out of the chair and the couch for a couple of weeks. Probably not as intense as your experience but I definitely felt better and was more flexible for about a month afterwards.
AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.
Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.
The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.
I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
Appointing indian leadership is the single biggest sign of moving to an extraction phase for a company.
The idea is they think the current value of the institution and IP is higher than their ability to innovate, so the try to outsource and reduce labour cost as much as possible intending to do the bare minimum maintenance for as long as possible.
This gets compounded by every layer trying to get the most out of the company as fast as possible, hiring in a way that has no long term outlook.
I certainly don't want it and nobody I know that actually understands the real cost does either. Every single nation that provides socialized healthcare is hopelessly strained by its cost, and the service has suffered as a result. The system relies on eithe dramatic reductions in the cost of healthcare or a positive birthrate to sustain it.
Nobody I know in socialized healthcare systems has good things to say about it when they actually need it.
The US has the most expensive healthcare costs per capita in the OECD, and the poorest health outcomes on average.
You might think that this is merely because so many people in the US are not covered at all. But even when you account for people who are covered, the results are mixed at best. With the US performing slightly better in some areas, but much worse across the board.
I also know a few people who have moved back from the US, even though they had health insurance, just to receive better socialised medical care in their own countries. I also know of a who went to the US to get cancer treatment. None of that means anything really. The number of people you know and their uninformed attitudes are statistically insignificant.
How much do you pay as a percentage of your salary in taxes? In total of course.
I pay 30% in taxes for federal and state. House is paid off but taxes is about 3% my salary. My insurance is more than I need (I don't use it at all) and cost me less than 2% of my salary.
You can keep your socialized system, we are doing more than alright here mate. I got plenty of friends in Europe, England, Canada, and Australia all complaining about the same thing, wait times for care. I can see my doctor for basically anything inside of a couple weeks.
Having experienced both, and needed both, I certainly have more positive things to say on the socialized version than the privatized version. Does the US system not hopelessly strain people by its cost? Does the US system not require positive rate of insurance payers to sustain it?
I was like you. Then I was left with a surprise $32,000 medical bill that I feel pushed me past my limit. I still haven't recovered my life. My divorce. Missing so much with my kids.
You are OK with peoples lives (500,000 a year) being destroyed in order to 'keep the service good'. And you are OK with the price of good service being over 50% of American bankruptcies being due to medical dept. But who cares if peoples lives are ruined, you have a shorter wait.
When did this country become a country of sociopaths? This isn't working.
I don't know you or give a shit about you. You need to be a man and be accountable for your own life. Why are you expecting others to subsidize your mistakes?
You are weak and your life is the outcome of your own actions. You should have prepare for such a situation if you feared it was possible.
As for all the others, same thing, literally not my problem. You failed your family, why are you blaming the healthcare system.
This is even less than statistically insignificant.
Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness. Besides just being an asshole, the cart will take a potential parking spot that someone else later needs to move to free up, and worst of all the wind could blow the cart into someone elses car.
Nobody is gonna kidnap her kids as she walks the cart back in less than a minute. It is simply her being a lazy asshole.
> Every single person that doesn't return their cart does so out of laziness.
> It is simply her being a lazy asshole.
I can see that this is a very personal issue for you, so I'll just say this: People are complicated, and I would encourage you to have more grace for them. If it bothers you that much to see a cart left by a mom struggling with kids, you might consider offering to return it on her behalf.
Is advising people to wear sunscreen and not speed also nannying? If the government ultimately bears the costs of poor health of citizens, why shouldnt they embark on public health interventions to lower those costs.
I’d say it’s the opposite. The dumbest don’t have the faculties to appreciate technology. It’s treated as inevitable and immediately
becomes another modern fixture we take for granted in our life like a baby using an ipad.
> Experience has show we cannot build secure systems
It's an unpopular idea because its bullshit. Building secure systems is trivial and at the skill level of a junior engineer. Most of these "hacks" are not elaborate attacks utilizing esoteric knowledge to discover new vectors. They are the same exploit chains targeting bad programming practices, out of date libraries, etc.
Lousy code monkeys or medicore programmers are the ones introducing vulnerabilities. We all know who they are. We all have to deal with them thanks to some brilliant middle manager figuring out how to cut costs for the org.
That sounds like a perspective from deep in the trenches. A software system has SO many parts, spanning your code, other people’s code, open source software, hardware appliances, SaaS tools, office software, email servers, and also humans reachable via social engineering. If someone makes a project manager click a link leading to a fake Jira login, and the attacker uses the credentials to issue a Jira access token, and uses that to impersonate the manager to create an innocuous ticket, and a low-tier developer introduces a subtle change in functionality that opens up a hole… then you have an insecure system.
This story spans a lot of different concerns, only few of which are related to coding skills. Building secure software means defending in breadth, always, not fucking up once, against an armada of bots and creative hackers that only need to get lucky once.
Take a broader view of what "building secure systems" means. It's not just about the code being written by ICs but about the business incentives, tech choices of leadership, the individual ways execs are rewarded, legacy realities, interactions with other companies, and a million other things. Our institutions are a complex result of all of these forces. Taken as a whole, and looking at the empirical evidence of companies and agencies frequently leaking data, the conclusion "we cannot build secure systems" is well founded.
This is accurate. Especially in shops that implement firm shipping dates for Product Increments. You have X weeks to build Y features consisting of Z tickets.
At the end of those X weeks you better have all your tickets done. So more often than not, the tickets are done and the features are implemented. Shops like this build incredible ticket closing machines. They are implemented to pass user acceptance testing not to hold back hackers or bad actors. When leadership incentivizes delivering features and a developers job or raise depends on delivering those features, you get what you incentivize.
Sometimes it is the management that doesn't understand anything. In their perspective, security doesn't improve the bottom line.
I worked for an SME that dealt with some sensitive customer data. I mentioned to the CEO that we should invest some time in improving our security. I got back that "what's the big deal, if anyone wants to look they can just look..."
Looking at the number of already discovered vulnerabilities in popular applications, I would say it's actually impossible to build secure systems right now. Even companies that are trying are failing.
IMO it's still way too easy to introduce a vulnerability and then miss it in both review and pentests.
We need big changes in all parts of the software buliding and maintaining process. Probably no one will like that, because we are still in "move fast and break things" software development age.
It takes a lot of hubris to throw away ostensibly worldwide EV dominance. And selling Americans on giving up car/independence culture when compared with Europe or Asia will be tough.
They will undoubtedly crush in the robot and energy space though.