It’s the same old “if it’s not cute and fluffy and it doesn’t have cute, big, sad eyes it doesn’t matter if it suffers.”

You can see the same thing in zoos. Tigers, bears and primates get nice big, beautiful cages.

Fish get a small tank.

Shrimp get a tank so slim that the shrimp can’t even turn, so it’s always perfectly visible. (As seen in the Haus des Meeres in Vienna)

That’s like a whopping 0.01% of dog owners.

Read the rest:

Searchers had been using bloodhounds, officers on horseback, drones and helicopters in their hunt for Hardin since he escaped nearly two weeks ago on May 25.

Apparently, neither the escapee nor his hunters are very fast walkers. That 30min walk took the helicopters two weeks.

Again someone who thinks that public policies are natural laws…

NASA could do and did do what SpaceX is doing now, but they are beholden to the government and if the government says “we don’t do that for ideologigal reasons” then it doesn’t matter what can be done.

In almost any other county, calling the police won’t get anyone hurt.

In my country the dispatcher would probably even just send a social worker instead of police.

Thanks for the summary! That sounds freaky!

Well, the trade-off between trusting a huge corporation or a single dude on the internet.

What exactly happened there? It was the big thing, then I didn’t use it for a month or so and then it was gone.

Even if you make them in large quantities, material cost alone will be at least €50k. You will need a skilled operator nearby, and constant maintainance, and if you lose even one per year, a regular underpaid human worker will be much cheaper.

These things are pure marketing devices to pacify investors, generate headlines and make unions and workers afraid.

Because it’s not real. It’s purely for marketing, not for actual wide-spread implementation.

Even in the best of cases, even factoring in economy of scale and all that, a robot like that will cost upwards of €50k at least, probably closer to double that, will require constant maintainance, and the risk of vandalism or accidental damage is really high. And you’ll likely need a (skilled) human operator nearby anyway, because the delivery vehicle doesn’t drive itself.

The purpose of projects like this is marketing and public perception.

• The company looks futuristic and future proof. That’s good to get investors.
• The company looks like they could replace humans with robots at any time. That’s good with negotiations with unions and workers.
• The company gets into headlines worldwide. That’s advertisement they don’t have to pay for.

This robot is not meant to ever go mainstream. Maybe there will be a handful of routes where they will be implemented for marketing purposes, but like drone delivery and similar gimmicks, it won’t beat a criminally underpaid delivery human on price, and that’s the only metric that counts for a company like Amazon.

“Prescription glasses” only mean “glasses with optical properties”, so glasses that actually do anything with focus, as opposed to e.g. non-prescription sunglasses or non-prescription accessory glasses that people wear to look smart or something.

It doesn’t mean you need a prescription for them.

(That said: in some countries you need a prescription for your prescription glasses if you want your health insurance to pay for them.)

I’m considering getting a Switch 1 now. I can find hackable ones for €100 in my area.

But then again, it doesn’t really do anything I can’t do with my other devices.

Well, IRL hacking doesn’t have exciting gameplay mechanics. So more realistic hacking game might not be such a clever idea.

90% of the things that Japan introduced according to comment sections on the internet never happened (or never made it past the prototype stage) and the rest was actually introduced in Korea, not in Japan.

The Japanophilia is strong with a lot of people on the internet.

There’s this idea I’ve been considering for a long time.

Imagine putting a remote controlled firework smoke bomb under the tailpipe, hidden from sight. At best a really stinky one that smells like burned rubber or something.

When someone follows to closely, just fake an engine issue or something by activating the smoke bomb and fill their AC air intake with the smell of burned rubber for weeks. Just to teach them to not follow too closely again.

That’s a fair assessment.

The Nigerian understanding of religion is fascinating. They just take what they need from any place they want. In the western world most people stick with the faith they were born in, or maybe switch once or twice in their lifetime. In Nigeria it’s common to switch very frequently, always taking the parts they like best and leaving behind the rest.

It’s a very open and interesting way to look at things, not so much tied to their own personal identity (“I am protestant, so I must hate catholics” as it used to be common in the west), but instead they build their own faith from all the best sources they can find.

The media shift is happening right now. It started about 3 weeks ago, and suddenly the media shifts from pro-israel to anti-israel. At least here in central europe this is what’s happening.

You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.

That’s the same on Git.

And what’s TCP/IP?

Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.

https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html

Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite

So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.