Plugin Hybrids aren't "traditional hybrids, with a major engine integrated into the transmission, normally providing the motive power". That vastly misrepresents how they work today.

I may be extrapolating from the one I own, but the whole *point* of a plug-in hybrid is that it's primarily an electric car, and only uses the gas engine when the battery is dead (or if you floor it, or if the "car-brain" determines that it needs to run to keep the oil and gas fresh, or to more efficiently create heat in the winter).

Just commuting to/from work, I use *zero* gas most days in a plugin hybrid. My record so far is 3500 miles between fill-ups. That's about 3200 miles pure electric, and about 200 miles with the engine running. And that tank only ended because I filled up to go on a road trip.

Once the battery is "dead" with "0 miles" left, the car does drive like a traditional hybrid. The engine turns off opportunistically, just like a regular hybrid.

And yes, the car does have some complexity from both systems, *but* it is also simpler in other ways. The more complex transmission reduces other complexity... there's no reverse gear, for example (it just runs one of the electric motors in reverse). The gas engine itself can run on an Atkinson cycle that is more efficient, and can run in the RPM ranges that are always optimal, sending extra power to charge the battery at any time. Because the gas engine runs a lot less, all the parts associated with running the engine (everything from fuel pumps, injectors, etc. to the exhaust system and all the sensors there) get used far less, and *should be* cheaper to maintain in the long run than a full gas engine.

And even though the charging system and bigger battery adds more weight than a traditional hybrid, in practice the total lifetime ecological impact is less than a traditional hybrid or a pure gas vehicle.

Plugin Hybrids are also generally at much more attractive price points than pure electric vehicles, today. There are plugin hybrids in almost every vehicle segment, including ones where there are zero pure electrics that you can buy today, like minivans.

TL;DR: Plugin hybrids are not perfect, but they are better in almost every way than traditional gas engines or traditional hybrids for efficiency and long-term maintenance, are better than pure electrics on long trips (until the country gets ubiquitous charging infrastructure) and purchase price (in practice).

Although the cloud service is pretty good, I do hope they have an easy path to saying "back up this device"

Also that the concept of local itunes libraries, with smart playlists, survives :-/

if they really screw the pooch on this one, they will loosen the lockin they have for some people who have been reasonably happy with music stuff since the iPod days -- I always knew there were some android-y things to manage my playlists but nothing I knew I'd be able to trust...

https://gizmodo.com/the-surpri...
and
https://tatham.blog/2008/10/13...
go into how people with astigmatism - a rather large % of the population - are less likely to love light text on dark backgrounds.

There doesn't have to be one true color arrangement for everyone (though, as with many accessibility features, there's a tension between letting designers have complete control and letting users adjust things that make their lives easier

For my usage, having to jam a finger hard slows me down just as much as the tap-and-hold... but with more "did it work? did it work?"

I don't think sensors for 3D touch (measuring how much the screen was flexing because of the finger jammed into it) would have much to do with reading a fingerprint anywhere on the screen.

Yeah, gestures are so easy to trigger accidentally, it really can violate the dao of programming that a program should do that which startles the user the least :-D

Analog controls in a binary world are often a bit off- I mean, do you really want to jam your finger harder into a pane of glass? Between that and the idea that as a generally optional feature, it usually activated secondary / non-critical modes, you're left with the "press harder for a less important thing" - bad UX all around.

Facebook still offers a formula that might be unique on the Internet; a hard to replicate (if only because of the Metcalfe's law / fax machine effect) blend of using real-word identities and relationships to get and give attention, with a lot of work put into making a UI that is friendly enough for non-techies but still pretty feature rich (thinking of how easy it to throw up a photo gallery - and also get an audience for it)

I don't see people abandoning it en masse, and as long as they can find some way of monetizing the people who are there, they will remain a predominant player.

I wish it was all the old, independent web and blogsphere where anyone could hang up their shingle, but that paradigm has died out to the "wall"/stream amalgamated views of tumblr, twitter, instagram etc - and Facebook is the only of those really nailing the "real life" aspect.

Good hackathons should be:
- optional
- during regular working hours
- not limited in scope or expected value to the company

even though "TodoMVC" shows that a todo app is kind of a cliche, it's interesting how many of the same (incorrect) assumptions so many things make. (Also, many people make idiosyncratic lists of their own requirements, see below ;-)

Table stakes is having good "repeat" events, and some choices for stuff like "Final Friday of Month" or whatever- as well as a crisp "this repeats when task is marked complete vs this repeats when task was dude" I've found some apps that do this pretty well (Appigo Todo - but it hasn't been updated in years) but too many either don't support it or bury it in the UI.

Of course even Appigo makes very-engineery (vs. human-factorsy) presumptions like "everything with a date is more urgent than anything without a due date" and "the more overdue something is, the more urgent it must be" while the opposite is most likely true.

One other thing I haven't seen in an app (at least not one less than $20) - I want categories for my todo items, but I don't want to have to navigate back and forth to view the various categories... way too many apps treat these as separate lists for some unfathomable reasons, so trying to skim both urgent and less urgent stuff (less ugent might be stuff that needs to be done in a certain place, like at home or a store) requires clickng back and forth. I just want a big old list with subcategories inline

I'd also like tracking and charting of how many things I have pending vs get done, so I can do a little self-gamification if i want - but that's not as important as a categorized-but-browsable-as-single-list

" The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments."
None of these mean "worse" per se. While I admire this kind of analysis, I reject the idea that it permits broad scale subjective value judgements with the scent of "objective truth".

I think the phones have gotten slim enough that you can kind of think of the case as an optional part OF the phone.

(Going without a case is kind of like how the Rebels always take off the back panels of their Y-Wing Fighters)

And relative to other parts of the phone, pretty damn customizable! So it seems like a win.

I read Carol Dweck's "MindSet"... in all the books I've reading during a self-help kick, I think its identification of Fixed Mindsets vs Growth Mindsets is the most useful concept, both for my own growth as a former-semi-precocious child, and how I deal with kids these days

Precocious kids are prone to developed a Fixed Mindset, feeling that their intelligence and abilities are intrinsic, critical to why they are special, maybe even why they are loved. So the result of praising intelligence as "oh you're so smart" - The tendency could grow to seek only those activities that will validate their self-image, and also to lash out with anger at the external "causes" of their failures...

Describing and cultivating the core of the Growth Mindset is trickier.-- it's a more nuanced belief. It holds that the value of life is in the process, that abilities and intelligence are plastic and that constant growth and striving are the hallmarks doing well. You want kids to get a good Growth Mindset and maybe they will reject things that are too easy as unworthy of their time and attention; it's much better to get a good challenge that can teach, even if the "good" results are less assured.

THanks :-D

Confusingly I grabbed both the regular and misspelled version. SoYour and SoYoure - I think the person helping with LetsEncrypt got tripped up

Cool, thanks for the pointers.

I know Robert O. Doyle's son, Robert has written some survey stuff looking over the problem of free will, like what does that mean in a universe that's seemingly pretty damn deterministic...

Ah, glad I didn't come out swinging.

I admit I'm a little pessimistic about finding definite answers. Trust those who seek the truth, doubt those who claim to have found it.

Not sure exactly what question you're asking but....

Like I mentioned, The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul is a great "sampler" if you enjoy asking the questions.

Also, Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop" has one model, and presented in a particularly emotionally moving way

Finally, "On Intelligence" by Jeff "I also made the PalmPilot" Hawkins has some very specific possible answers about some of the neuroscience of (tl;dr: it's mostly all "predict and test")