I live in suburban Houston, in the middle of a subdivision with more than 2,000 homes. With T-Mobile and Verizon, I get between 0 and 1 bars of signal strength. AT&T is a bit better, with 2-3 bars. What good is 5G or 5.5G, if the best I can get is a crappy connection?

One of the things 5G is actually good at is being able to have a larger footprint for a given cell, and better penetration (5G not 5G UW, UW is dramatically worse then prior cell technologies for range and penetration, think of UW more like "fancy WiFi" then a traditional cell technology). This isn't marketed I guess because the "use case" is "cellular operators can get the same coverage by spending less money" or "spend the same for 5G rollout as they did for 4G and get better coverage", and none of that sounds good to the people who pay each month to get coverage (they either already have good coverage and want to pay less, or they coverage is crap and they will want to know why it didn't get improved already!)

Depending on the state of 5G rollout in your area you might see an improvement in coverage if you try a 5G phone. I know T-Mo got 0 bars at my house on 4G and 1 or 2 bars in town. With 5G it gets 2 bars in my house and all the bars in town. It isn't just a change to the signal strength meter because 4G T-Mo in my house wasn't usable, and outside with a single bar sometimes two it was pretty slow to barely passable. In town it was sluggish but Ok. 5G was a lot better. VZW is 4G in my area and has pretty good coverage though, I imagine VZW decided to invest more money in getting more cell sites, and less money in doing a 5G rollout. (I use to be on VZW, and tried T-Mo's "test drive", I compared the 4G v 5G performance because my wife had a 4G phone so to switch to T-Mo we upgraded her phone to 5G because otherwise we would have saved money each month but only one of us would have had phone service!)

Out in the country, particularly in the western US, there are still vast swaths of land that never even got 3G, much less 4G or 5G.

Yeah, I'm in Vermont which isn't exactly high population density, but T-Mo seems to have given us better coverage then a lot of the mid west, although there is a lot more 5G in the mid-west then I would have thought. If you don't have a 5G phone you might really want to give one a try in your low coverage areas, I'm not saying it will help, just that there is a reasonable chance that it might.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Absolutely! "more speed" is always nice, as is "less latency", but they don't always unlock new applications. Mostly you can tell when another bump up will because you've been just barely managing before using special hacks to make the most of inadequate bandwidth or latency that is actually too high. On the next bump the special hacks can go away, or they may need to stay but it brings you from "just barely but mostly kind of possible" to "hey it works nice!"

EVDO, and EDGE had a ton of those, 3G had more than a few, and 4G didn't really have any. I mean ok, sure you can't stream 4K content over 4G, but if you are streaming to a phone that doesn't seem like a high demand activity.

So sometimes you get a whole network upgrade cycle where "like the last one but better" doesn't enable any new applications. That is 5G's story (unless "hey! Use it to solve the last mile and compete with cable companies!", but that isn't a high profit area so cell companies don't want to shout about that!)

Most people would be perfectly happy on a solid 3G connection as long as they saw that 5G on their phones.

I kind of doubt it.

3G was noticeably slow for a lot of things, and really wasn't fast enough for anything but very compressed video. It is noticeably slow sending high quality compressed still photos. 4G on the other hand was "fast enough" for what most people do on a phone or even a "real" computer most of the time.

So while I disagree that 3G would pass the "Folgers' crystals" test, I'm thinking 4G absolutely could pass for 5G for most people most of the time. I know 5G actually has more bandwidth, and lower latency, but most of the time it is good enough. I mean this weekend I was at a board game con and for the first time got "5G UW" on my phone, and it didn't feel any faster. It showed up as a lot faster when I ran a speed test, but loading a PDF of some rules didn't feel faster. It probably was, but loading big PDFs is on the other side of "slow", so something that takes say 4 minutes on regular 5G and maybe 7 minutes on 4G taking only a minute and a half on 5G UW is for sure faster but without a direct 1:1 comparison it still doesn't feel fast.

[from the summary, not Oryan Quest!] The real advance is that the technology will finally help facilitate more of the far-fetched business applications that 5G initially promised, like self-driving cars, autonomous drones and self-operating factories.

This is the same horseshit they fed us about 5G in the first place.

If 5G somehow helps self driving cars then we are doing self driving wrong. I don't want a self driving car that won't self drive if it can't "phone a friend", and I don't want a self driving car that has an additional attack surface of being on the internet all the time. It is bad enough that the infotainment system (which is on the internet al the time) isn't air gapped to the self driving systems.

Self-operating factories out to you know self operate as advertised and not need any fancy 5.5G in order to do stuff that ought to be all local.

I would give you "autonomous drones", except for the word "autonomous". Still what most people want from drones is pretty pictures, and getting them as it flys can be a bonus. Except for the military, they want to blow stuff up, either with the drones, or by using the drone as a spotter for artillery, so again I'll give you "high quality live video feed from drones so you can see if you killed the dudes in the trench, or if you need 'a little to the left!'".

No, they are not safe. Tons of data exists in the world that contains characters that CSV files can't handle. Like commas.

I have absolutely imported things like "Last, First",75,30,"blah-blah" (with last-comma-first showing up as one single string as the CSV "spec" promises)

Commas inside quotes absolutely don't phase Excel. Microsoft may not have top shelf quality, but they aren't nearly that anemic. Quotes are also handled by doubling up. Beats me if you can use UTF-8 or other more "exotic" (by 1980s standards) things though, but they do have the basics down.

Wait, CSV files aren't "safe"? Sure they are awkward to deal with if the data naturally has commas or quotes, but many kinds of data are pretty light on that sort of thing. To be fair I don't really work with spreadsheets very frequently, and it may have been a decade or two since I've needed to get anything into Excel in particular, but I remember it being "not hard" to pull data out of a "real" database, massage it lightly with Perl, and produce a CSV that excel would accept. Likewise I remember being able to have excel generate CSV files and slip them in in Perl and do "useful" things with it. That is still the process I use to get things in and out of other spreadsheets (I've managed to mostly avoid MS for a while).

I may not be fond of Excel, but it likely is the most commonly used tool to analyze data sets, especially of sort of "middle sizes" (100s of entries, low thousands, but not millions or billions). It seems like a decent first tool to teach. I personally may get more done with R, but I think 12 year old me would have gotten less done with it (ok, maybe I'm a special case -- 12 year old me would have looked at R and thought it was a stunted APL, but been thrilled to work with "real computers" and a "real language" in school, plus rockets!).

A more interesting course maybe would have used Excel for a dataset or two, and done a quick "introduction to R" (or python) in a use case where you get a data set that you need to do roughly the same processing on but you get many different versions of it (say drilling data two dozen sites and you get new data each day -- kind of a pain to do "the same thing again and again" while with something like R or Python you set up your tools and just run them again and again). Then again how many days is this course intended to be, and wait "drilling data" might be a good example of a bunnies use case, but maybe not well aligned with the political climate. Change that to "software usage metrics" or something (which features are used/not used in different experiment cohorts, over time, maybe as some rollouts are done or a TV ad campaign is run -- generate a report showing how successful the new feature is to justify a raise during the next employee performance review cycle, you know real world uses for statistics and flashy graphs).

Same.

My current car is a GM EV, and about the only part of the infotainment system that doesn't suck is CarPlay. For example second place in the "good" parts of the infotainment system is "XM Chanel Zero" is silent (because no matter what I was doing last time I was in the car, it decides I really want (a) the radio on, and (b) playing XM (true when I had the "free intro subscription" and then true after that when it became the "XM begs for my money" channel). Seriously the #2 feature is "I found out how to make it shut the hell up".

Now to be fair I was already considering that my next EV needs all wheel drive (I moved from bay area CA to north east kingdom VT last year, so while the Bolt is pretty decent in snow for a front wheel drive, sometimes 2 wheels just don't cut it here...then again 6 inches of clearance is mostly what doesn't cut it, even when it is six inches of clearance and being able to "gut through" another two inches or so). So I was already looking at the Tesla model Y (advantages: AWD and with recent price cuts and tax breaks shockingly inexpensive, disadvantage: associated with Elon Musk) and the Hyundai EV5 (advantages: CarFuckingPlay, AWD, and nonElon, disadvantages: not a lot of track record as an EV maker, and has gone from $10k cheaper then the model Y to somewhat more expensive -- do I really want to pay extra because I have a personal distaste for Elon?).

That is a bit unfortunate since it means people going on a hike in some park might still be expected to answer the phone.

If you don't want to be contacted, turn off the phone. Feel free to claim it must have run out of battery while you were on the hike. Or claim you weren't sure if you might run out and wanted to preserve power for a potential emergency. Or leave the phone on and don't answer and say the same things (or "didn't hear it ring" -- if you place great value on being technically correct in all things place the phone in vibrate only mode first).

I mean you could also be honest: "I was on a hike, it is alone time where I focus on being present in the natural world, so it was not an appropriate time for me to take a non-emergency call, so I didn't"; If you are married your wife might take offense at that, but if you discuss it ahead of time maybe not. If your work expects you to be contactable 24/7 and they pay you extra for that they might also take offense, then again if you are getting paid extra for "pager duty" and decide to go on a "out of reach hike" in the woods I would be put out if IU were them too. If they aren't paying extra, but expect it anyway it might be a good time to renegotiate.

I'll also note that just because you have a phone that can use satellite doesn't mean it can accept incoming calls on it. For example my phone can use satellite but only for the very rough equivalent of text messages, and you need to point the phone more or less in the right direction at the right time, and have a mostly unobstructed view of the sky. So even if it could do voice calls it may not be pointing in the right place when an incoming call comes. It is definitely good for "I had a blow out, the car flipped, and I'm pinned down, and I think I see a bear", followed by the phone saying "ok, point to the left, no the other left, more left, keep going....keep going...oooohhhhhkay message sent, keep pointing this way in case there is a reply..." -- so hopefully there wasn't a bear, or it isn't hungry and the car isn't on it's cubs otherwise all I managed to do is make it slightly easier for someone to find my body. It is not at all good for someone calling me to tell me "the server is down again" if I'm in a no cell reception zone.

Personal emergency locator beacons have been a thing for quite some time so the ability to call for help exists if outside where the phone system reaches. Getting such beacons to work does mean a separate device and subscription fee though, and some people are too cheap to get one and end up paying for it with their life.

Some people are cheap. Some people don't realize how many areas are out of cell reception. Plus it also has the problem of needing to keep one more thing charged, and one more thing to remember to pack. Also sometimes you go on a trip and just because it isn't camping and you live somewhere urban-ish and the destination is somewhere urban-ish doesn't mean you won't be driving through areas that don't have reception. Oh, also some people don't really like gadgets so they don't keep up. Some people don't believe the promises gadgets make since they have bought some in the past that over promise they think all of them over promise.

I don't have one. Partly because I don't frequently go places where I'm outside of cell reception, and partly because it would be one more thing to both keep charged (easy, I have a battery/gadget charge part of my home office!) and also bring with me anytime I might be away from cell service (hard! that would mean I would want the gadget in my car, but it is already in my office!). Fortunately my phone can also do it, so I don't need to track an extra item to charge or remember to bring with me. That wasn't the case last year though & I didn't have a satellite GPS tracker/ememrgency-alert thingie. I haven't become any less cheap though.

But Roku's CFO is a moron. You don't leave $490M sitting in an uninsured account. The money shoulda been in a MM or treasury fund.

I'm not qualified to be a CFO, and maybe Roku's CFO is a moron, but "cash in a bank" and "money in a T-bill" serve different purposes. Cash in a bank is something you can spend right away if say payroll is due tomorrow, or you see a company you want to buy, or you decide a bunch of shows Netflix decided not to renew are something you want to bid on. A T-bill is some place you lock money up in when you won't need it for "a while" (six months, five years, lots of durations are available, generally the farther in the future the more money you get back). If you have money in a T-bill that doesn't mature for say five years and you want it now you need to go out and find someone to buy it from you, and they don't give you back full price. That can result in problems. What kind? Well the exact kind SVB is having, they have all their depositors money in a mix of T-Bills and real estate backed mumbly-mumbles. If they have a decade to come up with all the money they have it.

Money market accounts also serve a different purpose from a traditional bank account, MM accounts are to have decent liquidity but also provide a non-trivial return. The downside of a money market is they are absolutely not insured. So if you are lambasting Roku for "unsafely" putting money in a bank account you would need a whole next level of flame thrower if they had that money in a money market.

Those banks got bailouts. That is much less likely for SVB.

Both correct and false. SVB didn't get a bailout, the bank's assets are being sold off to some other bank that is willing to pay money, SVB's existing management isn't going to keep their jobs, but the account holders get to keep all their money (even amounts over the FDIC insured limit), and apparently have access to it today. Which is likely for the best, we won't be driving a bunch of companies out of business, we won't have a bunch of unemployed people who don't get severance or even the last paycheck they already worked for. We also won't be rewarding those who were running SVB.

We can't even write a JPEG parser without walking off the end of a buffer.

Well to be fair on macOS ImageIO is a service that operates inside a sandbox that literally has only permission to do local computations and communicate only on channels opened before it enters the sandbox. So it isn't exactly like macOS/iOS folks doing image decode actually have much reason to make sure the JPEG/PNG/JBIG parsers don't walk off the end of the buffer...

why does a query language have to be able to do arbitrary Objective-C method invocation of every library the process has access to? WTF? Who was using this for anything not inherently obfuscated?

So you can jam all your user's data into CoreData and then do a query across it for something that isn't simple to express in something vaguely like SQL. No built in predicate has the ability to for example search for "colors in the P3 gambit that are not in NTSC". The built in predicates are also more or less limited to things like strings, integers, and floats. So representing a color is a little awkward, and representing an image would be a lot harder.

Non-CoreData ObjC containers also have some NSPredicate support. For a "conversational" article about NSPredicate see NSHipster's NSPredicate article you don't really need a lot of ObjC or Swift background to get the gist of it, except maybe when you are looking at the "blocks" section, that is the "can execute arbitrary code" (a "block" in ObjC/Swift is a closure or lambda in other languages).

Gathering the data is the easy part.

Gathering the data only seems easy until you actually do anything with the data, storing it is impossible so you need to process it as you get it...

I dunno, many kickstarters fail to fund, I attribute that to the concept being flawed. You are right though, sometimes the concept can be sold but not turned into an actual product, those too are failures of concept and normally blamed on anything but the concept.

I tend to be more focused on boardgames kickstarters, and one rah last few years there have been a ton of Covid related reasons people use to excuse not delivering Kickstarter projects. Anything from production delays (combined with warehousing costs for the already produced parts that are waiting on the non-produced parts) to increased transportation costs. I would believe them except the different kickstarters claim different orders of magnitude of effects, anything from an extra $30 in shipping to get things delivered, to "can't do it for love nor money!". Ah yea, also "the chip crisis" (blamed for the delay on the Dark Tower reboot, which did eventually ship & is a great game) Fortunately I really won't die if none of the KS games I've ordered show up, and while I had some reason for purchasing each and every one I backed I'm not sure I actually have the space if they actually all show up.

Why on God's green Earth are the programmers trying to enforce speech codes in ChatGPT?

Because when Microsoft has a public launch of their AI without any guardrails to "speech codes" people turned it into a vulgar racist monster in about two days and MS ended up with a pile of bad PR rather then good PR. So people attempting to do other public launches of AI to drum up investors or potential business users are avoiding that particular mistake. Or at least attempting to avoid it.

Free speech should be free

Fair enough, but this isn't free speech. This is speech that people poured a whole lot of their own money into and have decided what they want to see out of it. Complaining about it is a lot like complaining that you can't get the Disney Character Actors at the park to swear because Disney told them they would get fired (i.e. not get more money from Disney) if they swear in costume.

Yep, Disney's rights to x-men are complicated so having them be a central part of the story would be expensive. Also because they were not a big part of the MCU they would feel sort of shoehorned in, or you would need to spend a lot of Civil War "introducing" them. Plus as the MCU trundles along all of the divergences with the comic source material pile up onto each other pushing them farther apart. So for example Disney has full rights to the fantastic four, but they have never really been able to make a successful F4 movie, so any comic "event" that featured the F4 (or any members) as a significant part is going to need to work around that one way or another.

Besides even in the comics Marvel reinvented lore when they wanted to, spinning off new universes and timelines. Failing to do that leaves you really hemmed in after long enough. So either discard the past via a reboot, or just "forgetting" something that was once true but makes the story you want to tell today hard to do.