Perl was way ahead of its time... they were doing "vibe coding" back in the 1990's :)

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

All true, which is why China's system isn't completely centralized like that. Centralization is a matter of degree, not a binary on/off switch. The Chinese government mandates the broad strokes, and leaves the detail work decentralized, to be handled by the market. They've got a lot more capitalism in their system at this point than they'd probably care to admit.

Waymo is currently at 250,000 autonomous rides per week, in six cities, and I mean autonomous in the strict sense of "there are no Waymo employees in the car". They seem to be competing pretty well.

As for how other companies will compete against Tesla in the future when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises.... we'll find out, if and when Tesla finally makes good on their ambitious promises. You shouldn't count those chickens until they've hatched.

I think this is the latter case, where the backups are useless to signal or law enforcement, and can only be decrypted by the keys that you hold on your device (or in a backup if you made one). The keys get spread to all the devices you have logged in to signal, so if you have more than one you're reasonably ok to not make an effort to back them up explicitly. If you lost all your logged in devices and had no backup of the keys, their cloud backup would be useless, but it's not super likely I don't think.

It's absolutely the case that you could just use any random cloud backup provider, and that their service is basically an overpriced, limited version of what you can get elsewhere. But even with all those caveats, I think it's a pretty good idea for them to offer this service. Most non-technical people could understand how to back up their chat data to some other cloud provider, but they simply don't want to learn. They'd rather tick a box in the app and pay $24 per year forever.

Personally that's not me, sounds like it's not you, but I'm not offended that the option exists, and I think it's an ok way for them to secure $2 recurring donations in exchange for a token service.

That reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Good judgement is the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad judgement".

i.e. you certainly can become an expert yourself, eventually, but you'll probably make some sub-optimal financial decisions in the process.

AI could provide the push to finally popularize secure, authenticated email, if only because the phishing attempts will become so realistic that there will be no other way to distinguish your grandma from a foreign scammer :/

I concur with that (I'm 52, no more 10-hour marathons at the keyboard for me!).

Note however that the proper metric to measure isn't "time elapsed to create code", but "time elapsed to get that code sufficiently bug-free that you can ship it to customers without it causing a mess".

Any high-school student (or AI) can write code that looks reasonable and passes the basic acceptance tests. The real trick is getting that last 1% correct, so that the code can "just run" indefinitely, unsupervised, for all use-cases, without crashing or misbehaving or otherwise requiring a human being's time to manage it.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

We'll have to do that also, and if the problem was just a single, one-time step-change (i.e. "we'll have to live in temperature range B from now on, instead of traditional temperature range A"), that would be sufficient.

But it's not that easy, is it? The climate changes, and as long as we keep increasing the CO2 content of the amosphere, the climate keeps changing more.

So we could adapt to the climate we expect to be living in 20 years from now, but without also solving the emissions problem, that won't be enough: we'll have to adapt again some years after that, to a climate that's even worse. And again, some years after that, and so on, likely until our only remaining way to "adapt" is through mass die-offs.

Sir, you are mistaken. All those Bitcoins aren't going to mine themselves!

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

Having their face recorded on video and their credit card on file to be billed and/or prosecuted afterwards would deter many. Of course the hard-core troublemakers would use a face mask, and a fake or stolen credit card, and would probably skip the prank-fart-bomb kiddy stuff and strap in an IED instead.

OTOH you could do a lot of the same shenanigans with a traditional human-driven taxi as well, with less chance of being caught on video afterwards. So it isn't clear that the problem is any worse for Waymo than it is for anyone else.

We should categorize these not as 'errors', but as deliberate lies in the service of the fossil fuel industry, who Trump openly promised would get whatever they wanted if they helped him win the election.