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Comment Re:One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 24

Laws that require backup noises make no sense and cause problems

Laws which require backup noises apply to vehicles where there is no person operating the vehicle who can reasonably see behind them. That's why they are on trucks and buses. They also only apply to commercial motor vehicles, which these are.

The charging stations shouldn't be located in these places, and they should also be designed for pull-throughs. Even if there weren't a noise issue (which there won't be if they aren't installed in dumb locations) there still would be other reasons to do it.

Comment Re:Frozen at starting salary of $135K? (Score 1) 19

Apparently, it doesn't make as much sense as it used to.

It does, but these people don't work on sense. The idea that we live in a meritocracy is a deluded one. They are not at the top of the financial ziggurat because of merit, but because of a lack of it — they will do anything to anyone any time for money.

Comment Re:could be feasible (Score 1) 32

There is no pro to doing it within the atmosphere.

We could potentially put something at L1 to reflect sunlight. An "angular soletta" was proposed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. In that case it was for the purpose of increasing insolation on Mars, but the same nonexistent technology could in theory apply to reducing it on Earth. The idea was nested truncated cones of flexible, reflective material. Altering the angles of the cones would allow redirecting sunlight.

In a way this is a worse plan than solar power satellites because it actually could be used as a weapon. Solar power satellites can simply have fixed focus, and be defocused so that they cover an area instead of targeting a point, and then they cannot be used as weapons at all. The same does not apply to this idea. You could focus it and burn up cities. But it also doesn't involve putting crap into the atmosphere.

Comment Re:Why social media shouldn’t have children. (Score 0) 102

Not one of those greedy cocksuckers gives a shit about their mental health. AI is clearly no exception.

This is true of everything. If you want to ban kids from social media because of this then it's no less logical to ban them from everything else. A parent's job is to teach children to successfully navigate a world in which "everyone" (statistically, nearly) is trying to take advantage of them, not to keep them locked in a box.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 0) 91

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 91

But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feels like a fairly small amount of data. My best guess is that it's some insane formulas that it struggles with more than the number of cells.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Comment Re:Those who cannot remember history (Score -1, Troll) 261

When in the last two centuries have the French, or the British, or the Germans, or the Belgians, or the Italians moved in a way to unify that continent to stand up to this kind of genocide?

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

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