I will turn them into my shill and and apologist. Every year or so I'll announce progress on my all-diamond car and they'll become my biggest defender against accusation that I might be running some kind of con even though they're a victim of it.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Pointing a phone camera in someone's face without consent also gets people upset. There are plenty of clips on YouTube in various contexts where it escalated into violence. Having a camera constantly perched on your face will too and it's an entirely self inflicted situation when people start throwing punches.

He didn't need them to see and he certainly didn't need to have a camera attached to his face with no means to remove it. He learned the hard way that people have opinions about that. Especially in Europe where the concept of privacy and violating it are more prone to prompt a reaction.

Pointing spy glasses at others is an open invitation for them to be ripped off and destroyed in front of the owner. Or violence. Even in America where the concept of privacy is optional they're intrusive. I expect the reaction in Europe, particularly in France and Germany will escalate into violence even more quickly. And frankly people stupid enough to wear this garbage should have known better.

... was writing some Rake files (Ruby's equivalent to Gradle) to build a very large project comprising many different components in C++, Java and other stuff. As a language it seemed very pleasant, not far removed from other high level scripting languages like Python. It wasn't producing super fast code but it was fine for our purposes. I liked that it could have blocks that could implicitly return values. I liked that it was terse and some decent JSON support through a gem. I thought the acyclic build system was really nifty and far easier to understand than Gradle (with groovy or kotlin).

But I don't think I would like to use Ruby (or Python) for anything serious. If I want high level scripting I'd probably just use NodeJS, and if I wanted something more I'd use an actual structured language, preferably one with decent package management.

You *hope* they'll refund you. They *hope* that the sum is so small that nobody will go to the effort of reclaiming it. I'm also sure it this small sum is actually a way for them to identify & hit whales for bigger sums through crowdfunding appeals. If you were stupid enough to go to the next level and actually "invest" in Aptera through their crowdfunding activities, well sucks to be you. You ain't seeing that money ever again.

Well here is a bitcoin wallet for you to deposit $100 into - bc1qzn24hp4h5fhduysg2qk585vzkj2eyc4qlp3frs. I promise you that between now and the heat death of the universe I will either deliver you that car made of pure diamonds... or I will spend the money some other way. But in the meantime, don't lose faith and defend me if anyone expresses doubt that maybe I've taken you for a ride.

I think it is completely reasonable to NOT generate as much solar as the battery can store. If a car can charge 20 miles from the sun in a day then that's a win. Many people don't even do 20 miles in a day and even if they did, then the time between charges is doubled, tripled, quadrupled. So I'm all for a car with solar panels even if they don't fully charge the battery.

My beef is with Aptera. This is a company that has been around for a long time promising a car and never delivering that car. And the pattern of them appearing in the news when they're scrounging for money. A better company would have just made the fucking car. I don't accept this is some kind of problem with them being a boutique maker or whatever. A lot of companies make custom vehicles, boats, or whatever in limited quantities and do it in a timely fashion.

The funny part is seeing us pointing this out getting modded down. Aptera the company has been going for 20 years and produced NOTHING. Aptera pivoted to solar powered EVs in 2020 and has produced NOTHING. I am 100% enthusiastic about EVs and solar power but at this point I have as much faith in Star Citizen releasing as Aptera and for the same reasons.

After six years you should be demanding your money back.

This sounds like another funding round / grift for a vehicle that should have been in production for years now. You can go on YouTube and find videos of them hawking this car five years ago. And Aptera the company has been around in various incarnations since 2006. What they have never done in all that time is actually make vehicles.

And to be clear I love EVs and I love the concept of solar powered cars. It's a tantalising prospect that may become real some day. Maybe that's the whole schtick with Aptera, dangling that prospect even though their business model is more like Star Citizen in perpetual development than one serious committed to actually releasing something.

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

I have an Occulus Quest 3 headset, and the hardware is great and there are some decent games. But the "metaverse" (Horizon Worlds) is just boring. Why the fuck would I want to go into static hubs and play boring minigames? They're repeating exactly the same mistakes that made Playstation Home on the PS3 suck balls - slow loads with boring content waiting at the other end.

I have the same thoughts now about it as I did for Home - they should have just bundled a proper MMO into the headset with quests, zones, clans etc. Let people make avatars which are orcs, elves, fairies etc. Let them go into a game which has objectives and a purpose and start engaging with it. Perhaps if they did that they'd have a success instead of a dead albatross hanging round their necks.

One benefit of AI glasses is that it makes it easier for random people to identify an invasion of their privacy and directly punch that asshole right in the face.