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Comment Re:One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 57

Should this requirement apply to autonomous vehicles equipped with sensors that would prevent it from hitting a pedestrian when reversing?

Until they are infallible, yes.

the city should have banned charging stations in these locations via zoning before one was built there

Life is chock-full of "should haves", alas. Instead of each new project being better than the ones before, many people and organizations seem to think they know everything when they should have learned from others. I'm quite sure someone else had figured this out already.

Comment Re: One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 57

I'm not reading the code rn but I would assume the volume is mandated. It's got to be over a certain level to be considered audible to people with hearing disabilities. We had one on our RV as it used to be a bus, I disabled it. I will probably put it on a switch at some point though

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 104

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

Comment Re:Quality Work Can't Be Rushed (Score 1) 104

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Comment Re:One silly law causes problems (Score 4, Insightful) 57

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) 38

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) 46

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.

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