By the same token, I was reading for years how China's construction market was the biggest bubble in history and was going to pop so hard the nation would be an economic black hole. Is that still going to happen or what?

make that comma.ai. sigh. No AI assisting me here tonight. Or spell checker apparently.

Never mind that their FSD is more capable than any current system on the market today. Unless you've ridden in a Tesla with FSD activated and witnessed the problems first-hand I'm not sure you are qualified to speak to how bad it is. The "8-bit guy" did a random off-his-normal-topic video recently about FSD and it was eye openingly good.

My issues with FSD have more to do with the fact you don't own the car really, and you are constantly beta testing it for them. But it's remarkable how well it does work.

I've been temped to try out the very affordable comma.si driver assist system (not quite FSD) that can work in any late-model car. I don't mind having more assistive technologies.

Maybe. Here in North America, the big three have already conceded the budget market. None of them are interested in anything other than luxury cars. For the first time, the average car purchase in the US has hit $50k. Europe ceded the entire EV market years ago to China.

Canada is set to relax the Chinese EV ban and tariffs, which I'm in favor of (maybe set them to 50%). However the only Chinese EV manufacturer that will actually be allowed in is Tesla. Our market is just too small to for Chinese automakers to justify complying with our North American standards when the US will never ever allow them in. On the other hand if we allowed cars meeting European standards in, that would open the door to a ton of Chinese vehicles coming here.

Meanwhile the fetish with touch screens and always-on internet connections is a real hangup of mine for EVs. That and how every charging station wants you to use a crummy app, instead of just being like a gas station.

Anyone else noticed these? I thought popup ads had disappeared years ago because they are so annoying, but apparently not. Although I'd rather have these ads than those pernicious and malicious html-load.com scripts running on this site.

Application portability doesn't enter into it, nor does this have anything to do with code at a binary or library level. Nothing to do with Windows drivers! Not sure why you brought that up.

This is the Linux kernel we're talking about. This extension allows slightly cleaner, easier-to-read syntax in certain circumstances. As I understand it, it's syntactic sugar that brings a bit of C++'s ability to cleanly extend structs to C. This is clearly shown by some insightful comments above.

Nice dig at systemd, but completely nonsensical. All three major compilers support these extensions to the C language. Application developers can use them as they see fit. And have for decades.

Look what he responded to.

People toss out a throwaway allegation and then expect you write a dissertation to rebut it.

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)