I'm serious. I've seen so many videos of police interactions where people end up dead. Sometimes its easy to excuse -- "The dude pulled a gun on the cop" or "He charged him with a knife" -- but other times it makes no sense and it leads to great outrage. It has turned interacting with the police into something similar to interacting with a dog's food bowl and having to be careful to not freak the dog out or you might get bit (ie: shot). This, to me, signals that we have a lot of cops on the force that are -- to put it frankly -- cowards, or scared shitless, when interacting with people in less than ideal situations.

The way I see it, if you can't avoid having cowards on the force, then you simply need to find ways to remove them from the equation. Robots are the answer. If the cop doesn't have to fear for their life (either in actuality or in their imagination), then fewer people will end up dead when they come into contact with the cops.

I know people are too busy dreaming up Black Mirror or crazy Dystopian futures with robots, where the tech is abused, but with the combination of social media stoking outrage and the current state of police accountability. Are we not already pretty much there with current police? As far as I can tell, robots can only move us away from a worse future.

Consider that a robot can always have its cameras recording, it doesn't need "privacy time." And whenever its deployed, it's likely in a scenario where its important to have a video and audio record for the event. Finally, you can kit robots up with a wide range of less-lethal options and don't have the same broken mental math that goes on with cops -- robots aren't alive.

You want robots mixed in with the police.

How the hell are people so outraged over their privacy in cars, but I hear next to nothing about phones. Nearly every person has a smartphone now with multiple high res cams, multiple microphones, cell radio, GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth. People take them with them to shit, to shower, to drive, eat, sleep, and everything in between.

If you're not on a dumb flip phone or a smartphone running a version of Android that can be publicly audited, then I don't want to hear about your paranoia over a camera stuck inside your car, when your phone is the biggest privacy hazard in existence. Maybe you do have one of those 2 things, in which case, congrats, you're rare, but most people don't fall into this category.

This is what I expect. They're being forward thinking in how the system is used and banking on Autopilot's FSD improvements which should be doable if they placed a strong focus on the LV area in data collection (ie: similar to Waymo in Phoenix).

Theoretically you could call a "Tesla Cab" to pick you up at your house and then it would drive to the nearest tunnel station and enter there, exit near destination, then drop you off at your destination. The tunnels are just another road lane, but you can build more of them than you can surface lanes.

They have some value but the problem is that everyone is using them for the wrong crap. They're a great way to store records of something that you might want to be able to transfer at a later date.

Take San Diego Comicon for instance. Their current system for buying tickets is set up so that people that got a ticket in the previous year have dibs on the tickets for the following year. Without jumping through a lot of hoops, this benefit can't be passed on to anyone else, you can't sell it for anything. If this benefit of "first dibs" were converted into an NFT, then you could pass/sell that NFT around if you have no use for it next year.

Another example would be something like attending artist concerts or sporting events. Every event you attend you get an NFT, kind of like a "frequent buyer reward card" at shops. Event organizers could then grant different bonuses depending on how many of these "event NFTs" you have built up. This also lets someone sell them off to other people. It also has public record as well, so the event organizers can know how many times those NFTs have been moved around and know if someone is a "long holder" or if they just collected it recently, and the benefits could change accordingly.

The value in NFTs comes from how you connect them back to the real world. Simply trying to tie them to ephemeral digital goods is pointless.

Some of the video that 3rd party watchers collected were pretty nuts. I liked the footage from NasaSpaceFlight. You can see huge chunks of the ship just raining out of the sky and impacting the ground. It sounds like Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut) might have also lost about $20k in camera equipment when a piece landed on their equipment.

Serves as a nice reminder of why they clear the launch range before flight. Nothing like having an engine the size of car land on you.

Occam's comes in and you settle on it not coming from the lab, really?

Unless there is solid evidence that this virus broke out first somewhere besides Wuhan, or that Wuhan just happens to have a huge population of a specific bat species that spreads coronaviruses, then Occam's Razor actually points to the lab. Wet markets and deforestation are not exclusive to Wuhan, they're all over fucking China and many parts of South East Asia.

It'd be on the level of winning the Power Ball lottery if it just happened that it originated in a wet market, a couple miles from a lab that specializes in researching animal/bat to human coronavirus transmission. It'd be like dying from plutonium, 5 miles from a facility that enriches uranium, and everyone being like "Experts say the plutonium didn't come from the enrichment facility, it's got tons of safe guards in place to make it impossible that it could have happened."

Just because it's a BH4 lab doesn't mean someone couldn't have screwed up badly somehow (ie: a Virology Chernobyl event). If anything, because it's a BH4 lab is all the more reason that China would make sure that any evidence of the screw up would be completely cleared. If it came out that they fucked up at a lab of that level, then it would probably impact them down the road and be a tar-and-feathered event for them.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where it came from. Even if there was solid proof it did come from the lab, its not like anyone would place sanctions on China over that fact, nor does it absolve anyone for their poor response to the pandemic.

You wouldn't speak it the same way most of us read it, you'd build a different vocabulary around the language you want to work in.

Here is a talk Tavis Rudd gave about using Python to do this. You'll see that he uses a very minimized lexicon to code. You would probably end up using a different style IDE built for the task though. Our current IDEs are built for typing in stuff, which doesn't mesh with TTS. Exactly what changes you would make in this, I don't know, but there is probably a lot you could do.

As for dealing with someone in a cubicle that has to talk to code -- throat mics.

I'm tossing my agreement into the hat on this one. The ideal location would be a fish eye lens camera in the rear view mirror housing along with the other cameras front facing cams. It'd be cool if they could put it up near the headlights so you could get it much more further ahead than the driver, but I'd worry about issues with keeping the camera clear in less than ideal situations.

It's definitely geo-political. There is a video from the CaspianReport quite recently that talked about the tensions in that part of the Mediterranean, particularly due to a reserve of natural gas below seafloor that Isreal would really like to tap into. Their sea rights are pretty limited though and I suspect that this deal is focused on somehow expanding their reach into the Mediterranean to get access to those resources.

It's not meant to be a solution. I've seen this mentioned a lot but all the articles I saw either don't mention that Tesla is trying to "solve" anything or everyone is assuming that the close proximity (temporally) to the winter disaster means that this is somehow some attempt to fix that.

The reality is likely to be more that Tesla sees an opportunity to elbow in on the peaker plant market. In addition to Tesla, there are a couple of projects looking to add grid battery storage in Texas. Over short term fluctuations in the grid, like voltage or frequency, grid batteries can really make some money quickly, especially when you consider most of Texas is relying on itself for everything.

If Tesla isn't making the power and money off the high peaks, then its likely natural gas peaker plants that are. We've seen this before in Hornsdale. Adding a grid battery to the network helped get rid of peaker plants and stabilized the grid more. In fact, Hornsdale saved money off the grid battery that they installed because it could stabilize the grid for much cheaper than the peaker plants could.

Also, you seem to be under some kind of misconception that Tesla is a charity, it's not, its a business and energy supply is a growing part of that business.

The failures on both aren't even apples to apples. The SLS Green Run was the equivalent of SpaceX doing a static fire on the pad prior to launching payload. That same SLS rocket and engines are supposed to be flying a mission for the Artemis program here in 8 months where they'll deliver a payload into a trans-lunar injection trajectory. A comparable recent failure for SpaceX would have been that one F9 failing to land on the drone ship and blowing up in the ocean, because there was probably a future Starlink mission that was planning to reuse that booster and now they'll have to figure something else out. The Starships that have been blowing up left and right are literal prototypes trying to figure out how to make and operate a type of rocket that's never been done before.

The other thing that I forgot is that if that Green Run failure causes too much delay, ie: >12 months, then that costs us even more money because the SRBs for the Nov '21 launch have been stacked and have a 12-month shelf life once stacked. If they don't launch, then they have to unstack, recertify, and restack them; at the very least -- at worst they have to buy new SRBs (~$60M a pop).

I'll just reiterate it again since you ignored the elephant in the room. SLS is a project that is $20 Billion in the hole in development costs to date. Each rocket that gets made will cost 1 to 2 Billion each and will be completely unresuable. The Orion crew capsule is also $20 Billion in the hole in development and will cost almost $1 Billion for each capsule, but luckily is partially reusable.

SLS is a failure of a program purely from a cost perspective, before it has even launched. It just serves to show us why we need private companies like SpaceX, RocketLab, and Blue Origin, to help set expectations for what programs should cost. I would include ULA but they have nothing in the works for a reusable rocket.

A great success, I don't know. A success, progress in the craft's development, and progress toward the real future of rocketry -- for sure. SLS has nothing to stand on, except being a jobs program. It's a $20 Billion project (so far) that's overdue and overbudget and will cost nearly $1 Billion per rocket (though I've seen $2B quoted too). People are freaking out because SpaceX built most of what it has done on the estimated cost of this single program and lets not get started on the Orion program.

NASA/Boeing and ULA are building rocket tech that will have no place in the industry here in the next 10 years -- primarily on the taxpayers dime. If that's not a failure I don't know what is, the static fire failure a few months ago is just the icing on the cake.

"If you give an inch, they'll take a mile."

The "take offense" thing can swing in two directions, its not just in the woke direction. The problem is the quote I gave though. No one has wanted to sit down and try and draw lines in the sand. Instead it's functioning under an insane warped sense of "I know it when I see it," which is how I think most people operated with the "Take offense" stuff prior to the 00's, but when you have HRs staffed with idiots out of say, liberal arts schools, their reality isn't the same as most people's.

Hence why you get people getting distraught because you used a "Master/Slave design pattern" and "that's offensive!"

Only if you are interested in carrying around a collapsed antenna. Starlink uses a phased array antenna which are pretty large at the moment. I could see the design shrinking a little bit over the years and maybe someone will come up with a fold up antenna design for it, but I doubt it will ever be shrunk into a handset.