Well the keyless entry can be useful. For example my car lets you open the boot by kicking under the bumper, if you have the key on you. Useful when your hands are full.

Anything less than 100% security negates that occasional benefit though.

Things someone who has never worked at a startup says.

With Arabic they use a different pen nib that makes pushing easier, so they can rest their hand further down. That doesn't help with top to bottom languages though, and for them as they first adopted European stationary and were influenced by European languages, it made more sense to go left to right.

Brexit and the fact that LR vehicles are very easy to steal due to a botched keyless entry system probably did more harm. COVID too of course.

Some keywords can get your video demonetized or hidden from searches. The rules keep changing and are not clear. At the moment mentioning Epstein in the first 10 minutes seems guaranteed to get your video hidden.

Right. You are at the border. Tired from your long flight. Agent asks for a cheek swab. Your choices are to refuse and at best get turned away and have to go back to where you came from, at worst they arrest and detain you for weeks or months, steal your stuff, trying to break into your phone and computer, and eventually deport you.

From the sound of it they are having issues with under-performance causing lag, and/or bad wireless interfaces. The CPU and the wireless chip are probably soldered to the PCB and not replaceable, so easiest thing will be to just replace the whole computer.

They may also have run into component reliability or software premature ageing issues. Tesla had that with early model computers, where excessive logging would wear the flash memory out in a few years and brick the car. They were very difficult about out-of-warranty replacements, but in the UK if it's a design flaw like that they can't really avoid it.

Geely is fine. Their other brands have decent reliability records, like Zeekr, Polestar, other Volvo models, even Lotus (as far as luxury sports cars go). They aren't on the level of BYD or SAIC, but they are also not the reason why Volvo is having issues. Volvo is mostly antonymous, they just use Geely parts where possible, and the computer doesn't seem to have anything to do with them.

BYD just set a record for the fastest production car ever. In the video the driver lets go of the steering wheel at 350kph. Must seem slow when you were doing 500kph a few moments earlier.

I don't mind short seasons if that's what the story needs, like with Andor or Chernobyl. But they also can't really expect me to subscribe for more than a month or two when there is so little decent content. Often they remove the only reasons I have to come back, e.g. Star Trek Prodigy is gone now, luckily I have it on disc and cracked the DRM.

It sounds like the normal kind of politeness that most cultures have. In the UK we often do thinks like thank the cashier when they take our money, or apologize when making a request that is really a complaint.

In Japan it's customary to ask questions in the negative, so that the person answering can avoid outright refusing or saying no. Like if you were asking about someone doing you a favour, you would probably say "can you NOT do this for me?" And if they wanted to refuse, instead of saying "no" they would probably reply "it's very difficult", by which they mean impossible.

Most cultures are not so abrupt and direct.

The left to right writing thing is more to do with the introduction of pencils and pens. Japan had the same thing.

With a brush you can write top to bottom, right to left, because your hand doesn't rest on the page. With a pen, you are going to smudge what you just wrote. With a pencil, you will get the lead on your hands.

Interestingly one of the reasons why Japanese computers were often more powerful than Western ones was that they needed to have better graphics to show complex characters, and so the standard design was to have separate CPU and video memories. Western machines usually had a unified architecture where CPU and video shared a single bank of RAM, limiting the bandwidth available to both.

They are going to fly around the moon to test the systems out, like Apollo 10 did. Also like Apollo 10, the lander isn't ready yet.

Blue Origin is supposed to be supplying the first one. They will need to do a robotic mission to land it and take off again before a crewed one goes, so this isn't as close to the goal as Apollo 10 was. SpaceX is also supposed to be producing a lander, a modified Starship, but again, years away from getting to the moon and being man rated.

It looks like the race with China is heating up.

The only Iranian I've ever met (that I'm aware of) said that when he met people, he usually called himself Persian to avoid the stigma that comes from saying you're from Iran, presumably out of fear that Americans would assume that he was a fundamentalist just waiting for a chance to shout "Death to America" and blow himself up or whatever. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Who made claims that oxycontin isn't addictive? The government? No. The manufacturer. The government merely allowed them to do it until their claims were shown to be false.

Spreading claims that would encourage a pandemic to get massively worse by discouraging vaccination falls squarely under "detrimental to public health". At no point were *legitimate* studies that showed safety concerns in any way squashed to favor any company's interest. That's why we know that vector-based vaccines were responsible for a statistically significant number of strokes and heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.

The studies that were squashed were a bunch of very weak, mathematically garbage studies that contained errors so obvious that even I, a non-medical person, could shoot dozens of holes in their methodology. A small number of individuals were behind publishing fraudulent study after fraudulent study, and they kept doing this despite broad consensus that their methodology and their conclusions were pure, unadulterated bulls**t. They did this by publishing in journals significantly outside the areas that were appropriate for the papers, relying on the journals' lack of people with adequate understanding of the subject to shoot it full of holes and recommend not publishing it.

And these folks had a tendency to go on YouTube and spread their bulls**t, using their publication in a "journal" (of physics, social sciences, psychiatry, chiropractic medicine, etc.) to support their absolutely fraudulent claims. YouTube quite literally became a dumping ground for trash science that made the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism by comparison.

It got to the point where my canned response was, "If you are showing me something in a YouTube video instead of a peer-reviewed journal, I automatically assume that what you are saying is pure, unadulterated bulls**t, because out of the roughly one hundred times I have not made that assumption, I have found it to be true every single time. If you want me to read it, write it down, so that at least I can skim it in three minutes and point out why you are wrong without wasting an hour of my time watching your stupid video."

IMO, YouTube was right to crack down on that. When people without medical degrees are basically giving medical advice that contradicts broad medical consensus, this is almost guaranteed to be harming society. And nothing good can come of that. Children dying of measles, smallpox, polio, and other vaccine-preventable conditions is not something we should aspire to. Regardless of whether they have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean companies should be required to be their megaphone. And regardless of whether the government was the group who pointed out how potentially harmful the things they were saying are, the stuff they were saying was still harmful.

I love the idea that they could score the game correctly, but it's more fun to make a human guess if another human is scoring the game incorrectly and challeng it.

So it's not about accurate scoring, it's about strategy on challenging inaccurate scores or taking one for the team.