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It's actually quite complex to unpack.

In the past, you could order the cars with or without FSD hardware (on promises of future capability). These days (~2020+? I'm not sure the cutoff), you can order them without or without an FSD hardware enablement/cost, but they all have FSD hardware inside them, and the cost is just about turning it on or not, and you can always later opt to pay the cost or a subscription to enable it.

For cars that do have FSD hardware both installed + enabled (paid-for): if you're part of a smaller select group of opt-in, approved testers (currently ~100K drivers in the US plus a smaller number in Canada), you can enable "FSD Beta", which is a whole different animal than Autopilot and not really relevant to the discussion.

However, when you're using regular Autopilot, the capabilities of Autopilot are different for cars which have installed+enabled FSD hardware, and those which do not (either because you have the hardware but didn't pay the enabling cost, or because your car is old enough that some of them didn't come with the hardware at all if you didn't pay the cost up front or pay to have it retrofitted).

Non-FSD-capability cars, for example, can't detect stoplights on Autopilot at present, while FSD-enabled cars running Autopilot can. There are probably some other differentiators like that as well. Basically, Autopilot-on-FSD-capable-cars is slowly getting minor Autopilot feature upgrades that are only possible with that hardware while they're waiting for the "real" FSD to arrive. Autopilot-on-non-FSD-capable-cars doesn't get these upgrades and is stuck with a more-limited functionality.

+1 to that. I'll add the other thing that gave PHP an edge at the time:

Installing any major work built in Perl back then was a nightmare of installing all the underlying dependency modules, often into the system directories. It didn't have a clean, standardized way to package up a script + dependencies easily, and dependency management was hellish, especially with many key modules needing platform-specific C compilation.

At that time commercial "shared" hosting was still common: many customers sharing one linux webhosting box and uploading scripts to via FTP, with no access to or control over the underlying system. If the webhost supported PHP, you could upload a php script and it Just Worked. Not so with Perl!

Perl was by far the superior language, but it just wasn't the superior experience for a beginning web developer who mostly just wanted to embed a tiny amount of CGI functionality in a static HTML page, and then upload and run it pretty much anywhere with no fuss.

Yeah but what about life insurance? It's not the deceased who gets the payout, it's their survivors. It's a real grey area ethically, as you can think of it as the survivors taking a bet on whether a family member will die soon, and profiting off of winning that bet. You could argue that the dead person approved and paid for it, but that's not always clearly the case.

Some whole-life policies carry cash value and are an investment vehicle as well, so you can potentially make money on them surviving as well. This seems ethically-better, but most life insurance is term life that doesn't have this investment upside.

Yes, but, you could also say the same of fossil fuel power plants as well. The world has been getting "cheap" electricity from fossil fuels for many decades now while ignoring the environmental (and other, like nuclear waste problems from Coal) externalities that taxpayers ultimately have to face one way or another as well. You'd need a comparative analysis of the externalities of both to make sense of the trade-offs and pick one that's "better".

Renewables like solar and wind are great of course, but they're intermittent and cause weird issues like the Duck Curve. You still need base load from either nuclear or fossil fuels for a stable, reliable grid.

There were older attempts at this stuff, in the 90s with "Beowulf" clusters that had cross-machine process management and whatnot. It's a lot harder than it seems to make this approach make sense in the real world, as the abstraction hides important operational details. The explicit container + orchestration abstraction is probably closer to the ideal than trying to stretch linux/systemd/cgroups across the network "seamlessly". It's clearer what's going on and what the operational trade-offs are.

Yes - after I got bored of regular Sudoku, I found "Killer Sudoku" and I've been playing that variant regularly for a long time. The hard puzzles (blank with no "easy" parts) in the killer variant are quite challenging, and over a span of years I've continued to gain new insights into better techniques for finding the answers. The logical chains you have to build up just to eliminate one possible number somewhere really stretch the brain! More often they're merely tough and I can solve them in one sitting in under half an hour. It's a great mental warmup in the morning with coffee, to get the brain juices going!

My personal favorite recommendation in this vein is The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ . They've got some great writers and editors and often deliver pretty unique insights. Their articles tend towards long-ish-form, but not nearly as long as e.g. the New Yorker. They're a little less world-focused and more US-centric, but not completely. There is some bias (isn't there always?), but I've seen them cover a single issue from multiple POVs using multiple writers before. They have a print edition as well, for ~$70/year (includes digital access as well).

I'm not asking whether significant protests tend to cause economic harm. I'm asking whether there should be reasonable limits. I think it's easy to come up with a feel-good answer like "the economic impact of the protest should match the severity and importance of the thing bring protested", but it's hard to have good rules for where that line of reasonable-ness is.

Hyperbolic example: If there was a 0.01% minority in your country/region which was violently opposed to some existing minor local law or regulation, would it be ok for them to shut down half the economy over it? Think of all the secondary damage that's doing every time someone gets upset over something relatively-small in the big picture. I think most would think that's unreasonable. It's this question that gets at the heart of when and/or if it's ok for a heavy-handed government to come in and put a stop to things. When is it reasonable for the powers that be to intervene and "stop a protest" because the toll is too high for the weight and/or popularity of the matter at hand?

Serious question though, which applies to both the Canadian truckers case and the Minneapolis example above - does a right to protest an issue also include a right to inflict economic harm (on broader society, in poorly-targeted fashion) in order to raise awareness? Is the amount of economic harm (say, %GDP of the town, region, or country) or how broadly it's targeted ("random retail stores"? "Anything that relies on ground-based trade between Canada and the US"?) a factor in how allowable it is? Where does one draw a line of reasonability here?

Correct. Multi-point racing harnesses can only be used with a cage. The standard diagonal shoulder belt design allows your body to lean over sideways (towards the center of the car) if the roof of the vehicle caves in on your head and pushes you down. If you're in a harness without a rollcage and the roof caves in, the harness locks your spine upright and you end up with a head/neck/spine injury that's very likely to be fatal. This whole line of reasoning snowballs from there, because beyond that:

If you do install a well-designed cage just so you can safely use a harness, now you also need to wear a helmet. A cage without a helmet is begging for a bad head injury, because your head bounces around a little during an accident, and those bars are hefty, rigid, immobile objects mere inches away from your skull.

Even in a fairly low-speed incident that wouldn't cause other injuries, the bars would put a dent in your naked skull. You're also going to want a neck restraint system for that helmet (it's like a collar under the harness with little straps to the helmet, so that it can't move far), in part because of the added head weight (momentum) from the helmet and how rigidly your torso is locked in place, to prevent neck injuries.

Now that you have all those parts down: the combination of the harness locking down your torso, the neck restraint, and the limited window of visibility from the helmet means you've lost a good chunk of your peripheral vision and can't turn your head/neck to check things either. With your vision more or less locked in straight forward, you can't see all the things you really need to see to drive in normal street conditions safely. The limited vision works fine on a racetrack under racing conditions because everyone's trained the same way and operating in a sanitized environment, with no "intersections" or cross traffic, you have flag workers and/or radios to warn you of some things you can't see, etc.

The bottom line is that both street and race car safety systems are a whole complex of things that are engineered together in concert. They're well-tuned to the appropriate environment, and foolishly mixing ideas from the two generally makes you less safe, not more.

Random context video showing a race crash from the inside and outside perspective. Loss of brakes at the end of a high speed straight at COTA (he was still moving at 136 mph at the wall impact, after all the attempts to slow it down). The driver walked away fine, thanks to all the safety gear that the cockpit video shows off nicely near the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQitOyEyRd0 .

Yeah but it wouldn't be illegal if the rationale was that they had priced some gas discounts into the Toyota purchase price as part of the deal.

Yeah but usually what happens is that no new development of that sort occurs during the (intentionally limited by cheaped-out hardware design) lifetime of the appliance. If they do push any updates, they'll either be to fix security problems (only if you're lucky enough that they get fixed at all), or they'll push some horrible software feature users didn't ask for which worsens their experience vs how it operated when purchased and brings new bugs. Appliance manufacturers are terrible at firmware/software. You get all the downsides and none of the upsides.

Well, one part of the charging problem they're trying to solve is getting cars in and out of slots quickly to increase overall capacity. For the existing Tesla owners in the US, there's virtually zero auth/payment overhead: they already have Tesla accounts and it identifies the car, so you just drive up and plug in and get billed. They also charge idle fees ($0.50/min if there are open slots, $1/min if the whole station is full) for occupying slots unproductively.

I imagine they could have added some kind of reliable payment-card reader, maybe. But then you're dealing with a whole other level of things like people trying 3 different cards until they get one to work and burning time, possible fraud, skimming, etc. You also have new hardware and failure modes in the charger itself (the reader, the screen, the buttons, etc), whereas right now they're featureless, just a tall plastic thing with a charge cable on it, and it's charging to a known card pre-registered in the account.

It seems a reasonable tradeoff (at least in the US, to me, at this point in the industry's evolution) to stick with the system they've got for simplicity and speed, and ask for a Tesla app install. The only other open charging network I've tried in the US (Chargepoint) also needs an app install and account.

It's a leaky abstraction, though. The problem is that many systems people that were raised only on these abstractions lack the depth to understand what's under the hood when those other layers do unexpected things.

The labels applied to liberals here are ones with positive connotations, and the labels applied to conservatives have negative ones. One could choose other labels that make for a different obvious outcome.

Most political debates are more about straw-person demonization of the other side rather than understanding each others' underlying rationales, issues, or values. Understanding might not always lead to some great compromise, but it would still be helpful if the debate were elevated to the real issues instead of meaningless attack soundbites. Almost everyone in the media on both sides of any debate does understand the real issues, but chooses to pump ratings with soundbite attacks instead, to all of our detriment.

And to put some balance on your critique of conservatism:

Small-c conservatism has a positive purpose in the government of a nation - it's the impulse to not change things; to value stability. Whatever we're doing now, however stupid it may seem on the surface, is what got us this far. There's no guarantee the latest radical new idea which sounds great on its surface won't cause an unforeseen long-term fallout that wrecks society. The world isn't a science lab or a startup: the lives and happiness of millions are at stake with every decision. There's a liberal impulse to fix everything that looks wrong with bold new ideas, and a balancing conservative impulse to avoid making sweeping changes to the machinery of society without a lot of time and care.

The extremes of both impulses, unchecked, are not healthy. A government which is extremely conservative never rights the wrongs of the past or improves the lives of its citizens, or even reacts to obvious changes in the natural world or other competing societies. It's locked in stasis, and thus is doomed to decline. On the other end of things, a great example of the potential horror of government being too liberally-bold with new ideas would be China's Great Leap Forward, which I would humbly summarize as an attempt to swiftly enact radical changes to a society, which sadly and unintentionally caused a famine which killed millions.

Also on a similar theme: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil (it's intended to be about free market economies, but you can also read it as something about knowing how even simple modern marvels work at all).

Sceptre has been my favorite. They're not the most-premium brand, but I've been buying them for years for home TVs and they're decent. They do make Android TV models, but they also continue to make non-smart models with 4K and other basic AV bells and whistles: https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...

Because it's cheap to replace a roku/chromecast as technology evolves, but TVs tend to be longer-term investments. Hating smart TVs is akin to hating cars that have built-in factory navigation systems. Content streaming devices/services (and mapping/navigation/music for cars) regularly evolve/change with the fast pace of technology and the Internet, while TVs and Cars are hardware you hang onto for a long period of years. You don't want outdated tech baked into your hardware forever, especially tech built in by companies that don't specialize in that stuff to begin with.

Part of the problem is that most 401Ks have a very limited set of investment options. You get a short menu of choices arbitrated by a clueless HR person at your company and the self-interested financial company that manages the 401K plan: a bunch of standard mutual funds and index funds, some are semi-targeted (e.g. large-cap vs small-cap, whole-market, foreign-vs-domestic, target-date, tech?). If you're lucky, there might be a couple of different bond funds, and maybe a money market option to park cash temporarily. There's not often the flexibility of a regular investment fund (e.g. an etrade account) to go after other specific options or individual stocks and bonds, or especially any kinds of commodities, futures, options, etc.

I get the rationale: it's set up that way so that it's a "safer" investing option, because they're afraid people will make bad choices and lose their 401K balances. But the flipside is you don't get much flexibility in making the wisest or most self-interested investment decisions. The 401K -managing firms love it though, as they get to sell a bunch of funds that are often in-house and have fees, and the real free-market-trading investors like it because the 401Ks put a bunch of very predictably-timed money into predictably-common choices, and they can rely on this to gain a little advantage/arbitrage.

I get what you're saying. It's ineffective to robotically collect them this way (ever), and if humans go collect them, they could just collect a lot more while they're there, making it all pointless.

Perhaps an answer is that one of the contingencies being covered by the Perseverance sample-collecting is against future contamination? Maybe the NASA missions have been extraordinarily careful about not contaminating Mars with earth microbes, but they're worried that future commercial crewed missions won't be able to be so careful. Then when the humans get there, they'll have some unspoiled sample containers to experiment on and compare to the post-human samples.

I think this is pretty valid, but I'd couch this in terms of citizens vs non-citizens. I knew and/or interacted with a lot of working-class/poor citizens and life seemed better for them there than in many countries. There are policies and universal safety nets that make it happen, with regard to housing, jobs, medical care, etc. For poor or working-class non-citizens, it's probably much bleaker.

I have a similar take. I lived in SG for ~5 years, many years ago (90s). There's a lot I would like to criticize on abstract principles about the politics, the surveillance state, the lack of freedoms, some very draconian laws and social norms. However, that instinct is always tempered by the fact that, in practice, Singapore's society seems to work phenomenally better than most other countries for most of its citizens, even for the working class and poor, which is quite an achievement in such a high-income/standard-of-living country.

It's a unique place in every sense: social and cultural issues, economy, geography, history, leadership, etc. It's a very interesting country to study, but the most important thing in any analysis of Singapore is that lessons from Singapore almost certainly don't extrapolate well to anywhere else; don't draw conclusions about how some other country should be run based on what works there.

It could be the case that a lot of the momentary, solo reaction is driven by your brain's anticipation of those future social situations.

Sorry, I'm not suggesting anything about the fundraising methods or tactics. I'm just talking about the general idea, floated often in comments on threads like this one, that our budget and/or reserves and/or endowment are unjustifiably large already, as typified by comments of the nature "How much does it take to run a few servers?" and similar.

I get that the article and other comments are about the fundraising, but my comments are not trying to address anything particular about fundraising methods/tactics.

I'd agree the raw infra costs themselves are now a small slice of the pie. The much larger slice, though, is all the engineering and other staff required to make it work. By my rough counts, adding up just the Technology, Product, and Legal staff mentioned more-explicitly above adds up to ~320 employees. ~140 of those are in the Tech department alone. Once you add in all the other supporting teams and departments of a robust and functioning organization, the total headcount still seems reasonable.

Yes, the engineering "efforts" are exciting and interesting to learn from. They're also a continuous process that requires a heavy human investment in the form of staff (and staff retention!), and those salaries and benefits are relevant to the bottom line.

On the parts about annual expenses: keep in mind this is a long-term movement and foundation with long-term aims. Being sufficiently financially stable to run another year or two isn't really a win. It still leaves a rather important institution and its projects subject to lots of short-to-medium term existential risk.

I mostly agree with your analysis, but while Devolution sounds good on paper at an abstract distance, the reality of it is going to be (and is) a lot messier.

The problem is that we don't have just Red-vs-Blue states in the US. We also have Red-vs-Blue subregions and counties within most (all?) states, and even within a nominally Red or Blue county, city, or town, you'll almost universally find a a sizable sub-population of the opposite bent.

So, to pick an example hot-button issue: Abortion Rights. If the feds decentralize this issue and let states find their own paths, you'd have ample abortion rights in the blue states and virtually no abortion rights in red states. But many of these nominally red or blue states are really, say, a 70/30 or 60/40 split by population, and so a large (but non-majority) population of each state is now living under laws they despise, which is not going to make for good long-term outcomes.

Over a long-enough time period, I suppose many would choose to move to other states and physically polarize the nation by-state, which is then going to make it easier and more natural to eventually Divorce the two sides as separate nations, and then they will almost surely have wars in the future over turf, politics, etc. But in the shorter term, most people don't have the freedom to just move states on a whim because of political change: they have families and friend networks, they have jobs to consider, financial and social costs of uprooting and moving, etc. It's still a relatively-rare privilege, among the whole US population, to be in a situation where you can easily move states as you feel like it on a political whim.

You could also imagine a path where Devolution just gets more-fine-grained - the Feds leave more to the states, the states leave more to the counties, they leave more to the cities, etc. This would allow things to differ at a much more local level. All over the country, you might find a flip of the abortion laws every 20-30 miles traveling down the highway. This reduces the costs and challenges for the individual - now they can more-easily move a short distance for a set of laws they find palatable, or simply drive across legal lines for various services/purposes. However, I think having such a large menu of divisive and important legal issues vary at such a low level would lead to a lot of chaos and friction. You'd lose a lot of the advantages of being a relatively-homogeneous country. Imagine doing business in such a country and having to pay far more attention to the more-significant legal differences in every jurisdiction. It sounds like a mess!

My current (perhaps naive!) opinion is that you can't fix this in an effective way through Devolution or Divorce - the costs are too high. I think this needs to be fixed at the per-human level: we need to become less-polarized as individuals, and elect less-polarized politicians as well.

We need to learn to disagree without being disagreeable again, and to understand where each other is coming from. We used to have that (well, to a much larger degree than we do now) decades ago. I don't think Facebook alone created this mess, but tech is certainly playing a significant role in amplifying the problem rather than solving it.

You have to reach a point where everyone can have conversations with all of their neighbors of the form "I disagree with your stance on X, but I can see why you think that way, and I want to explore where we have common ground and find a compromise solution that can make both of us reasonably happy to live alongside each other", or your society is doomed to eventually be a failed one.

Being "right" on an issue is not as important as being good neighbors to each other and respecting others' views. Perhaps your particularly strong view of a certain issue will eventually prove itself to be universally acceptable/accepted (in the sense that eventually in some future year, an overwhelming majority of the population will agree with you instead of say, just the 35% that are in your political subcamp).

However, you're not going to get there by going to war with the other 65% and demeaning and degrading them. You're going to get there by being understanding enough to have healthy relationships with them, and then perhaps minds can change more-naturally (and it may take a generation or two for some changes, but it's the only non-violent way to get there). You have to do this even if you don't think the other side is doing it, or even capable. It's the only way to have hope for a better future.

Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to:

Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity.

The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use.

Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many reasons), the total network currently has some physical presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world, and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering network requirements that come with that. The live codebase gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There are many other side-services that run alongside the core MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on...

On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend against threats to the org from businesses and governments around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in many different directions (my favorite example was our past lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA). There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention the Fundraising team itself, of course! :)

The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going. The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are shocked to learn just how small our tech teams are for the jobs they're doing.

> pretty much ensuring those animals don't go extinct.

Sort of, but you have to add some nuance here. None of the animals we commercially farm in mass quantities for food are "natural" animals to begin with. They were bred down (in some cases over many centuries) from their natural ancestors to be a perfect food animal for humans. Some probably wouldn't survive (as a species) in the wild if the humans were gone. The ancestor species in many cases are already lost. More importantly, significant amounts of previously-wild ecosystems are now turned into commercial farming operations just to feed all these artificial animals, robbing habitat from the remaining more-natural animals.

I still eat meat. I just think it's important to not be naive about what's going on here. We've already largely terraformed what used to be the wild Earth into a custom-tailored bio-mechanical ecosystem designed to amplify human population potential. There are, unfortunately, not many great ways to fix it at scale without massively reducing our population first, and it's debatable whether we should even try.

A related notion is that most of what we call environmentalism isn't really about saving the natural state of the Earth (whatever you define that as!), it's about stopping our ecosystem engineering from going off the rails in directions that will ultimately doom us (climate change, massive pollution, etc). The Earth will be fine either way: if we manage to off ourselves through stupidity on environmental issues, nature will just go back to being nature again.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1338/

Sounds like a great economic opportunity for some construction contracting companies to specialize in these offices-to-apartments conversions. It is possible to gut a lot of the "soft" walls and infrastructure on each floor, bring in more plumbing, and re-build a new floorplan. I'd wager the companies doing these conversions can make a tidy profit (and create employment opportunities!), and still charge the building owners a reasonable-enough rate that they'd rather go this route than sell a dying office building at a huge loss.

You can get a bit creative with this too: e.g. dedicate some floors of the new apartment skyscraper as co-working spaces, and try to plan it so that everyone who rents in the building can use the co-working spaces for "free" as part of their rent and still have some leftover capacity to sell co-working memberships to others nearby as well.

> The more desirable sounding Modern seems to be unachievable for any real world site. I'd love to see counterexamples if I'm wrong.

I'd agree that the description of "M" in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS#Recommende... is unrealistic for a site with a large and diverse audience, so far. The primary issue is that it requires turning off TLSv1.2.

Wikipedia is a good example of "about as Modern as you can get in the real world with a big global audience". It's a little stricter than "Intermediate", but doesn't quite meet the "Modern" description. The key items there are that Wikipedia still supports TLSv1.2 (but only with TLSv1.3-like ciphers) and it still supports dual cert compatibility (ECDSA+RSA). The RSA support is likely to be on chopping block Soon, as the only real use-case for RSA in this config is to support ancient installs of the last-known-good version of Chrome (49) on WinXP SP3, but Wikipedia will likely have to continue supporting TLSv1.2 for quite some time.

In any case, though, Wikipedia still gets an "M" rating in the check, so either the description is wrong or the check is buggy:

https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/en.wikipedia.org#tls