294 karma · joined September 27, 2015
Today, manual cars aren't about efficiency. Manuals are about driver engagement and the feeling of connectedness with the car and with the road. You can think. of it as more of a luxury than a necessity, and that is still a very valid argument for manual transmissions in road cars, especially those designed to be driver's cars.
But yes, if there is a smoking gun for the death of the manual in America, it would be our crumbling, congested roads and absurdly long daily commutes.
For this particular instance, I think your claim is essentially the inverse of #whataboutism.
* Ropes or any kind of cords that can be used for hanging * Blades of any kind (kitchen knives, scissors, box cutters, utility knives, etc.) * Anything that can be sharpened into a point that can puncture flesh * Any kind of chemical substance that can be deadly in sufficient quantities. * Any bodies of water where one can drown * Any accessible point that is high enough for one to jump off of.
The list goes on. Eventually, the environment that is left would basically be a padded room in a psychiatric hospital in a straightjacket.
On his relationships, he discusses how he was never really able to open up to his significant others about what he was going through: "So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone."
On the doctors he has seen: "I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was."
On his family: "I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week."
"I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me."
And there's plenty more. The vast struggles that Zeller faced and described are not inconsistent with the points that @DoreenMichele is discussing.
Do you have some hard evidence that shows that most traffic accidents are caused by people not complying with speed limits vs. people being inattentive, people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, people making invalid turns, people slamming on their brakes but the driver behind them is unable to react in time, etc.?
The notion of "speed kills" is not always correct. If everyone on the highway is driving above the speed limit, then driving at the speed limit and slower than the flow of traffic would actually become a cause of traffic and increase the risk of a collision.
The main reasons to rename Uranus is 1) consistency and 2) the puns. Either name it Caelus to be consistent with the naming convention used for the other planets or name it Ouranos to be closer to its Greek spelling and pronunciation.
I prefer (1) because the current situation is similar to having a codebase where all class names are PascalCase but there's this one class name in Upper_Snake_Case.
> However, mainstream science maintains that we're neither individuals nor have free will.
You are conflating government control and social interactions. Liberal western politics is based on individual liberty and free will in the context of government policy. Such policies are focused on reducing the control that governments have on individual rights and not how individuals are influenced by other individuals within societies, which is the topic that Homo Deus and Sapiens focus on.
Do you have a public style guide that indicates this?
I worked at Microsoft, and while there are teams that (very unfortunately) went with this "diamond" style of error handling, code written in the CNF (Cutler Normal Form) style, such as the kernel code, use gotos and a central cleanup point at the end of the function, which is also the same style used by the Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
The "diamond" style hinders readability, especially when you have many levels of indentation). While it may be a practice adopted by many people, that is does not necessarily mean that it is good style. Even Steve McConnell's Code Complete, a book published by Microsoft Press, recommends early returns over deeply nested if statements for error handling: https://books.google.com/books?id=LpVCAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA764&ots...
Unfortunately, the Win32 API is full of technical debt, many of which cannot be repaid due to backwards compatibility reasons. Given it is likely most application code written against Win32 is in C++, the ideal approach would be to follow an object-oriented style and use destructors and RAII rather than cleanup functions, but that is not the world we live in.
The design of the Win32 API should not be used as guidelines for good coding practices or even API design. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading "The Worst API Ever Made": https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html.
Self-driving cars -> Not only has it become its own company (Waymo) but it also motivated many other companies to tackle the same problem and develop self-driving tech of its own.
Life Sciences, Google Contact Lenses -> Now its own company, Verily.
Google Brain -> I quote Astro Teller "It would be fair to say Google Brain (now called the Neural Network Project) is producing in value for Google something that would be comparable to the total costs of Google X — just that one thing we’ve spun out." https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/googles-captain-of...
Hard science and engineering problems take non-trivial amounts of resources to solve. How many start-ups are tackling the kinds of problems that X is trying to solve?
Excuse my pedantry.