6,598 karma · joined November 17, 2017
I guess we can keep arguing about the definition of rare, but about half the smoking rate of many European countries is pretty significant, and immediately noticeable walking around cities in both places. It's also a significant reduction in the US since the 90s, when every restaurant and workplace, and decent number of homes, smelled like cigarettes.
NYC vs Hamburg, Amsterdam, or Brussels are night-and-day differences on this point.
I'm not sure Vegas is representative of much of anything, but last time I was there what I smelled was weed, not tobacco.
There actually has been a really big push against this in the US. I was shocked by the amount of smoking I saw on a recent trip through Northern Europe, whereas smoking in public is pretty rare to see in the US these days.
Now we just vape our nicotine directly, or smoke weed, depending on the state.
Air travel is as safe as it is because we don't stop the investigation at "pilot error" but instead ask why the pilot made the mistake, and why a single mistake was able to lead to loss of life.
But of course yes, Apple has vaguely and generally declined and their products are flops. Unlike the good old days of the first versions of Mac OSX, the G4 Cube, the iPod HiFi, the flaking-paint Titanium Powerbook, the bendy iPhone 6, or of course Ping, the revolutionary music social network.
And there was an answer given by John Ternus:
"The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there's times when it's comfortable and handy to have touch.
We needed to get to a point where adding touch didn't make the product lesser in any way. It didn't make it heavier. It didn't make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen, the best display we've ever put into a Mac. All of these things, and, oh yeah, it has touch as well."
Presumably adding a feature that doesn't cost them very much or otherwise negatively affect the product, but which some users might like.
Rumor is that Apple is skipping the M6 Pro and Max chips this year in favor of releasing the M7 Pro and Max sometime next year.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/proled-xdr-display/specs/
The 14" went from 72.4Wh to 72.6Wh.
The cost of the panels themselves is becoming one of the cheaper parts of that project.
I don’t know why a smaller voting population would preclude any of the things you mention.
They seem to be reporting gross margin by excluding the cut that cloud providers take for hosting their models, and excluding R&D.
Basically they seem to be taking credit for the whole amount that customers are paying cloud providers to run Anthropic models, rather than the actual net proceeds of that business to Anthropic.
More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.
And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.
Then how did he get elected in 2016 with a heavy social media presence and then continue using Twitter as his primary direct communication method as POTUS up until 2021?
Mainly that if we want traffic to be slow and walking children to be safe, this can be accomplished by better planning and placement of schools and better design of our streets.
Slapping a blinking 30mph sign on a wide, straight, six-lane highway is kind of a brute force solution that relies on enforcement and compliance, and still leaves pedestrians vulnerable to a lot of car traffic. Anyone walking through or crossing the street during non-school-zone hours is also not afforded that extra level of safety.
Placing the schools on quieter streets with features designed to naturally slow traffic flow and promote safety for pedestrians and bicycles could accomplish most of the same safety goals and work passively 24/7.
As could designing neighborhoods so that more kids can walk and bike to school, reducing car traffic further during busy pickup/dropoff times.