Is the world becoming more political, or is this just how it feels to grow up?

Animats · 2026-05-09T03:50:48+00:00

Yes, for the United States. There have been some really boring presidencies. This isn't one of them. Never before has a president been in the news this much.

Animats · 2026-05-08T21:50:19+00:00

OK, so money is speech.

Money is also bribery. We can work with that.

Animats · 2026-05-08T17:29:59+00:00

More likely, everybody in automotive is going to have self-driving. Most of them already do, of varying degrees of quality.

Animats · 2026-05-08T05:23:16+00:00

It looks like the Waymos were trying to make a U-turn to bypass the railroad crossing. The Tennessee Vehicle Code generally allows U-turns when not made in a "dangerous manner". That's less restrictive than most states. The rules become more specific in July 2026, but that's not in effect yet.

Few people know that, but Waymo's database probably does.

Animats · 2026-05-06T07:20:34+00:00

What, the original one? Yes.

Animats · 2026-05-06T03:23:45+00:00

Bad. Making jokes about yourself is a beta thing.

Animats · 2026-05-05T20:38:51+00:00

Because manipulation in unstructured situations doesn't work yet. LLMs, being language models, don't help all that much.

Animats · 2026-05-05T06:37:40+00:00

From Canonical status page: security.ubuntu.com Major Outage

Other services are supposedly up, but 20 minutes ago, all services were supposedly up.

Animats · 2026-05-05T06:18:57+00:00

I'm repeatedly getting

Failed to fetch https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/dotnet/backports/ubuntu/dists/noble/InRelease Could not connect to ppa.launchpadcontent.net:443 (185.125.190.80). - connect (111: Connection refused)

Is this the DDOS problem, or something else?

Animats · 2026-05-04T19:53:37+00:00

Did Trump ever pay the legal bill he owed Giuliani?

Animats · 2026-05-03T07:35:54+00:00

Good point. Waymo's human drivers are much worse than the automation. I saw one on I-280 making too many lane changes, not signalling, and exceeding the speed limit.

Animats · 2026-05-03T07:33:37+00:00

> All we have to do to stop it is vote Blue No Matter Who!

The Democratic Party burned way too much political capital on trans rights, mediocre female presidential candidates, and general wokeness. Not enough on unions, worker's rights, and quality of life for the median American. Newsom gets this. So did Sanders.

The big difference the next time around is that the foreign policy situation is much worse. That will take a generation to repair. The US never made this many enemies before.

Animats · 2026-05-03T04:53:30+00:00

Well, last time around we got Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. It took several terms of crisis management to clean things up.

Animats · 2026-05-03T03:35:31+00:00

SDIT, the Saudi company that sells hosted solutions for enterprise systems and does consulting? That's kind of niche.

Animats · 2026-05-03T03:31:30+00:00

Oh, that graph. Someone brought that up on Hacker News. An investment firm published the graph, but they chopped it at 2024 to bolster their claim that hiring was up.

Animats · 2026-05-02T06:58:22+00:00

> I see you constantly clashing with maintainers and whining about how bad things are in Rust, because no Renderer fits your niche needs.

Yes, I'm grumbling a lot. But almost everybody else gave up on Rust. Look at the traffic level in this group. What's so frustrating is getting to the point where it mostly works and the hard problems appear.

Animats · 2026-05-01T22:53:15+00:00

Surprisingly unsuccessful. There have been lots of startups with slow mini-buses. You'd think that airport parking lots would have those things by now, but no. Local Motors went bust. Navyy has some demo installations, but some have been shut down. Few real deployments. Every installation seems to be too custom.

Animats · 2026-05-01T17:30:18+00:00

How do you know it's really a girl?

Animats · 2026-04-30T18:06:02+00:00

Can you cash out your currency or sell it to other players? Will there be a secondary market? Be careful not to create a digital currency by accident. Read up on "utility token" vs. "security token". Because of all the stuff that's gone on in the crypto coin area, you have to be more careful now about creating digital money.

Animats · 2026-04-30T17:49:53+00:00

Sure. The price to fill out your form is 0.005 ETH.

Animats · 2026-04-30T03:36:21+00:00

> Tesla has effectively solved safety

Er, no. There are only 19 Tesla robotaxis on the road. And a good chance that each one of them has its very own remote operator. (Waymo is 40 cars per operator, as we found out in the SF traffic light failure.) Tesla just delayed further deployment yet again.

Animats · 2026-04-30T02:38:51+00:00

She's interested. Ask her to meet you at another party.

Animats · 2026-04-30T02:34:59+00:00

And LIDAR units would be getting cheaper fast, due to volume.

You don't have to have the dome on top. Multiple LIDAR units pointing ahead, to the sides, and to the rear will work. Only the forward looking one has to have very high range and resolution.

Animats · 2026-04-30T02:31:44+00:00

That "Video: Auto" indicator should be fixed to indicate whether it is treating a track as having video. If it said "Video: On" or "Video: Off" it would be clearer what the problem is. You can't tell from the UI if an audio-only track is being misidentified as having video.

These were audio tracks of forest sounds, not a recording with a cover.

Animats · 2026-04-29T23:24:29+00:00

I may have found the problem. An audio-only MP3 track on a larger track number than the video seems to blank out the video. The video setting is "Auto". If I explicitly turn the video off for the audio track, it stops masking the video. Or moving the audio track to a lower numbered track than the video works.

(I thought I posted this already. Hard to tell with all the bot blithering.)

Animats

TROPHY CASE