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2 yr. ago

  • Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't this the primary corporate entity - the one that owns the trademark, sets the development direction, and ultimately owns the product - essentially announcing that they are abandoning their own product?

  • Ah, this must be the freedom, individual rights and small government I hear about all the time

  • Most likely outcome (assuming you make it to Iran) is they make a big show of congratulating you and setting you up with a super lavish lifestyle that is totally not a compound that you are definitely allowed to leave if you want but why would you want to with all the people trying to kill you

  • Dust.

    Jump
  • It's not that they are particularly loud, it's that the noise they do make tends to be quite "whiney" and high pitched and can get quite annoying after a while.

    The problem with putting it outside is that big temperature swings (+/- 10C or so) could cause warping or other problems while printing - the plastic needs to cool at a fairly consistent rate, otherwise you end up with inconsistent sizing on your z-axis.

    Filament itself also doesn't like moisture, so if you live somewhere where you get close to the dew point overnight you could easily ruin the whole spool of filament

  • Kinda says a lot about the US military that a supposedly well trained soldier - green berets are supposed to be fairly elite right? - couldn't figure out how to build a bomb beyond just stuffing a car with whatever random flammables they could find

  • data retention

    It's the opposite - most regulatory frameworks require that you only retain data if you have a "legitimate purpose" for holding on to it; providing app features absolutely is a legitimate purpose, so by having a "wrapped" you can justify holding on to everything a user does - after all, you need it to provide features.

  • I'm surprised it's not already in place for rail freight. Pre-defined, well known routes, automatic right-of-way. You'd need some exception detection - spot things on the line or if any part of the train is behaving abnormally, but like cars you can "fail safe" - do an emergency stop if the computer or a remote operator decides that something has gone sufficiently wrong which you can't do in a plane

  • Technology wise, aircraft are already 90+% automated - autopilot does basically the whole cruise phase, pilots are there to do the communication with ATC, manage the autopilot, and be hands on for taxi, takeoff and landing.

    From a legal/policy perspective, the aviation industry is held to a much higher standard of reliability and safety than the automotive industry - the AI driven YOLO that companies like Waymo get away with. It's not just that autopilot systems have to always work, it's that they have to always behave in a predictable way.

  • It's a universal rule that anyone who references their supposed IQ like this is at most half as smart as they think they are

  • "Well is there anything dangerous in there?"

    "That's classified, also, take a good look round at the building you are in and think about that question some more"

    "Shit."

  • I'm imagining a somewhat boring looking office/lab with a bunch of locked rooms.

    "What's in there?"

    "Oh, it was Dr Simpsons lab in the 90s"

    "Well what were they working on?"

    "Don't know, its classified"

    "Well can we get rid of it?"

    "I don't know, it's classified"

    "Well who does know?"

    "I don't know, its classified"

  • Plus a bunch of old equipment and documents that are definitely secret and too valuable to just destroy, but no-one is entirely clear exactly how secret and valuable so it's safer to leave it guarded in place than to try and move it

  • Yeah, I get that from the US perspective the idea of there not really being a hard price tag on everything is a bit odd - the US system is bonkers and confusing from the outside as well (and it kinda feels like that's by design).

    Another example as to how this works in practice; my daughter was born a couple of years ago

    • As soon as we found out my wife was pregnant picked a midwife from the list of available ones in our area (we talked to 3, picked the one we liked the best)
    • We saw her once a month for the first 2 trimesters, then weekly from then
    • We got ultrasound scans every 8 weeks to keep tabs on development
    • Due to some minor complications we saw an OB/GYN at the hospital a couple of times
    • My wife needed to be induced, and there were some more complications during delivery so our total hospital stay was 9 days
    • She had an epidural, and needed a pair of specialists to help deliver the baby
    • We kept seeing our midwife fortnightly for 3 months after birth
    • We saw the OB/GYN again after that to check in on the complications and make sure everything was ok

    Our out of pocket expenses were

    • The ultrasounds, because we chose to go to a clinic near where we lived
    • Parking
    • The insurance excess for when someone put a dent in my car door in the carpark
    • Food delivery for me for the time we were in hospital; I could have got very cheap meals from the canteen, but didn't really fancy any of it

    Grand total was less than $500 NZD (not counting the insurance excess), and we could have avoided the majority of those costs if we wanted to.

    Not saying the system is perfect; it's functionally impossible to get mental health support publicly, dental care isn't publicly funded if you are over 18, it seems like nurses and junior doctors have to constantly fight to get pay rises that keep up with inflation, and the system as a whole has been chronically underfunded for decades - but we don't have people choosing between death or bankruptcy, and we have higher life expectancy so shrug

  • Sort of.

    I live in New Zealand, so this is hyper specific to how our healthcare system is set up, other countries will have radically different systems.

    The way it works in NZ is that all hospital visits are free, and all medicine dispensed within the hospital are free. Visits to your GP are free if you are under 16, over 65 or pregnant. Medicines prescribed by your GP have a price cap ($100NZ/year/person iirc), as long as they are on the "Pharmac" list.

    The 2 main caveats to this:

    • Hospitals don't have infinite capacity. If you need non-acute treatment (ie, you aren't going to suffer serious harm by not getting treated immediately), you could easily be waiting a year to see a specialist
    • Pharmac. The way the government ensures that drug prices stay affordable is by giving a government agency a big chunk of cash, and telling them to use it to buy the drugs that are going to have the best "bang for the buck", and use the bulk purchase negotiating power to get as good a price as possible - hospitals pretty much exclusively prescribe Pharmac drugs because they don't have the budget to buy anything else. This means that in general, if you've got something common, the drugs you'll need will probably be on the Pharmac list and you'll not have to pay anything, but if it's rare, or you want a newer more expensive treatment, or you just get unlucky and need a drug that Pharmac doesn't cover you can be in a really hard spot.

    Private medical insurance does exist, and is pretty much there to let you "skip the queue" - there are private hospitals not funded by the government that employ their own specialists (who typically also work in the public system) - or to fund drugs that Pharmac won't. Is fairly common in mid-end white collar jobs (especially finance and tech) to have private insurance paid for by your employer, but is pretty much just there for "what if I get an exotic cancer" or "what if I fuck up my knee and don't want to have to wait a few months for surgery". My wife needed her gall bladder removed a couple of years ago, and we just used the public hospital even though we do have insurance that might have paid for private - the public system is excellent for 95% of things.

  • Back when I worked a shitty retail job we would usually hire a few people on fixed term/fixed hours over the Christmas/New Year peak (ie, you get minimum 20 hours a week for 16 weeks starting November 1st), first couple of weeks are mostly training, then peak, then cover into the new year while the full time people take some leave.

    Had one guy who got to the end of his training then informed management that he would need leave approved starting now and right through peak because his family was going to an expensive ski resort but that he'd happily pick up some more hours when he got back. Got really salty when he was told that that wasn't going to happen, and he was welcome to go anyway but shouldn't expect a job when he got back.

  • If I didn't show up to work for 6 months, they'd stop paying me - surely there would be a case to force her to return the salary she drew while not actually performing any of her duties?

  • Same, but in my line of work (programmer) it makes me look like a damn savant. "How did you know how to do X?" "Oh, I vaguely remembered something from reading the API docs 2 years ago so I just went and looked it up again"