mikeash

35 ms·

331.
by mikeash 7y ago
You’d expect offices in the US to be familiar with US states and territories, but that doesn’t stop them from occasionally demanding a passport from people from New Mexico, or saying a license is fake because there’s no such state as “Distr
332.
by mikeash 7y ago
“Do people think that the risk of nuclear Armageddon just went away with the Cold War?” I’m pretty sure the answer is “yes.” I’m baffled as to why, but that seems to be the case. I’m also pretty sure that MAD is a very risky thing, and we r
333.
by mikeash 7y ago
So much of them are necessary measures to protect people, though. The trouble is distinguishing the two. For example, medallions are obviously and pretty explicitly a protectionist measure. On the other hand requirements to display fares cl
334.
by mikeash 7y ago
The technology exists to shoot down ICBMs. It’s not yet deployed in sufficient numbers to be significant against an all-out attack from Russia, but that could change. I’m sure they want to stay ahead of the curve.
335.
by mikeash 7y ago
That tweet tags $TSLAQ, which is a group of Tesla short sellers working toward the company’s failure.
336.
by mikeash 7y ago
I'm not sure about brand new vehicles. Cars have a bathtub curve like anything else. I expect car fires are mostly very old or very new cars.
337.
by mikeash 7y ago
It happens fairly routinely. Google "car fire in garage" for numerous examples. One particularly amusing one: https://abc7chicago.com/17-cars-catch-fire-at-newark-airport... You have a complex electrical system th
338.
by mikeash 7y ago
My pet idea is that we’re just the idle thoughts of some incomprehensibly vast intelligence. Imagine a world of intelligent ants. You might picture them working in their colonies. You might imagine their social interactions. Imagine a world
339.
by mikeash 7y ago
Maybe they should try advertising this. For me, "organic" is a marker for "bullshit label that's used to convince people to pay more." If they actually do taste better, I might buy the stuff.
340.
by mikeash 7y ago
When did I have that choice?
341.
by mikeash 7y ago
Airflow losses for a car will be dominated by the outside air. Surrounding the car with helium seems impractical, and hard on the occupants.
342.
by mikeash 7y ago
Right, but that seems to be based in confused expectations. The tweet starts out, “My email address isn't on the web.“ But it clearly is.
343.
by mikeash 7y ago
There’s usually a funny noise long before any catastrophic failure, so I think it’s the bearings or the gears, but concrete information is hard to find. I actually had my motor replaced due to this noise. It was a high pitched whining, kind
344.
by mikeash 7y ago
No idea! Would it be expected for an electric motor to lose so much efficiency in that scenario, though? I though the variation was small. Motor efficiency aside, a total “energy spent for distance moved” accounting will look bad at such lo
345.
by mikeash 7y ago
It’s the same in the US (assuming “my country” is elsewhere). The triggering event is generally considered to be the Stonewall riots, which happened before I was born. Seems like a big event dislodged things, but then it took a long time fo
346.
by mikeash 7y ago
If you put your email address out there, people will use it. Maybe github needs to do a better job of conveying what you’re making public when you push a commit, although as a service for programmers it may be reasonable to expect people to
347.
by mikeash 7y ago
The early Model S motors had problems like that. They got a lot better over the years. The Model 3's is great, and the Model S/X front motors are now the same as the Model 3's, while the rear motors are something else that&#x
348.
by mikeash 7y ago
Tesla claims that their drive unit (which includes the motor, inverter, and gearbox) efficiency on their latest models is 93%.
349.
by mikeash 7y ago
Behaving differently on an empty list than on no list is a huge smell. That's really weird and unexpected behavior. Doing it for testing is even weirder. If you're fetching an element from a dictionary and want not-present to be t
350.
by mikeash 7y ago
I've worked in a lot of different languages, from ones that work the way I prefer all the way to Python-style languages where anything is a predicate and there are a bunch of semi-arbitrary rules about what qualifies as "false.&qu
351.
by mikeash 7y ago
Right, look at the size of the motor versus the size of the batteries in an electric car. Efficiency is already well over 90%, too. If you managed to create an idealized electric motor that was 100% efficient, had no limits on power, torque
352.
by mikeash 7y ago
Do assembly languages even have a concept of truthy/falsy? The ones I'm familiar with always require an explicit predicate, such as "jump if zero" or "jump if not zero."
353.
by mikeash 7y ago
"The following values are considered false: * None * False * zero of any numeric type, for example, 0, 0L, 0.0, 0j. * any empty sequence, for example, '', (), []. * any empty mapping, for example, {}. * instances of user-defi
354.
by mikeash 7y ago
I thought the evidence was pretty clear: the safety record of American ATC is nearly perfect and delays caused by ATC are nearly nonexistent. As far as "socialized health care," there are many different models for it. The oft-disc
355.
by mikeash 7y ago
How much time and effort would it take to go from a chip under an electron microscope to the embedded crypto key, though? Seems like a substantial reverse engineering effort. (Although only for the first time you do a particular type of chi
356.
by mikeash 7y ago
I've just seen commenters on the internet who have tracked their cars. You can search "model 3 track performance" for plenty of articles.
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by mikeash 7y ago
The performance version of the Model 3 does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds and by all reports it’s an excellent track car.
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by mikeash 7y ago
I don’t think there’s much of a dilemma here. There’s little reason to think that requiring backdoors in encrypted devices would reduce killings.
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by mikeash 7y ago
If it’s an iPhone, the data is encrypted with a key derived from the PIN and a random key that is baked into the phone’s CPU. The CPU has instructions for encrypting and decrypting with this secret key but no instruction for reading the key
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by mikeash 7y ago
I think that probably understates the magnitude, too. $25 could be several weeks' wages for a typical worker.

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