This was my grad school commencement. One thing that really stuck out was how many folks I knew where either themselves or their families complained about the Car Talk guys giving commencement instead of some head of state or what have you. Ray and Tom’s speech was thoroughly entertaining and humble.
Yes. Emphasis state. Recently passed AADC legislation (Age Appropriate Design Code for the UK) and CA-AADC (same thing, California) are going to make these kinds of design patterns common.
With the passing of the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) in the UK and the California Age Appropriate Design Code expect to see this is a general design pattern across the internet.
Part of the disconnect here is that the oft-repeated claims of how many miles have been safely driven by FSD versus humans is a bullshit number. Nearly every mile driven by FSD was driven by FSD AND a human that had to take the wheel when FSD failed.
> In studies of willingness to pay for autonomous driving, the range tends to be $1,000–$7,000, which would buy you between 120–820 hours on Volkswagen’s plan. In 2018, commuters drove an average of 225 hours per year. Drivers typically value their time at 20–40 percent of their wages, and given that the average American wage is around $52,000 per year, or about $26 per hour, Volkswagen isn’t necessarily being unreasonable with its pricing.
The price may or may not be correct, but it doesn't appear to be fabricated out of pure intuition. It seems good to see an alternative pricing option on the table to Tesla's current single, up-front purchase price. As more players enter the market, some amount of economics should finally start to take hold such that the right price and model emerges. As they say, you have to start somewhere.
All of that said, at some level it feels like cars are headed to a place where autonomous driving is no longer an option, but an inseparable feature to the concept of owning a car. At that point, are you subscribing to the car or are you subscribing to the autonomous driving system?
This is the opposite of a map. A map helps you build a mental model for how you navigate space by showing you a broad view of the land, potentially enabling you to navigate to anywhere. This offloads the effort of learning, such that you don’t learn to navigate the space yourself, and only gets you from one point to another.
You are right, but most people want navigational aid, not map. Maps were popular because they were good navigational aid, not because they help building mental model. If better navigational aid becomes available, most people will gladly abandon map's mental model building feature.
This is not a new thing. Google maps were hard to use as a map (on mobile, but on desktop too due to horrible styling) for a looong time for the purpose you state.
We just snap a photo of a tourist or transit paper map and use that on holidays. Way faster and easier to use for just walking around or planning a non-direct transit route.
Even a basic information like, "will we be walking up a hill" is hard to see on gmaps. Even on terrain overlay, the shading is sloppy an imprecise, and contour lines are a mess (too sparse, and marked too sparsely), no hills are marked with height so it's hard to see what's up/down.
Google Maps is horrible for use as just a map. I like to use an external Garmin GPS device in my car (with my own custom high-contrast map theme[1]) because it works so well as a HUD map. I rarely set a route, but I frequently refer to it while driving, and as a result I get to know the roads I drive on quite quickly. One of my favourite features is the blue line it paints on the map behind you, which makes it easy to orient yourself when driving in a place you've already been.
[1]: For some reason, both Google Maps and Apple Maps have terrible contrast, to the point where they're completely unusable for me in dark mode, especially while driving. Apple Carplay is useless to me for this reason. Garmin's default map theme is pretty decent, but they actually let you change map themes, and load custom ones if you're so inclined. So I made the street lines bright and bold, with high-contrast keylines. It's an absolute joy to use now.
Disagree. A navigational aid such as Google Maps is only good as long as you know your exact destination in advance. If for some reason you can't, or you need to orient yourself in an area, or even understand the route you're on, or - God forbid - plan a trip involving multiple destinations - Google Maps is incredibly hard to use.
I'm not quite sure what you mean; I've been quite happy with Google Maps's support for multiple stops. And as for the other thing: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".
What I mean is, it's nice if you input the exact location or locations that you want to visit. It sucks when you're trying to plan a trip - exploring what's in the area, possible routes there. At that stage, you may not have any concrete stop in mind, you're just trying to tentatively evaluate options. Google Map's interface makes this task very hard. It also sucks when you're trying to orient yourself - i.e. understand what the map shows in relation to where you stand. In particular, the way it goes out of its way to hide street names is very annoying.
The latter two use cases are exactly what a map is supposed to be for. Hence, Google Maps suck at being a map.
Exactly! Using GPS etc to navigate actively inhibits your ability to learn to navigate yourself. A friend of mine got a car with satnav built in years ago. After living in the same city for more than a decade he still can't get around without it.
Exactly, I feel the title should be more "Redefining what Google Maps® can be with new information". And as you noted, this app is not really a map.
Regardless of the semantic shift that there is probably no way to stop now, I'm hoping real maps will still be around, they are the best tool to give you spacial awareness at different scales.
This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor.
It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip.
At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.
https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/