The distinctions drawn here are particularly interesting in China.
Somewhere like Shanghai, you'll see ~70% of traffic in "bike" lanes are what appear to be electric mopeds.
But if you look closer, all of these mopeds technically have tiny attachment points for pedals. Government regulations allowed e-bikes to be driven unlicensed (but with a special green license plate, unlike the US!) and wherever bicycles are allowed. At the same time, the delivery industry and commuters wanted something stable, capable of carrying cargo/passengers. So the form factor adopted was that of mopeds, while vestigial pedal attachments were provided in order to pass as "e-bikes" under the regulatory criteria. Example. [0]
In practice, using pedals on these made for a clunky experience so they were not usually attached at all. The other main regulatory criterion was that these have to be limited to <= 25 km/h, unlike true mopeds/motorcycles. In practice, these speed limiters were also removed, setting up a cat-and-mouse game between police and riders.
The rule requiring the vestigial pedals was finally removed a few months ago, meaning that the ontology of "e-bikes" is pretty different in China now. [1] (Pedal-assist traditional bike frames also exist, but they share space with the larger mopeds in bike lanes and bike parking. True electric mopeds and motorcycles also exist, but they are effectively regulated out of existence in big cities.)
At the end of the day, top speeds are more determinant of whether different modes of transportation can coexist than pedals or form factor.
I wish there were a way to “archive” cards and passes in the Wallet app. I’d be much more likely to pass-ify my life if that were the case.
The Wallet app is just too important and used frequently in time sensitive actions to clutter with cards/passes that I use once every few months. That is, when I’m about to tap to pay, I don’t want to infrequently used cards to clutter my payment experience. Likewise, when I’m about to board a flight, I don’t want random loyalty cards to clutter the interface.
At the same time, I would really like to keep these occasional cards and passes in Wallet, just not on the main screen. It definitely beats hanging onto these physically, especially because they are in fact infrequently used so I would never carry them around.
It should be a similar distinction to Apple’s Home Screen vs App Library for long-term archival.
I use my password manager for those. The only card I have in my Apple wallet is my grocery card. Otherwise, I go to my password manager and pull up the entry and the attached images. Some, I have just a barcode png. Others I have screenshots of the card from an app/website. This has been a really good balance for me.
As an aside, I tried to use base64 for the images so everything was in text, but decoding with a shortcut was annoying enough I went with the image attachment.
It’s possible to make a pass with location info so that it pops up on your Home Screen when you’re nearby a relevant location (e.g. a store, library, train station, etc). Doesn’t seem to be supported by this tool, though.
I feel like street-view data is surprisingly underused for geospatial intelligence.
With current-gen multimodal LLMs, you could very easily query and plot things like "broken windows," "houses with front-yard fences," "double-parked cars," "faded lane markers," etc. that are difficult to generally derive from other sources.
For any reasonably-sized area, I'd guess the largest bottleneck is actually the Maps API cost vs the LLM inference. And ideally we'd have better GIS products for doing this sort of analysis smoothly.
Yes. I work at a company that is using street view to identify high-rise apartments with dangerous cladding for the UK gov. Also could use it for grouping nearby properties which were clearly built together and share features. Helps spread known information about buildings. You can also get the models to predict age and sometimes even things like double-glazing.
I made this - https://london publicinsights.uk as well as operate a public records aggregator that has indexed, amongst other things, planning applications. I wonder if it could be of use?
Yeah I noticed that while refreshing because the same one came up again. Seems to go against the whole spirit of the “doesn’t exist” theme if it’s not auto generated IMO.
The ones that show when you first load are indeed pre-generated[0], but you can 'Try your own' which does generate a new AI from your name prompt, although when I tried I was getting gateway timeouts likely from the extreme HN-attributed load.
Moving to a subscription fee model is dangerous for a service that's reached saturation point. They can no longer project infinite growth in value extracted from eyeballs going into the future, and are stuck with whatever they choose to charge (along with some limited increases in fees. Building a better service cannot be fully leveraged into higher fees, since there's only so much YoY increase in costs users will stomach.)
On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.
Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.
This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.
There is in fact significant doubt among climatologists as to the veracity of this record.
While the 1913 hot spell was certainly significant, all recorded weather information at the time from surrounding locations, in combination with the dynamics of local microclimates, imply that the 134 degree reading was "essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective." [1]
Observer error stands to be the most plausible explanation, implying that the the recent 130 degree reading in Death Valley may actually become the location's, and the world's, hottest verified temperature.[2]
As far as I know that number, 134F, is not considered accurate. The trusted number is just over 129F (129.2F) where Death Valley and Kuwait City are recently tied. This is only the hottest place where people live though.
The actual hottest place is the Danakil Depression of Ethiopia. The air is toxic around the hot springs due to high sulfur content and so almost nothing lives there except pools of exotic bacteria.
The usual problem with this pedagogy is that kids get confused when presented with improper fractions (eg. 11/8), and so on. I guess this is probably still a good intuition to start with, but how did you tackle those extensions later on?
I don't recall that coming up as an issue for him. I don't see why that would be a problem. You can just explain that 8/8 is one whole, leaving 3/8. I don't see why that would be hard to demonstrate.
"These are two pies. Let me cut them into eight pieces each. Let's count to eleven pieces. That's one whole pie plus 3 parts of the second pie, so it's the same as 1 3/8."
Three additional pizza slices automatically appear in my mind when you mention this. I found it more difficult to explain why the multiplication of two negative numbers gives a positive one.
Hm, that's a good one, I'm struggling to explain it to myself now!
My first thought is area, if you imagine four quadrants, draw a rectangle with side lengths positive from the origin, it's top right and multiplying the lengths gives you the area. If you instead take both sides negative then it's bottom left, but the area is the same.
However.. it's also the same if only one side extends negatively, so this is not at all satisfying.
(If that's made it even more confusing, the misleading error there is that side lengths are multiplied to give area, not positions on an axis relative to origin - the rectangle centred at the origin also has the same area.)
It sometimes gets easier if you first define a negative number as an "opposite positive." You can then engage in a discussion of what the opposite of an opposite is. Ultimately though, finding multiple approaches for the teaching the same concept is going to serve you better than locking in one specific analogy.
There's no one right way to teach math (or anything, really) because teaching is a dynamic relationship between teacher and student that is highly contextual and subjective. That, I think, is one of the underlying issues with standardization in schools. Something that works for 80% of kids will unfortunately fail that remaining 20%.
First, accept that a negative is the inverse, or opposite of something.
We can intuitively understand that multiplying slices by a negative inverts them - turns them from slices given into slices taken away. (Distribute the multiplication into addition if necessary to drive the point home.)
So it follows that multiplying negative slices by a negative inverts them again, turning them back into slices given.
It’s not a convenient visual, but if a negative slice represents the “taking away” of a slice, then a negative negative takes away the “taking away.”
I'm a little concerned about the new Safari interface [0], which very smoothly integrates the tab/address bar with page content. For example, the background color of the page flows behind the open tabs such that it looks like one unified interface, rather than browserchrome || pagecontent.
This is all great to experience as web apps increasingly take over the functions of native apps. It does help them feel more like first-class citizens, rather than plain documents pulled up through a program.
But it easily brings up new potential abuses by phishing sites, spammy notifications, and other bad actors. The new design seems to start breaking down the browser UI's Line of Death [1], at least in perception.
> I'm a little concerned about the new Safari interface
Having used it for a few hours, I'm hoping someone sees sense and gives this a good UX going over before release because it's currently unpleasant to use. The motion at the top with the tabs swiffing[1] about is distracting; some sites colour the whole top which is another huge motion flash; and finding the address bar requires scanning because it's not in a fixed position.
There's also an optical effect where switching between a site that's coloured the top and one that hasn't makes it look like the whole browser is jumping up at down due to the contrast boundary at the top of the page. All of this is going to make motion sensitive people even more unhappy.
It is a risky move to mess with people's browser experience. It does look good though, I use Chrome and won't be changing for that but it does show thoughtful changes, perhaps even practical!
I am currently hating the mobile Safari changes, alas. I love the idea of moving the address bar to the bottom because it's just easier to get to but ... you tap on it and it jumps to the top where it used to be. Then when you've got to a page, the address is right on top of the Home Bar which, I thought, you were supposed to avoid placing clickable items because the damn Home Bar gets in the way.
Also when you click the bottom address bar, it removes the page content in favour of your favourites. Really stupid if you're trying to go to/search something that you've seen in the page content.
Also, also, if you swipe the bottom address bar to change tabs - a really nice feature! - it disappears after a second or two (sometimes before the content has fully loaded) which means you then have to tap in a different place for it to come back.
The address bar is on top on iPadOS. I am traveling right now, so I did not put the iOS beta on my phone.
A pain point for me is having things different on my iPhone and iPad: side for hardware volume controls, different address bar location on iOS vs. iPadOS, etc. I find a slight amount of cognitive dissonance when switching devices.
Somewhere like Shanghai, you'll see ~70% of traffic in "bike" lanes are what appear to be electric mopeds.
But if you look closer, all of these mopeds technically have tiny attachment points for pedals. Government regulations allowed e-bikes to be driven unlicensed (but with a special green license plate, unlike the US!) and wherever bicycles are allowed. At the same time, the delivery industry and commuters wanted something stable, capable of carrying cargo/passengers. So the form factor adopted was that of mopeds, while vestigial pedal attachments were provided in order to pass as "e-bikes" under the regulatory criteria. Example. [0]
In practice, using pedals on these made for a clunky experience so they were not usually attached at all. The other main regulatory criterion was that these have to be limited to <= 25 km/h, unlike true mopeds/motorcycles. In practice, these speed limiters were also removed, setting up a cat-and-mouse game between police and riders.
The rule requiring the vestigial pedals was finally removed a few months ago, meaning that the ontology of "e-bikes" is pretty different in China now. [1] (Pedal-assist traditional bike frames also exist, but they share space with the larger mopeds in bike lanes and bike parking. True electric mopeds and motorcycles also exist, but they are effectively regulated out of existence in big cities.)
At the end of the day, top speeds are more determinant of whether different modes of transportation can coexist than pedals or form factor.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r4HAUJDQT1w [1] https://chinamotorworld.com/chinese-e-bike-new-standard/
reply