2-3 years ago, I was thinking something similar along the lines of "yeah, why doesn't Apple just stick with computers/phones/peripherals/software." But if anything's become clear in the last few years in the EV market are issues with: reliability, software/firmware, usability, aesthetics, build-quality, and high startup capital requirements. Apple is a perennial expert UX/design/durability/usability. Sure there's been a few boondoggles over slight decreases in QA and quality (butterfly keyboards)--but at the end of the day, most of us still love at least some of their products because they still, usually "just work". Apple is also quite good (whether or not you like it) at building walled gardens. Imagine if Apple released a rock-solid car and an absolutely kick-ass charging network that rivals Tesla's? There's be demand. The biggest, most-obvious reason why Apple could succeed at building a car is that they have massive amounts of cash. The #1 reason these fly-by-night EV startups fail is because they can't handle 5-10 years of negative margins coupled with massive capital costs. Apple could burn billions before their EV division becomes profitable and not even blink.
I wonder if Apple has been secretly acquiring land or negotiating leases for a charging network. That would be a significant chunk of infrastructure to add to their services segment. Apple One -> Now includes charging your vehicle at no additional cost.
Seems absurd frankly. How would they even approach this task? Something like this is either organic, gradual, and before you are famous or it is stealth and as wide as possible.
I don’t see them pulling something like this off without everyone noticing.
"No one knew what the iPod was for either" is a sort of Godwin-for-Apple-speculation. Once you cross the Rubicon where that's invoked, with no other argument provided, it's been signalled it's rational to connect any dot.
But yeah, it's novel that Tim Cook's Apple would lean into something Wall Street would abhor - a low-margin capital-intensive business - for something that sounds out of date (L2 in 2028, n.b. Mercedes is at L3 on highways, even assumes liability. Elon would tell you Tesla is L3, YMMV)
Apple already is a major investor and builder of renewable energy farms around the world. They won’t even have to buy the energy, they will already have it.
When it comes to core UX, the current-gen iPhones and iPads are less usable than Androids. For one thing, this whole idea of swiping from beyond the edge of the screen, in many places without even a visible indicator that it's an available gesture, to do the most basic stuff like opening Home, is a severe regression compared to simple buttons; and it's even worse because some of the swipe gestures do different things depending on how far you swipe. To be fair, Android also introduced this misfeature, but at least you get a checkbox to restore the old behavior.
I agree with the sentiment--and with most of your comment--except the assertion that "I don't think it's possible to beat this stack".
I have something similar: Kotlin on the server-side with my SQL DSL generated by jOOQ and Flyway running my schema migrations. I don't have any experience with LINQ--but it looks to be of a similar idea to jOOQ such that you get an autogenerated, injection-safe, type-safe, compile-time-checked SQL DSL.
If you like LINQ, you'd probably really like jOOQ. It's uber-powerful and the only queries that I've not been able to completely write in jOOQ are geo-spatial queries--and even for them, I can use string SQL for just the one where-clause predicate where I need to go off-the-rails--the rest of the query still being standard jOOQ. The thing I like most about it, is that the queries that I write in the DSL are sooo close-to-the-metal of pure SQL--I'm not even context-switching between SQL and jOOQ really. Check it out!
Also have to sing praise for Kotlin, flyway, and some type-safe db framework.
I’ve recently been migrating projects from jOOQ to SQLDelight. While not as feature complete, being able to write queries in sql and then generate type safe code has been amazing. My biggest issue with jOOQ has been joins where you lose some null safety and general issues with the generated POJO (which admittedly has improved over time). With SQLDelight, it has felt like the database just fades away when writing Kotlin.
I think parent meant “stack” for every similarly high level, statically typed language. I can vouch for Spring (Data) with JPA. The criteria api is also very great.
What's a "large sum"? If you compare how relatively spoiled we software engineers are to other (even white collar) careers, we're doing pretty darn well. Even if you're making super-low-end in the US at like $80k, many people in other careers would never dream to pull that much. Many of us are comfortably pulling $120k-$170k and that's unfathomable to many people. In everywhere but (maybe) the most expensive city centers in America, that's a very, very good life.
I'm assuming "large sums of money" here means (at least) $250k+. I guess I start to ask "how much is enough"?
100% agreed. $350k salaries for people that have basically built and maintained the modern-day Library of Alexandria is a pittance. These people deserve it.
Try the (free, or premium) tabnine plugin. It uses a ML model to analyze your codebase for patterns and suggest better-and-better autocompletion over time as your project grows--it works really seamlessly with the IntelliJ autocomplete--so, it only adjusts the suggestion list when there isn't a straightforward suggestion from IntelliJ's already.
Man, that is a depressing link. (Thanks for posting it, though.)
I still can't resist the occasional sushi outing, but I've mostly stepped away from eating fish otherwise, largely because of pollution concerns like these.
I do wonder if there's room for some notion of "ultra-clean sushi." What if a restaurant went fully vertically integrated, farming its own fish in its own aquariums? Then fish could be pulled out and sliced up as needed, and you'd know they were pollutant-free.
For sushi novergian are buildling "in ocean" fish farm that are ridiculously big to tackle problems with fishing and existing fish farms (polution, feed, sea lice etc...)
Another good thing is implementing fish directly in aquaponic farms, where you use water from fish tank as fertilizer in the water loop of you hyroponics. Might work with salmon.... but not on huge scale to meet current demand.
A confounding view here though is that even though seafood contains pollutants, the benefit of high omega-3 content in some species outweighs the negative effects of the pollutants. The key is find the combo of:
- high omega-3-to-omega-6 fat ratio in the fish
- short-lived fish (low bioaccumulation)
That basically leaves you with wild salmon, (some) farmed salmon, and small/oily fishes (like sardines and some species of mackerel).
So, yeah, farmed fish are the only ones making it on the list for pregnant woman and young children. So those are what I limit myself to too. No wild catches.
Nope, precisely because they can be controlled for heavy metal intake and the like. Surprised me too.
Make sure to buy from a traceable certified farm. There ate still farms that feed their fish trash and waste, they are no longer allowed to be imported where I live. Source: https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/
> Nope, precisely because they can be controlled for heavy metal intake and the like. Surprised me too.
Pretty sure Chilean salmon, the only one I can get, is awful for you and also bad for the ecosystem. I hear bad things about some Norwegian salmon too (whose main branch apparently "owns" Chilean salmon farms).
> Make sure to buy from a traceable certified farm
Depends on which part of the world you live. Over here it's Chilean salmon. Apparently, pretty bad.
edit: wait, your link recommends wild caught salmon from Alaska, and considers farmed Atlantic salmon as dodgy! From the website you linked to:
> "Atlantic salmon sustainability varies. Avoid wild Atlantic salmon as they are struggling in the wild and numbers are dangerously low. Most of what’s in the market is farmed. There are environmental concerns relating to the farming of salmon. Check labels for how and where it was produced and look out for eco-labels [...]"
"There are environmental concerns relating to the farming of salmon"
What I heard is that Chilean salmon is pumped full of antibiotics.
Agree with this incremental step from a political perspective as an easy sell / quick win. But, it's imperative that this be understood as an incremental step. The hazard here is equating "natural" with "safe" and "synthetic" with "unsafe".
Eventually, this mindset will have to be dropped because morphine, cocaine, and cyanide are natural (heck, methamphetamines is found in trace amounts in some species of acacia). MDMA is synthetic but can be lethal in a single dose. LSD is semi-synthetic and one of the safest of the bunch--in fact, it's safer than the "natural" chemical feedstocks of its synthesization routes (LSA or ergot).
The shift will have to be to evaluating each molecule on its merits and risk profile. Sure, the whole "natural" argument feels warm-'n'-fuzzy for a lot of people--but sadly it's a poor metric for determining safety. After all, our brains' receptors can't tell whether a molecule originated from a plant or from a lab.
TL;DR: LSD, Cannabis, Psilocybin, Mescaline, DMT, (maybe) MDMA, and their various pro-drugs/analogues should be legal and regulated--regardless of their source. Morphine? I mean, the libertarian in me says "OK", but the more practical side says "probably not a great idea". In the end, none of this is rocket science--but the DEA, the broader US Government, and religion have turned it into a far more complicated thing than it needs to be.
One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource.
It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.)
TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.
I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space.
I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like:
1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures.
2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it.
3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization.
4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand.
5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that.
What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.
I was consulting at BP back in 2002 - even back then the health and safety environment inside their offices (I was all over the world with them) was the same as their oil rigs ... no trip hazards go unreported, always hold the handrails, always cover a hot drink, no calls in the car even with handsfree, very low speed-limits (with cameras) on-site etc - it's lived with me all my days and is very valuable safety advice TBH - none of it was theatre.
Also, every meeting would start with a safety announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same - drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is reduced
Actually having an adult discussion about safety tradeoffs at scale in this day and age of "but if it even saves one life" isn't possible. You simply can't go on record having acknowledged that tradeoffs even exist. Wherever you draw the cost:benefit line, no matter how generous, someone will try and make you look like the bad guy for not setting it a little more conservatively.
And that's why they talked about charger cables and not the oil spewing elephant in the room.
Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.
I worked at a Shell site a few years earlier. The stats on accident in the office were surprisingly high. But the #1 cause of lost time was accidents on the 20 minute drive to the plant each day, especially at twilight.
