I love the note regarding the rearview mirror being an actual, you know, mirror.
A friend was teasing me the other day for using my mirrors while I backed up, ignoring the various screens and camera feeds dotting the dash. I reminded him that photons impinging my eyes reflected off the material world at the diffraction limit of the visible spectrum remain much higher fidelity than some shitty parts-bin screens.
Plus those rearview screens are always horribly bright. You know what has infinite levels of dynamic brightness? Light bouncing off a planar reflector.
So much of modern cars is cost savings and poor design decisions dressed up in the name of modern - but ultimately resulting in UX worse than an early 2000s Honda.
And I totally agree, but I still use mirrors because when I need to pass and park next to a pillar (my garage has a few) I can never tell how far I actually am from it through the cameras, whereas the mirror will tell me without lag and with absolute precision whether I'm about to scrape my car or not. Not to mention that it's very difficult to tell depth from cameras, which is what I need the most when the back axle has passed the pillar and I should start turning in very tight spaces.
Cameras are not a suitable replacement for rear-vision mirrors for the same reason that screens are not a suitable replacement. It’s even addressed in TFA: focal length.
>>> But more importantly, current screen technology requires the driver to focus on the surface of the screen itself, which is mere feet away from their eyes. This is a large change in focal distance from looking at the road ahead.
If you’re over the age of 40 or so, it takes time, a few hundred milliseconds at least, to refocus your gaze distance. A screen is near. When driving, you’re looking far. A mirror is something to glance at.
I test-drove a Polestar with a screen for a rear-vision mirror (and no actual rear window) and it was completely undrivable for me. It takes longer for my eyes to refocus on the near distance than I feel comfortable removing my gaze from the road ahead. I turned around after 10 minutes and returned it to the lot.
Also, this conversation is about backing up and parking (read what I said). When backing up you are mostly looking backwards only, so the focal length adjustment point is moot. Even if you have to switch to looking forwards, this is at low speeds / standing still, so it doesn't make a difference.
I'll restate my point with emphasis because you seem to not have read it: Cameras are infinitely more useful for backing up and parking.
People that only use their rear view cameras scare me. Move your head, be aware of your environment and the people (kids) around you. And use your cameras (again, kids).
Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop and very often see people just using their side mirrors (no rear cam, not looking back) ... scary.
Modern cameras give a way better view of what's behind and to the side of the car than you can ever achieve through mirrors. There's really no comparison. Yes, if you're comparing to older, inferior camera systems mirrors might be better, but not the modern ones.
I say this as someone who learned to drive and drove for a long time with no cameras. People saying this are just usually just used to mirrors and never bothered to take the time to learn to switch to the cameras for backwards maneuvering, or their cars just are not equiped with the latest tech.
And the camera's have been better for over a decade at thing point. I have to imagine people are just willfully antagonistic to them for some reason. How in god's name are you going to see a kid directly behind you, below your trunk height, with your mirrors?
I agree about many screens being commonly too bright, but not really about anything else. My partner's previous company car had a back-up camera with a fine brightness and the current one has none at all. I feel blind backing out of parking spots in this one: such cameras physically sit in spots where it can see things that a driver can never see, from approaching cars to either side (when your view is blocked) to a child walking by just as I am ready to start backing out
I don't remember having this issue in the past (we didn't have cameras in driving school), not sure why. My current approach is to stretch and strain a bunch more, start rolling verry slowly when I think the coast is clear and double check that nothing reveals itself, and then just hope for the best. If someone fell back there while I wasn't yet watching, it's simply tough luck I guess? Don't see a physically other option than, ehh, I dunno, adding a camera with a corresponding screen! ;)
> photons impinging my eyes reflected off the material world at the diffraction limit of the visible spectrum remain much higher fidelity than some shitty parts-bin screens
Consider that the camera can be ~2 meters closer than you are to the target, and/or have more pixels than you can see but that the alert system still uses, so I don't know about this diffraction limit fancy wording trying to put yourself above machines which can, in general, do so many things humans cannot
It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with “engineer” in their title who've never had to draw a free body diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.
I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program. It’s pretty funny because while studying material properties back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some students preferred branching out to hardware.
That’s great, unfortunately it is quite rare for CS undergrad programs in the US to require the basic engineering and science classes the other engineering/science majors require.
No, it isn’t. Nobel Prizes are generally awarded to those who are either working toward a peaceful resolution to a specific cause or have achieved something relevant to advancing that cause. In the first case, the prize is often given as a symbolic gesture of support for whatever the winner is trying to accomplish, as long as it aligns with the values of the Nobel Committee — as in the case of María Corina Machado.
Overall, she didn’t achieve anything concrete, but she was receiving support in her fight against Maduro. She is a somewhat far-right, controversial figure who also endorses far-right movements worldwide, including in the U.S., Israel, and Europe.
She has also been quite vocal recently in favor of a military invasion of Venezuela and has explicitly endorsed a series of failed neoliberal economic policies as remedies for the country’s economic problems — especially nowadays, when both the right and the left are distancing themselves from neoliberalism across much of the Western world. Her videos in which she says she would sell everything in Venezuela to foreigners are particularly telling — as if doing so would suddenly attract people genuinely interested in developing Venezuela’s economy from the ground up, instead of a wave of rent-seeking foreign investors.
The fact that she is unwilling to work alongside other Latin American leftist leaders who oppose Maduro further shows how deeply she embraces far-right identity politics — especially compared with someone like Zelensky, who is open to working with anyone willing to help him fight against Russia.
She is, above all, a political force that tends to escalate conflict, believing she will prevail through chaos. Let’s not forget that many of her far-right allies have been involved in several coup attempts in Venezuela’s recent history — dating back to the early 2000s — and that they lack any coherent plan for real economic development to help the country recover from the catastrophe it faces under Maduro.
These are the main reasons her winning the Nobel Prize is so problematic and motivated the strong reaction from the Norwegian Peace Council. My advice is not to expect anything from Venezuela’s far right. They are at least as problematic — if not more — than Maduro.
My mistake was confusing this with the real Nobel Committee (or whatever they call themselves) which makes this story "Group B does not agree with the decision of Group A"
She did that because she is hoping he will invade and throw Maduro out of power. I dislike Trump greatly, but given the situation of her country, I can understand why she would want that.
It’s crude, but you can overcome the degraded quality imparted by gpu accelerated encoding by specifying a higher video bitrate.
Find a complex short scene in your cpu encoded video, extract it, ffprobe it to get average video bitrate, and take the same clip in raw and try gpu accelerated encoding at +20% bitrate. From there, iterate.
For a friend’s use-case that I helped with, +30% video bitrate bump overcame the degraded vquality.
Edit: strangely enough, if memory serves, after the correcting +30% was applied the actual ffprobe bitrates between the videos were very similar, maybe a 10% or less difference. Someone smarter than me can work that logic out.
AnandTech was one of the websites that helped me as a child. I found it around 2002, and the clear-headed manner in which it discussed chip fabrication, function, lithography and the associated engineering and scientific foundations of them - as well as general concepts of bios, motherboard, chipsets, slots, bandwidth etc - helped foster a curiosity and familiarity with electronic hardware that has served me well for my whole life.
It helped me dream larger than my surroundings; which in turn helped me get out of an unstable home, poverty, and a dead-end town. I was sad when [H]ardOCP went down, but this hits different.
On desktop, FF supports the best vertical nested tab tree I have seen. What I’ve seen on chrome is laughably amateurish with huge chunks of wasted space due to unmodifiable(?) padding elements
To get it that way takes a bit of code in the advanced options, and tinkering with a user definition file in FF to remove the top tab bar, but it's worth it.
The other killer feature of FF for me is the ability to containerize domains and control how cross-domain containerization occurs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-wi...). My interactions with google (for example) never leak out of my google container, so my search queries or browsing aren't explicitly linked to my google account, because I do that outside my google container. Want to watch a video on yt without it tanking your recommendations? Do it outside the google container.
Of course there are a lot of other ways for google to infer it's "me", so I don't know if this is pure security theater or it actually hinders them building my profile. Either way, it's nice to be able to explicitly determine when and where my google profile is built as I traverse the web.
I like Tab Center Reborn, then use userChrome.css to hide the native tabs.
I also set the preference browser.compactmode.show=true to enable the "compact density" in the customize toolbar section. Good use of screen real estate with these changes.
Tree style tabs is more stable and performant but also has a few nice addons (TST Colored Tabs being one of my favs). Sideberry can be infinitely customized but I found it to be extremely slow with 100+ tabs across multiple windows.
5233 Sidebery tabs here, in a single window/profile. Multiple Sidebery "panels". I am simultaneously running a few other Firefox instances with their own Sidebery extensions and at least hundreds of tabs each.
I will not defend this use model to any skeptics, but FWIW I have no performance issues!
Sidebery lets you set colors on tabs explicitly, or by pattern. I use this sparingly but it's very useful when I do.
You shouldn’t approach it from such a detached, cynical angle. The import is as if the OSI embedded senior agents in the postal system during the labor unrest in the US during the 1910s-20s, and the FBI in Ma Bell during the second red scare in the 40s-50s.
The possibility for gatekeeping primary modes of information exchange is quite real, and quite worrying.
Neither of those hypotheticals seem that far-fetched. Maybe that's just the cynical side of me talking,
> The possibility for gatekeeping primary modes of information exchange is quite real, and quite worrying.
It's distressing today. The US intercepts an insane amount of communiqué - we knew about India's involvement in the Canadian Sikhist assassination before it happened. American-made electronics leak insurgent battle plans, tattle on domestic terrorists, enable modem-level attacks and who knows what else. The only reason you and I aren't threatened by it is the decorum required to operate an above-ground surveillance network.
No US company, especially at scale, can promise protection against the state for it's users. There's precious little anyone can do about it, nobody is selling an "alternative product" without state oversight.
Exciting times! Any physicist here aware of how these two papers would impact the applicability or validity of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND)?
background: my lay understanding of MOND is that it modifies the gravitational interaction parameter over cosmological distances. the force exerted on objects due to gravity is currently accepted to scale with distance in a certain manner (ex. 1/distance^2) while MOND postulates a different scaling relation (ex. 1/distance^3). Those are just examples, not actual values. The currently accepted gravitational interaction force scaling is what gives rise for the need for dark matter, and the corresponding lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) theory. Of course, we have not been able to observe dark matter, which is a problem for a theory. That is what has given rise to MOND, amongst other things. There are prominent, esteemed physicists who have recognized many issues with LCDM, some of which are addressed by MOND (https://astro.uni-bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_SciLogs.html)
previous HN posts with interesting discussions / links re: MOND
It's of no relevance to MOND, at least none that I can see.
MOND gives a different scaling relation, and is therefore contradicting general relativity. Its goal is to explain the effects we associate with dark matter, without the need for dark matter.
General relativity is (we are pretty sure) inconsistent with quantum field theory. String theory tries to fix the issue by replacing the particles in field theory with strings. Oppenheim is trying to fix it by putting general relativity as a classical phenomenon that lives "outside" of quantum field theory.
They're trying to solve different problems. And, Oppenheim's classical gravity picture could be used just as well with MOND instead of standard general relativity, if that's what you wanted.
MOND is getting less popular every year as evidence for dark matter piles up. The Bullet Cluster is a particular instance where we can actually "see" the dark matter flying around, in a way MOND couldn't hope to explain. LIGO has also given us a lot of confidence we have the right theory of gravity, at least up to the quantum scale.
> The Bullet Cluster is a particular instance where we can actually "see" the dark matter flying around, in a way MOND couldn't hope to explain
This is not correct. In fact, LCDM can't even explain the Bullet Cluster [1]. The evidence is not so favourable to LCDM over MOND [2] when taken as a whole.
More recent observations on wide binary stars disfavour MOND more strongly, but the classic reasons you cite are not valid reasons.
That article linked does not completely rule out MOND. It is a great article, but it even mentions several difficulties that complicate their observations.
so i put on my scientist hat and started to write a reply going through the mechanics of beating water's heat capacity, first pointing out that what you want for these types of systems is likely high volumetric heat capacity rather than gravimetric. then i went on to discuss the density of room temp ionic liquids (RTILs), only to find myself digging into their heat capacity numbers and man, you're right! I forgot how well water stores heat compared to other liquids. RTILs vol. heat capacity has trouble breaking 2 J/cm3-K![1]
A friend was teasing me the other day for using my mirrors while I backed up, ignoring the various screens and camera feeds dotting the dash. I reminded him that photons impinging my eyes reflected off the material world at the diffraction limit of the visible spectrum remain much higher fidelity than some shitty parts-bin screens.
Plus those rearview screens are always horribly bright. You know what has infinite levels of dynamic brightness? Light bouncing off a planar reflector.
So much of modern cars is cost savings and poor design decisions dressed up in the name of modern - but ultimately resulting in UX worse than an early 2000s Honda.
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