Curious Canid

If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.

The claim is that the remote operators do not actually drive the cars. However, they do routinely “assist” the system, not just step in when there’s an emergency.

I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern “tech” seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.

This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren’t. They depend on remote “navigators” to make many of their most critical decisions. Those “navigators” may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.

When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.

It’s also worth noting that the human “navigators” are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.

This may be the least important area in which China is displacing the US.

I think most people from my culture (midwest American) find it uncomfortable to get help from anyone. It seems vaguely embarrassing, even when it’s from friends or family. It’s much easier to give than to receive.

I’ve been on both ends of that pretty regularly and I have been working on learning to accept help gratefully as well as giving it. It is surprisingly difficult.

Trump always makes up whatever story he thinks will do him the most good at that moment. That is always the case. Occasionally what he makes up has elements of things he vaguely remembers hearing, which he may or may not have understood. That is why there are sometimes elements of truth in what he says. Just understand that they are entirely accidental.

I think this is good advice. The trick is to find something you’re interested in that involves other people. Given that you like to play and sing, look for other musicians to play with. Show up for open mike nights. Join a band.

…and the horse he road in on.

I’ve seen kites that looked more convincing. There are now some real, functional flying cars, although they are still far too expensive to be practical. This is not one of them.

I despise Meta, and always have, but the company I hate most is… …the entire health insurance industry. UnitedHealth is the worst, but there isn’t one among them that isn’t ruining lives and killing people on a surprisingly large scale every single day.

It is probably worth noting that I am removing the DRM so I can read them on devices that do not have Kindle apps.

Nothing is certain, but it looks like you will still be able to download books into local memory so you can read them. As long as the apps still work that way, it will be possible to access the book files.

You do need a tool that can remove the DRM from the books files the Kindle uses. DeDRM used to do this nicely, but it has not been updated to handle the most recent version of Kindle DRM. It will not works on any books published since early 2024.

There are commercial options that can remove even the latest DRM from Kindle books. I use Epubor Ultimate. It was the first to handle the most recent Kindle DRM, but I’m sure there are others by now.

Not complete, but fairly close. Any background talking makes it difficult.

Blazing Saddles (1974) The Yakuza (1974) Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

All three movies are exceptional in their own right and all three broke a lot of new ground by blending cultural and genre conventions in new ways.

Television Announcer: And now, the penguin on top of your television set will explode. {BOOOM!} Watcher: How’d he know that? Television Announcer: It was an inspired guess.

The multiple layers of cognitive dissonance are wonderful.

Well, they have almost always circumvented them instead, but that impacts the bottom line too.

I have never been without friends. There have been a few times when I didn’t have any that were close by, but I kept in touch. There is one person who’s been a close friend for 45 years now.

I have noticed that it’s gotten much harder to find friends over the last few decades. Our society has changed in ways that make it harder to meet people and harder to get to know them. Online can be a good start but it’s very difficult to progress from that.

Putting yourself in situations where you meet and interact with people, in person, definitely helps, but that’s not easy for introverts like me.

I switched from Google Authenticator to Aegis and have had no problems.

A lot of people don’t seem to get that social media services are almost entirely about their userbases, not their companies. Facebook and Meta are unbelievably terrible, but that is where most of the people you know can be found. Switching to something else is easy, but pointless, if your reason for being there is the people.

I have slowly convinced friends and family to begin using MeWe, but only a small number. And most of them still primarily use Facebook. At least recent events are pushing a few more away from it.