Many jobs used to involve physical labour, huge number of us now are desk jockeys. Decades of prioritising motorists and increasingly large vehicles over active transport mean walking, cycling are a fraction of what they used to be [0].

[0] e.g. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2010.... , https://la.streetsblog.org/2023/04/17/exactly-how-much-less-...

A Skarper system [0] that drives through an adapted brake rotor sounds [1] like it is the way to go if really want [2] a well thought close to non-permanent conversion solution.

[0] https://skarper.com/

[1] https://road.cc/ebiketips/review_v2/skarper-ebike-drive-syst... .

[2] Compared to other conversion options they are currently expensive https://road.cc/ebiketips/content/advice/buyers-guide/best-e...

There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that

"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."

Is wrong.

Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.

At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".

Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.

(edited to fix italics)

Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.

How does the ability to successfully reproduce confer expertise in protecting children from perils of the 21st century, specifically internet porn, hate speech, cyber bullying, addictive platform design, etc?

> If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is > the level at which to solve it.

Society creates the greater environment that kids grow up in. And we all then pay for the problems when they occur because of those sh*tty environments. Pushing fixing it all onto parents is like trying to get kids to be healthy when they are driven everywhere, surrounded by fast food joints and bombarded with junk food adverts. Claiming that it would be different with a little more public service information and tools on top ... well the obesity rates would beg to differ.

Ultimately, society creates the greater environment and lives with consequences, as such society cannot not be involved in any meaningful attempt to deliver improvements.

In the linked paper the researchers state "AI solutions must match the original program’s output exactly on end-to-end tests, including held-out tests. " And a bit further on "The AI agent is given execute-only access to the original program and a set of visible test cases, but does not have access to the original source code. "

At a guess, their agents are not going off into the weeds (like mine do occasionally) is because they have both access to a reference runtime implementation to use as a definitive end to end test to guide development. And also a relatively large token budget to run enough characterisation tests to allow them to home in on solutions.

On macOS it is still comes up short on a lot of the GUI functionality. Stuff like window management, decoration, focus, undo/redo, finder tree type views etc. What Apple have implemented seems okay to me for iPad, iOS etc, but is not up to the standards users' expect for non-trivial native desktop applications.

With enough determination most of the omissions on macOS can be worked around by breaking the SwiftUI encapsulation and delving into AppKit or jarringly inelegant solutions. All of which are somewhat liable to ended up binned when/if Apple pull their fingers out. I had higher expectations of Apple, and overall, it's easy to understand why it does not have a stellar reputation.

As to why it's a bit rubbish on macOS; SwiftUI is largely a mapping to UIKit, AppKit etc primitives. At a guess Apple wants to reduce that number and are seeking to minimise investment in moribund technology.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035685

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035636

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Otherwise time boxing is both going to help stop entities from wandering off into the weeds. And also communicate expectations from the commissioner about the expected effort levels and output quality requirements.

Empirically in human world, get very different results when an employee, particularly a junior, is asked to spend 1/2 a day on a work package, a week or are left completely to their own devices.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946688

Points: 31

# Comments: 9

Getting a handle on how nations are doing for jet powered drone is a bit tricky because of limited data available for what is primarily a military application. But, if we take model aircraft applications as proxy, then my understanding is that the Chinese company Swiwin (est. 2013) is already undercutting everyone else.

Small study

"the intervention period lasted only 5 weeks and that the observed increase in RBCV is comparable to that reported after a similar duration of altitude exposure or exercise training. "

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730423

Points: 1

# Comments: 1