I love my electric moped. Riding it around my European big-city, it just feels so comforting. Its so quiet, it doesn't scare ducks.
Scooters are taking over - Vienna is a green city that has had time to refine its transportation culture over a millenia. Parts of it were built for horses.
When I'm on my electric moped, I ride it like a horse. No need to over-do it and speed, or whatever, just pace along at a trot. There's a harmonic spot where the curves and corners of the city suddenly become super-fluid, and I even get all the green lights .. I'm pretty sure its because the physical geometry is designed for horses, and the electric moped drive train can approximate that.
Anyway, I can't wait until all the cars disappear. Europe is going to be even more beautiful.
Sort of seems like you didn't read your own quote:
"When e-scooter usage replaces average personal automobile travel, we nearly universally realize a net reduction in environmental impacts."
This is not the same as "actually worse for the environment than privately-owned ICE cars", and I'm guessing you've got a reason for your FUD?
I ride electric, too. Mine is charged by solar power. Sure, it took a lot of carbon to get my systems in place - but that's still 100x better than the daily emissions I'm no longer producing.
Actually this 'very different' aspect is a broken piece of modern development - its a bug, not a feature. There are methodologies which could have caught this entire stack issue and nobody would have lost their jobs - its just that the ethics of "developer who has control over everything else, or else" versus that of "proper operations and support engineering management (i.e. fire burns upwards..)" are out of skew.
We've been putting up with live fixes and direct "developer"-"production system" style methodologies for a long time; only ethically. It just happens to be 'accepted practice' to fold some gargantuan code-base into ones own environment, without a line-for-line proper review. "Its impossible", say the bean counters. "Who would pay for that?"
Technically there is no good reason for the easter egg to have occurred, had someone done a proper code-review, observed full test reports, respected code-coverage rules and principles, and so on.
The easter egg proved that someone wasn't doing their job.
Really? So some team should have inspected the entire Linux or FreeBSD kernel they were running one? Someone should have gone line-by-line through nginx? What about all the shell commands used? They should have had people go line by line through bash, cat and all the other tools needed in the background to setup and environment, all their libraries, all their dependencies?
That's not even getting to a project. Have you looked at a projects node_modules, or the maven/jar dependences pulled in? Even for small projects, it grows to a very non-trivial amount very quickly. Inspect ever single jar and dependency?
Should people write their own web servers instead? Their own frameworks? Their own operating systems?
At some point you have to trust someone enough to actually get your work done. If an OSS project breaks that trust (like we've seen with some node modules) you stop using them, but inspecting every last dependency is often impractical.
Well, you see ... I happen to think that you can use a lot of tools to cover your ass, and .. the fact that this one slipped in is as much a comment on the crud that is promulgating the wild and woolly Node/JS ecosystem as it is anything else. In point of fact, this kind of bollocks is why I eschew Node/JS and use other things [1], instead.
I do believe there are tools and ecosystems which make this sort of thing less likely. I can't recall a Linux easter egg .. nor a Golang one ..
>Should people write their own web servers instead? Their own frameworks? Their own operating systems?
One should at least, audit. As much as possible. It doesn't take much for a competent dev to 'grep -ir "easter egg $CODEBLASE' or, whatever .. not that its an expectation.
But yeah, if you have to have government-level 5-nines on all services, then I would say - fair play. The responsibility for an audit of such things should definitely have been in the requirements. I've seen such expectations for lesser projects, personally, where .. indeed .. code audit and ownership were tightly .. and properly .. managed.
[1] - I don't know for sure, but I think its harder to slip in such an easter egg on a production golang system. I guess I'll tune into that if/when it happens/has happened..
The physical conditions of the city are a manifestation of the destitution of its people. I've lived in many cities around the world that were utterly poor - yet, the people kept the streets clean. Things were orderly and maintained.
I firmly believe its a matter of the principles of the society. In a progressive, wealthy nation such as exist in Europe, recycling is a thing. People don't want to live in trash - they use it for energy, or recycle it as much as possible. Those who sort trash, promote a cleaner eco-system .. those who eschew the waste anyway, as 'responsible consumers', also help a great deal. These are cultural phenomenon you don't find widely promoted in various civic contingencies around the western world; corruption persists in environments which support its ill-gained prosperity.
In Europe, at least, we can find as many good as bad examples of this. I think its clear, the same cannot be said of other of the western nations ..
> I wonder if they could make a direct air-powered vibrator so that one doesn't have to torture their lips.
This fact is, imho, a motivating principle behind the genesis of various synthesizer designs and concepts. We synthesists wish we could do this stuff with our mouths, but the LFO's and the VCO's and the various and sundry other oscillating things represented in the electronic musical instrument world, can't blow a farts worth in comparison to a good trumpeter...
I wonder if there is anything unique about this that might make it interesting to use in a sampler or a synthesizer or something .. maybe some random noises that could be generated by stroking the core, or some such things ..
I doubt that storing digital representations of sounds on the cores and then stroking the cores would result in any modification of the data. You could run a wire with current next to the cores to induce bit flips, but what happens to the sound would depend on the format of the data stored on them.
You could put an inductor in or around the array, which could pick up magnetic impulses from currents used to program the cores. If you amplify the voltage coming out of the inductor and sample that, it could result in interesting random sounds.
This erosion of responsibility over time is some sort of back force from a wave of generational disillusionment.
We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.
We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.
Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.
Wow, the more time goes on, the more "Behold!! The Protong!" ( * ) seems to be an accurate assessment of things. He specifically targetted this artifact as an example of evidence that ancient civilizations were a lot more lucid than we thought.
Szukalski had some crack-pot ideas (Zermatism, Protong), but the idea that humans hadn't gotten quite the right perspective on ancient art is one of his most endearing claims.
The way I remember history taught in school is essentially "pre-history (first human settlements)" => giant leap to => "ancient high culture starting 3000 BCE", with a supplementary piece of info going like "well we don't really know yet what happened between those two". Back then it was clear to me, and so almost certainly to the researcher/historians of the time, that you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice.
In every civilisation there’s founding myths, Romulus and Remus from Rome, Yellow Emperor from China, Abraham from Israel, the Dreaming for indigenous Australians. I wonder how much those myths might actually be telling us about those otherwise undocumented times.
It makes me wonder what founding myths we live with today. I wont even bother to speculate at the risk of promoting flamebait but I imagine our myths are some of our most scared truths. Of course that's not to say they're conspiracies but just very convenient lies.
They’re not necessarily lies. I usually assume myths are faithful transcriptions of actual historical events, just stylized in order to aid in their retelling.
I think the Big Bang “theory” is one. It might be accurate, or maybe our universe is squirting out of a worm hole. Either way we believe our stories of the beginning to be true just as vigorously and reason about them just as much as the ancients did.
>you don't go from relatively simple cave paintings to insanely complex languages, forms of government and far-fetched empires just by snapping a finger twice
See, thats the fascinating thing about crackpot archeology/anthropology/sociology/etc. Eventually, its just a bunch of words - an ontology - with which to describe a complex system.
The idea that the root nature of the language is expressible in human-ideal objects, and that this ontology can persist across 10's of thousands of years of human activity (mostly destructive) as a cultural artifact with a message .. yes, this is difficult to conceive. Or, is it really?
"Far-fetched empires": literally what it means to consider what such an empire, were it in existence 65,000 years ago, would have looked like. Like, literally, its a far-fetched idea to look at a piece of dirt, and then paint a deep picture of what happened to it.
Without such imagination, speculation doesn't begin, and without speculation followed up by careful inspection, the relics would still just be out there, being ignored.
As far as I know, we have no reason to believe that the complexity of languages has changed over the last 200,000 years. The languages spoken by today's stone-age hunter-gatherers (there still are a few) are not systematically and fundamentally different from the languages spoken by more technologically advanced groups.
Well, I think we have next to no information about language development for 195,000 of those 200,000 years, so we don't a much reason to believe anything.
I'd speculate that since language skills are important, evolution would have worked to increase them over that era.
I don't know much about human evolution and history... However, if language skills evolved after humans left Africa then I'd expect them to have evolved a bit differently in different local populations. Yet innate language skills seem to be the same everywhere. So I would guess that innate language skills haven't changed much in the last 100,000 years. So I would guess that people have been speaking languages like today's languages (in all their glorious variety) for the last 100,000 years.
> The languages spoken by today's ... are not systematically and fundamentally different ...
That is a meaningless statement, when there is no consensus on the fundamentals of language, and more so because the Languages of the world differ variously.
I'm not sure what you think how complexity of language is measured. Certainly, there are terms and expressions that had to be invented along with the concepts that they describe, which hunter gatherers don't know, and that's not limited to technology. Emotional content would be much more important on a human scale. I think the question would have to be, whether everyone was able to speak. Which term would the analogous to "literate"?
The only way I can think of for measuring the complexity of a language is an inaccurate empirical one: see how hard it is for speakers of unrelated languages to learn it. That approach would probably confirm that Hausa is harder to learn than Bahasa Indonesia, for example, though whether that's what other people mean by "complexity", I can't say.
Scooters are taking over - Vienna is a green city that has had time to refine its transportation culture over a millenia. Parts of it were built for horses.
When I'm on my electric moped, I ride it like a horse. No need to over-do it and speed, or whatever, just pace along at a trot. There's a harmonic spot where the curves and corners of the city suddenly become super-fluid, and I even get all the green lights .. I'm pretty sure its because the physical geometry is designed for horses, and the electric moped drive train can approximate that.
Anyway, I can't wait until all the cars disappear. Europe is going to be even more beautiful.