My wife recently reconnected with a friend from college (20+ years ago) who is legally blind & living in MA. And I recently worked with a MA resident that is legally handicapped. Both of them have, through some state service, access to some number of free Uber rides each month. I know in the Boston area there is/was a state run car service for the handicapped, but using Uber apparently provides much more coverage & flexibility.

As long as the Uber drivers are being paid appropriately for this service I see it as a great service for the handicapped. I’d hate to see them lose it…

Yup. Blocks ads on our iPhones, iPads, streaming services, etc. Between that & uBlock Origin on our laptop browsers we hardly ever see ads.

Sending messages like this isn’t uncommon.

Back in the early 1960’s my dad had a high level security clearance at a defense contractor. He was one of a handful of people who knew the full details of a project to “identify, track, and destroy a hostile satellite”. This was in direct response to the Soviet Union launching Sputnik. The President of the US was another one of the handful that knew the full details of the project.

After a lot of R&D work a test was performed. A rocket was launched from somewhere in the South Pacific. It tracked a derelict satellite used as a target, closed on it, and disabled it. At that point my dad’s involvement on the project ended.

A few months later while at home he & my mom were listening to a speech by the President. In the middle of the speech he announced to the American public that the USA now had the ability to identify, track, and destroy hostile satellites. My mom says all the color drained from his face but she had no idea why since the entire project was still highly classified. In fact when my dad got to work the next day there was a memo waiting on his desk telling him that he was not to confirm, deny, or even discuss anything he may have heard on the radio or tv the previous night.

The President didn’t make that announcement for the benefit of the American people. He was sending a very public message to the leadership of the USSR.

(And my dad never told this story until well after the 25 year time frame established for routine declassification of such materials.)

I’d be hard pressed to pick anybody to go before him.

I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Drive-by-wire is so much better than old fashioned mechanical control.

🤦‍♂️

I burned myself out at a startup about 20 years ago. Walked into my bosses office & told him I quit. Was on the other side of the planet a few days later. I did eventually return home though.

My wife and I plan 6-12 month out, and sometimes more. At least for the dates of our vacations. My wife runs a small dog boarding service out of our home, and limits the number of dogs she boards. As a result she has clients that will schedule boarding up to a year in advance. So we need to block out our vacation time early enough to prevent clients from making reservations at those times.

At some point after we block out the time we’ll figure out where we want to go.

I’m sure some research scientist somewhere would offer $0.25 for it.

Some of us drive 48-wheeled vehicles.

It’ll trickle down. Ronnie said it would.

Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.

Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

I used to work across the street from their labs and we would regularly see them testing their robots in the parking lot. There were lots of areas of uneven ground that made for great testing. Eventually they reached out to us and a few other companies to offer tours of their facilities.

When we took them up on the offer one of the things I immediately noticed in one of their indoor testing areas was that everything was marked with what looked kind of like QR codes. The guy giving the tour said that the computing power in the robots was still fairly limited, and they needed as much of it as possible to focus on the actual robotics. So rather than have a ton of image/video processing they opted to label things that told the robot “this is a box”, “this is a door”, “this is a table” etc.

They could then send an instruction like “pick up the box, carry it through the door, and put it on the table”. The robot would then look for the appropriate QR codes and figure out how to complete the task.

That was 10+ years ago at this point. I don’t think they need those QR codes any more.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/NShNn

One can only hope!

Mike Wazowski!

As an old school M:I devotee I couldn’t agree more. I still watch the original series fro time to time and thoroughly enjoy it.

I also cringe at the mental gymnastics over the plot of this new 2-part movie…. You’ve got an evil AI on board a Russian sub that tricks the crew into torpedoing itself. The crew all dies but the AI survives onboard the sunken sub. And despite being stuck on a blown-up sub at the bottom of the ocean the AI is still a serious global threat. On top of that a two-part physical key that is the only thing that can disable the AI somehow made it off the sub and everybody is scrambling to find them. Once the keys are recovered somebody (clearly Tom Cruises character) will have to get onto the sunken sub and destroy the AI.

Why doesn’t the US or UK just go shoot a few more torpedoes at the sunken sub and obliterate the AI once and for all? The need to suspend so much reality for this plot drives me nuts.

Tesla also has a gigafactory & Supercharger factory in China. If Musk pissed them off, China could slap huge tariffs coming out of those factories.

Just support contactless payments. Then people can just tap their phone, Apple Watch, credit card, etc.

This sounds to me like a solution looking for a problem…