I’ve commonly heard people referring to Epic as a company that pays quite well for the area. They also have a reputation for being kinda crappy to work for, so I never pursued a position there. All the other jobs and offers I’ve had in the Madison area pay quite poorly compared to remote jobs with companies based in the Bay Area.
as usual with any large-scale procurement decision, it is a whole lot of politics. the anti-EV people were pushing against it, the defense contractors that run the government had more experience in gas powered vehicles, and the environmentalists were pushing for impractical targets like 100% EV, which just gave ammunition to the people who didn't want EVs.
the cool thing here seems to be that practicality is actually going to win out, and the postal trucks will end up being EVs on routes where that makes sense, and internal combustion on routes where EVs don't make sense.
Its probably too soon to know if that pressure succeeding was lucky or a mistake.
I love the idea of having an all electric fleet if it's feasible and better than the alternatives. I also have to assume the original plan to only electrify part of the fleet has functional reasons behind it.
If those reasons are overcome, or if that decision was somehow entirely political, then the pressure is lucky. Otherwise...we'll see?
Depends on driving habits and price of electricity and gas. In Washington state, electricity is cheaper compared to most of the US, and gas is among the most expensive compared to most of the US.
For less than ~10k miles per year, the higher up front cost of an electric vehicle and the greater depreciation due to eventual battery replacement might make a hybrid gas vehicle still cheaper per mile.
But for high mileage, high frequency of stop and go driving, I imagine all electric is cheapest?
Electric is likely cheapest considering duty cycle and fuel usage, and the battery should not need to be replaced for hundreds of thousands of miles, at which point we will have better batteries that last even longer and are cheaper.
> might make a hybrid gas vehicle still cheaper per mile
I agree. What is unconscionable is deploying 10s of thousands of vehicles that spend every day of operation accelerating rather quickly then coming to a full stop within a few seconds without using regenerative braking.
The published ratings of battery depreciation are per-mile, because there’s not really any other way to straightforwardly measure it, but the chemistry of battery degradation is very complex, and factors like number of high-current heating cycles and depth of discharge definitely matter.
the problem is we aren't comparing person vehicles, you have to consider these vehicles are estimated to need a 20+ year life span which mean replacing the batteries at least once, most likely twice. electric vehicle metrics are also not based on carrying a heavy load, at start and stop distances, moving at too low a speed to really benefit from reclamation.
The truth is, we have no real data to tell us how electric vehicles will fair over the expected time length with this expected work load.
When you factor in the building of instructor for charging stations, and their maintenance.
I’m conflicted on use of AirPods as hearing aids. I use one hearing aid and have normal hearing in the other ear. I often listen to things on my phone over the one hearing aid. It would be nice to have stereo. For this reason, AirPods for both listening to stuff and hearing assistance would be great.
On the other hand, when I see someone wearing AirPods I assume they are listening to something else or are otherwise trying to shut the world out. If I were wearing them to be able to engage more, I think I would just be sending the opposite message.
The fact that Airpods don’t look like hearing aids is a key advantage for some people. it’s especially important to some young people for whom there is a bit of a stigma around wearing them.
The flip side is you're wearing something that (today) is generally considered an entertainment device or something used to communicate with someone not in the room.
To be clear, I think this is great. My dad bought something off Amazon as a backup for his hearing aid and tried to get remote tech support from me. Who knows what Chinese piece of crap he bought and what he needed to make it work? Fortunately the return was easy.
> it’s especially important to some young people for whom there is a bit of a stigma around wearing them.
Anyone who has a stigma about wearing hearing aids around people they are talking to but not a stigma about wearing earbuds while conversing needs to do some deep reflection.
It's a huge double-edged sword. I don't think twice about people wearing hearing aids at the movies or walking down a busy parking lot. If I see someone with Airpods doing the same thing, I'm going to assume they're not using the rare FDA-authorized feature and instead are fully noise-cancelled.
Hell, there's an entire meme of "Oh no, they have their Airpods in!" that certainly won't abate after the release of a rarely-used feature.
I’m pretty pumped about it actually. I have high-frequency hearing loss in one ear (along with replacement tinnitus) that just randomly crept in on me a few years ago, probably after some ENT infection or the other.
The hearing specialist who tested me said it’s fairly significant—eg I can’t hear consonants at the end of words clearly, think he rated it as 75yo hearing and I was ~45, and he asked me if I happened to shoot guns on that side. But he did not recommend going so far as a hearing aid yet.
I personally am skeptical, especially a few years later. What the AirPods solution might do is let me audition the idea. If it turns out whatever it does is beneficial, that will certainly prompt me to get myself retested for the real thing. I should get re-tested anyway, but there’s not much better to motivate you than concrete evidence.
This problem could be solved easily. One could put some kind of tiny sticker on their AirPods - it would take sometime for it to become mainstream - like an orange color ring - indicating the user is using the AirPods as hearing aids.
(This is a people problem…)
The sticker/paint could change all of the white into a skin tone, the way many hearing aids are. Maybe similar to wrapping a car with vinyl, or nail polish.
How would a phone lockscreen indicator work? If someone walks up to you in a store with AirPods in, how are you seeing the indicator on the phone in their pocket? The situations where I can look at the lock screen of the phone of the person I'm speaking to are pretty limited.
According to Wikipedia, AirPods Pro Gen 1 have 0.16 Wh of battery per AirPod (There's no data on Gen 2).
With 5 hours listening time, that gives a power draw of 0.032 watts or 32 milliwatts.
This answer https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/640179 (I know, not the best source, but I'm just guesstimating anyways) gives a current of 1 mA at 5 V for an indicator LED. So the LED would need 5 mW. That increases power draw to 37 milliwatts and gives a new battery life of about 4 hours and 20 minutes.
If using 5 mA, which the answer calls "blindingly bright for some clear LEDs, even from 10 feet away", the LED would draw 25 mW and reduce listening time to only 2 hours and 50 minutes. The answer is also about non-diffuse LEDs so the indicator would only be visible from a narrow angle, but since it would point forward, that's probably fine. Making it diffuse would reduce perceived brightness again.
Brightness could be fine indoors, but outside with direct sun is probably harder. Since you would have the LED on both AirPods, you could probably expect that at least one of them is in the shadow at any time though.
Is it? I think that thanks to transparency mode and conversation detection people are keeping them in “full time”. In noisy environments I just keep them on without music and they help me hear people talk.
It really depends on the awareness of product features and evolution of the actively used devices. My lived experience is that those with white things in their ears can’t hear you or can barely hear you and have to pull one out to have a conversation.
Those that know you probably understand how you use them. If I were to see you walking in my neighborhood with your AirPods I would probably not bother saying hi unless I already knew you. If you were a new neighbor that always wore AirPods, that means we would probably never become more than strangers to each other unless you initiated conversation.
> If I were to see you walking in my neighborhood with your AirPods I would probably not bother saying hi unless I already knew you.
You can still do a slight but friendly wave or nod. That would open the door for them to verbalise a “hi” or “good morning” and strike up a conversation. And it only needs to happen once for you to know.
Also, anecdotally, over a decade ago I used to wear non-white headphones or earphones in public frequently. Yet I was still accosted by strangers all the time, asking for directions or other information, when there were plenty of other people around with nothing in their ears. Still I tried to always be helpful and friendly, even if it could get tiresome: I was always listening to a book, not music, so interruptions were meaningful distractions.
The related podcast episode has an extended discussion of past experience pushing postgres beyond its original design. Despite working with Bryan and dap at Joyent post Samsung acquisition, I had no idea about much of this.
This sounds a lot like the story of Sprint (Southern Pacific Railroad INTernet?). If I were less lazy I bet I could find the story where this part of Sprint morphed into Qwest.
Zoom works for me on iOS but I had to zoom so much to read the text that I then had to scroll a lot, turning the whole experience unpleasant. Landscape mode did not naturally enlarge fonts enough to make them readable.
Back in the days before I found spreadsheets useful my boss was trying to get me excited about sc running on his HP workstation. That seems to be about the same time that one of the original authors was off working on something (Java) that would have more impact.
> sc-im is based on sc, whose original authors are James Gosling and Mark Weiser, and mods were later added by Chuck Martin.
Meanwhile, if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will that started from a rather innocent PR to make some documentation use gender neutral pronouns.
Seems like the project quickly shut the annoying troublemakers down. The few people on Mastodon that are upset about this don't matter and they'll quickly move on to being upset about some other trivial matter.
> if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will
I followed your suggestion and took a look at this.
Let's call the situation what it is: Someone with a few followers on Mastodon saw a reason to harass an individual, with the reason itself being secondary in nature.
What happened there is called brigading, which is rightfully a bannable offense in many moderated online communities, even those many would (rightfully) consider very toxic in nature.
Pretending that this 3 year old pull request with a one (!) word change was actually of deep interest to the people involved seems pretty dishonest.
The fact that this absolutely trivial PR is enough to gain so much traction in certain circles that they gather to sling hurtful tirades at someone and call them names in order to hurt them....why would anyone want such a community interacting with a project?
Why would anyone want such a toxic crowd near a project?
Since it was brought up, can you, or someone else summarize what happened?
I am not looking for drama on Mastodon (it seems I need an account to search?), or drama here. Just some facts to judge whether this is a red flag of some kind, worth investigating more.
There was a PR to change references of he to they, or similar thinking the writing was by a non-native English speaker. The PR was aimed at inclusivity. The response was that politics are not welcome there.
A legit seeming concern is that anything can be political in the eyes of the lead dev. Is support for screen readers part of a political agenda?
In an effort to avoid drama, drama was invited. This doesn’t seem likely to be a welcoming place for some that would otherwise contribute.
“I have absolutely nothing against gender neutral language. I am however against outsiders doing drive-by PRs with ideological motivations. If a regular contributor hade made these edits, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Could I have communicated this better in 2021? You bet.”
> The response was that politics are not welcome there.
This is the ultimate response. Huge respect to the lead dev.
And this is very political. "They" is plural, it's usage in singular form is fringe, only very recent and originates from within political activism. For the majority of English speakers this is incorrect, and will remain incorrect as the belief system associated with it's usage is fundementally wrong and incompatible with their world view.
> I have seen C wizardry up close that I know I simply cannot do.
I have written C at least a few times per year for over 30 years. About ten years of that was OS development on Solaris and its derivatives.
Articles like this show crazy things you can do in C. I’ve never found the need to do things like this and have never seen them in the wild.
The places that wizardry is required are places like integer and buffer overflow, locking, overall structure of large codebases, build infrastructure, algorithms, etc. Many of these are concerns in most languages.
> auto reject C PR’s if they didn’t use the syntax if (1==x) rather than if (x==1)
When I was a student in the 90s advice like this would have been helpful. Compiler warnings and static analyzers are so much better now that tricks like this are not needed.
