For ios/swift the results reflect the quality of the information available to the LLM.
There is a lack of training data; Apple docs arent great or really thorough, much documentation is buried in WWDC videos and requires an understanding of how the APIs evolved over time to avoid confusion when following stackoverflow posts, which confused newcomers as well as code generators. Stackoverflow is also littered with incorrect or outdated solutions to iOS/Swift coding questions.
Its been that way for years, the ad is on the lockscreen, and its an ad for other books. The version with no advertisement is 20$ more, I don't see the problem if someone wants to get a discount for looking at ads.
As far as problems go, I understand it's been a constant and this specific implementation is pretty low on the list, but generally, greed leading to ads intruding every aspect of our lives and people thinking up with new spots to place ads is a problem.
Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press are to the development of our society.
I'd love to see most advertising simply banned, but in the case of books there's precedent from back when people used to actually read enough to be worth advertising to: mid-century pulp novels often had a couple pages of glossy ads right in the middle, usually including one or more cigarette ads.
The first or last pages of books are still frequently used to sell other books from the same author or from the same publisher. Not that long ago they'd come with cut-out cards to mail in for your order for more of the publisher's books from the partial catalog printed in your book (nobody orders by mail any more, is the only reason the stopped that, I assume). Some of my books when I was a kid would have the first chapter of another book from the same anthology series at the end, to sell it (Goosebumps did this, for example).
Isn’t it strictly worse if they only offer the $130 no ads version? Why is choice a bad idea in this context? All it means is more people can afford it.
Yes, this intersection has that. The problem is the sensor starts a timer that's set to 2 or 3 minutes for most of the day. This becomes a minimum wait time even when there are no oncoming cars for the entire wait period. At this intersection, the wastefully pointless "idle there for 3 minutes with no other cars anywhere in sight" scenario happens quite often.
There's also an even more perverse failure mode: we often end up waiting for 2.5 minutes with no other cars anywhere in sight, then when a lone car is randomly approaching the light that's been green for no cars (going its way) for 2.5 minutes, that one car gets stopped and waits as we finally get our turn arrow after 3 minutes. If the light was the least bit "smart", it would have changed for us right when we pulled up and no other cars were in sight. The turn arrow is only 10 seconds, so we would have been long gone and the intersection back to green by the time that other car was approaching - no car would have needed to wait and everyone would have been better served.
My local municipality decided that it would be more appropriate for lights to flash yellow and/or red on a couple of low-traffic intersections along major routes between 11 PM and 6 AM.
I have a few intersections near me that desperately needed to have the lights added but only for busy times of day. At night it can take 5 minutes to get through a battery of lights even with virtually no traffic.
I suspect choosing not to flash them at night is some combination of people not really familiar with that system getting potentially confused and (these are somewhat complex intersections) others just getting careless rather than carefully checking, at night, all the directions that traffic could be coming from.
That is the beauty of roundabouts, they work regardless of the time of day, and on some where there is a need for more regulation you can still add lights before the roundabout.
There's a few intersections like that here in Dublin.
But they aren't marked. So what sometimes happens is I cruise up on a bike, in the middle of the road because none of those have bike lanes.. and the bike, naturally, never triggers the lights. Neither does the car behind me.
Sorry to hear it's not only a problem here in the U.S. Ideally, our intersection wouldn't have dedicated left turn arrows at all, since it doesn't need them most of the day. The problem arises only about four hours a day. At those times the otherwise empty thoroughfare turns into a wave of cars making it impossible to enter or leave our neighborhood street by turning left because there's rarely a large enough gap in the fast-flowing traffic.
Traffic engineers probably have a term for this kind of bi-polar intersection. A solution would be some kind of "conditional left arrow" but there's no such thing (at least here in the U.S.) If there's a dedicated green arrow for left turn, then there's a modal left-turn red arrow along with it. It should be possible to improve all scenarios by standardizing something like a flashing yellow arrow to mean "okay to cross if no oncoming traffic" since this already works as the default behavior at intersections with no lights or lights with no left turn arrows.
> flashing yellow arrow to mean "okay to cross if no oncoming traffic"
That's already a thing, unless I'm misunderstanding you. We've had flashing yellow left turn arrows for years. I'm in the PNW, but I've seen it in other places in the US, we're definitely not unique.
While the potential of super-smart AI to improve transport efficiency, costs and environmental impact with self-driving is obvious, it's also expensive and still many years from being ready for broad deployment. It's puzzling that low-hanging fruit like an AI-assisted "Slightly Smarter" traffic light is ignored. It could deliver meaningful improvement today with cheap, easy to retrofit, Raspberry Pi-level tech which already works well enough for a simple, limited use case like reducing unnecessary idling at traffic lights.
For this situation, and similar ones, there are simple solutions. For example, in this situation, the timer should always be running (and resets when the light changes). When a car triggers the sensor, the light should change if the timer is > N. If the timer is not there yet, wait until timer is N.
No AI required, just basic thoughtfulness and requirements gathering.
The trouble with the street sensors is that your car has to come to a stop before it is detected. Stopping and starting cars consumes a great deal of gasoline.
Contrast it with the flow achieved when there's a traffic cop managing an intersection. It's an enormous improvement.
Don’t American cars have that thing that turns your engine off every time you stop? I can’t remember a car I’ve driven in Europe in the last 15 years that didn’t have that annoying feature.
Annoying because there are hardly any stoplights here. So it works by killing the engine for one second at the first roundabout you roll up to before you remember to hit the button that disables it for the rest of the trip.
I always thought they would work great in the states.
Shouldn't they have been pro-nuclear if they actually cared about the planet? But it seems to me they really care more about pushing their own ideology instead.
> Shouldn't they have been pro-nuclear if they actually cared about the planet?
Do you know that "they" aren't? Who is "they" even? None of this makes any sense. This is arguing against a group that is imagined to be homogeneous when that's clearly not the case.
In the South SF Bay Area, our pickup truck gets 13 mpg mixed freeway/city.
Doing 75-80 on flat land, or 65-70 over the Sierra Nevadas, it gets 24 mpg. With city traffic in other cities it gets 18 mpg.
The reason it is so bad here is that the environmental activists passed traffic quiescence laws that try to discourage people to drive by making the roads worse.
Of course, they don’t make obvious fixes to improve public transit, and the bike lane “improvements” they put in are mostly textbook “how to kill bicyclists” designs that European countries phased out decades ago.
Here are two classic favorites: concrete barriers that are too close to the curb to allow street sweeping, and adding bike lanes between parallel parking spots and the sidewalks.
They must have realized people started re-routing their trips to avoid stoplights unless they were making right turns, since they’ve also started erecting barriers or adding red arrows to make it impossible to make right turns on red.
Anyway, this wastes time, but it also costs us at least $100 a month on gasoline. Our primary car is an EV.
Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
> Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
sure, but I'd rather just lobby against cars at that point. Especially in a place like the Bay Area that should be mostly served by public transit and dense housing. Lobbying to micromanage idling just feels like a waste of effort for such a negligible benefit.
Yeah, a decent litmus test is if you sign into a service from a new device and without much effort all your chats/messages/history or whatever is there, the security is weak.
I got off WhatsApp years ago so I am not sure what's changed but back then if you signed on from any random browser, it was able to sync everything instantly and you'd see all your messages. This was after they claimed that it was E2E encrypted. What was explained to me at the time was that you share your encryption key with Facebook and hence the syncing.
Chat backups are end-to-end encrypted now. You're right that it wasn't encrypted for a long time though.
I'm not claiming it's the ideal solution. I'm claiming it's much better than lots of other things that came before. There's no point in having a perfect solution if the people I know don't use it. Everyone I know uses WhatsApp. It's a fact that life could be much worse than it is. They could be using SMS.
Still possible but the company itself is being sold and resold, now in the hands of an actor that seems to conflict with its mission, unless I am mistaken
Hardcore Bandcamp user here - it's been sold, but other than layoffs, the user experience has remained essentially exactly the same. Especially with regards to OP's point about buying the files directly without hurdles. Songtradr has yet to announce any future changes to the platform as well. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as it ever was.
Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
I always thought audio quality was something for snobs, but recently my car's aux input died and I burned a few CDs with yt-dlp rips and I get it now. Youtube's 128kbps makes me wince on some of the quieter recordings, even compared to my previous setup of Spotify over a lackluster LTE connection.
It might be relevant that you're burning them at a set volume, and your only way to increase volume is by bumping up the output volume, whereas any sort of mp3 player you can bump up the volume of the source independently from the output. Maybe if you burn them at a higher volume and keep CD player's volume lower you'll have better luck?
Disclaimer: I'm far from an audiophile, I just know from personal experience that if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts? I don't know, it just sounds staticky and worse.
> if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts?
Mostly noise because you're amplifying it as well, and possibly artifacts because material converted at too low levels (which is the case of old CD rips that weren't normalized before encoding) wouldn't use all the available headroom, therefore losing one bit.
I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.
I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.
* not every artist has a donation link.
* I don't get the album for free otherwise
So I think it's totally ok for the service to give 10% to bandcamp (or whatever camp it will be in the future).
But I would be really happy when something like Faircamp takes off, and is easy for artists to use (or labels etc.), so they would be having more control, while providing a clean interface (unlike e.g. Qobuz)
Probably not. Bandcamp still sells albums, Amazon as well, and there are bunch of streaming services out there. If everyone was ripping from YouTube how would they stay in business?
Yeah, that's the worst part. They change things around at random.
I've sometimes wondered if Xcode is such a shitshow that they can't keep devs, so each version represents an entirely new team stirring up the crock and trying to make sense out of it.
I think you're right. I've always wondered why they don't water down GHB to be the equivalent of a low ABV drink. The only scary thing about GHB is its relative potency to volume. It's honestly a wonderful drug.
It is a pretty nice alternative to alcohol, and since their name is GABA Labs, and GHB can be synthesized from GABA, I assume they will be selling some analog or even rebranding and packaging GHB properly for consumption.
Once I went to a new dentist in a new area to do a teeth cleaning. He told me I had 4 cavities that needed filling. I was skeptical so I went to another one the next week. He said 2 cavities. I went to two more that month to see what else they'd say: one said no cavities, the other said 6. That was 8 years ago, I still don't have any cavities.
An app called Fitnotes, which I've used for years, is a glorified spreadsheet in my opinion.
Also contrary to another poster who insists on not tracking your lifts, I find it essential both for making progress and maintaining interest, its somewhat comparable to levelling an RPG character. At the very least its useful for remembering what you've done recently so you know what to do next.
+1 for fitnotes, probably the best app out there for my needs. Very flexible, gets out of the way, and has some basic analytics like plotting graphs and calculating one rep max values (which I never use). The graphs I find very useful to see if how I'm trending over many months.
I only know it on Android, looking at the iOS App Store it seems like they both hijacked the name from Android, yet that FitNotes 2 is marketed as a clone of the Android app. The other FitNotes in iOS looks totally different in function/UI
There is a lack of training data; Apple docs arent great or really thorough, much documentation is buried in WWDC videos and requires an understanding of how the APIs evolved over time to avoid confusion when following stackoverflow posts, which confused newcomers as well as code generators. Stackoverflow is also littered with incorrect or outdated solutions to iOS/Swift coding questions.