I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
Wow, I think I remember that talk, too. And I remember thinking, "why would anyone want to run a video inside a terminal?!" I still don't want to do that, but it was cool that enabling that feature only required a few lines of code, since EFL(?) already supported it, was already linked in, and the code to start it was minimal.
Certainly not everywhere. I definitely remember plenty of tasteless ones, some deliberately so and others just cases of other people's taste differing from mine!
At my native home my bicycles are insured, now through my home insurance (part of the furniture, kind of), but at one point one of my electric bicycles was too expensive for that and required additional insurance. As soon as the price dropped a bit I could drop that extra insurance.
As the comment above said, in Japan a bicycle is registered to a person when you buy it. Even the second hand bikes from recycle shops. And there _is_ a theft problem.. but not everywhere. I sometimes don't bother with locking my bicycle outside the shopping mall, here (in my town in Japan). Nobody steals bicycles here. There was a time when a particular gang of teenagers would steal scooters though.. the 50cc ones. A friend's scooter was stolen. The police found the culprits and he got his scooter back.
But not much problems with bicycles. Unlike in my town back home. Now that I'm here I would not be surprised if, when I go back, I find that someone broke into my garage and stole the bicycles.
It's not insuring the bike itself, it's insuring damages for accidents while riding it.
If you run into someone on your bike, you're on the hook for their medical costs (yes even in Japan's universal health care system, it's not single-payer), loss of income, etc.
Insurance will pay for that. It's now legally required to hold bicycle insurance in most cities in Japan when riding for this reason, similar to requiring basic car insurance.
That's new to me, and something I have to check. Wow. I assume this must be new, I'm 100% certain my (Japanese) wife hasn't heard about anything like that.
Though even if you're getting an hybrid assist bike, if you're paying much more than 1500$ for a commuter, probably overpaying [1200 from the manufacturer]
Oh, I was there for a good deal of it. Win 3.1 was my first GUI OS. Remember wacky compositor add-ons to x-window to get the wobbly windows and the really good transparency that doesn’t wait for you to stop moving the window to update, on Linux.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
But what of the culture? For years now the art and music has felt like poor cousins to what is in the west, similar to what we see generated by AI now, and consumed be people doomscrolling on WeChat moments while they wait for their didi to deliver their food from the shop down the street.
Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
Maintaining modern accelerators requires frequent hands-on intervention -- replacing hardware, reseating chips, and checking cable integrity.
Because these platforms are experimental and rapidly evolving, they aren't 'space-ready.' Space-grade hardware must be 'rad-hardened' and proven over years of testing.
By the time an accelerator is reliable enough for orbit, it’s several generations obsolete, making it nearly impossible to compete or turn a profit against ground-based clusters.
On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)
Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity.
Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.
Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.
Thank you. The waste heat problem is so bad but no one gets around to mentioning the fact that you can't have AI grade chips and space at the same time.
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