> It's also a hoot to just see LDS missionaries waiving their iPhones around with the Genesis Apple clearly visible.
To be fair, the LDS doctrine around the fruit from the Garden of Eden and the fall is quite different from the Catholic understanding, it’s seen as a necessary, even a good thing, in the overall plan.
To be honest, I would say that these signs placed by Apple Computer were done not out of malice, but by way of warning. To say, "Here Be Dragons!" To counsel those who may be ignorant, there are pitfalls ahead, and be careful, because you could lose your soul to these things, even though they are designed as morally neutral.
Computers are a tool, after all. The fruit depicted could just as easily be from the Tree of Life. It's all about how we use those tools.
Could also just be to show up first in the yellow pages
Also tools are not neutral, they carry the intent of their designer and make whatever they are designed to do easier than it used to be; if you want to be convinced please read Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
I would argue that it’s likely there was no Biblical reference intended, but that even if it was, it’s then more likely the apple is a reference to “knowledge” (as in, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) than a vague warning about using their products.
Well, Wisconsin is #1 in cheese production and was #1 in milk production until the 1990s, still #2. If you take milk and cheese together, I think the historical nickname "America's Dairyland" continues to be applicable, especially considering the importance of dairy to Wisconsin's economy compared to California.
OT for this interesting discussion about Epic but one of the reasons that Wisconsin slipped to #2 in milk production back in the 90's was that northern tier milk producing states instituted stronger environmental protections back in the 1980's forcing changes in how animal waste in huge dairy operations had to be managed. At the time there was a lot of pollution due to runoff of waste into creeks and rivers causing a cascade of problems with water quality downstream of these huge dairy operations.
A large number of these operations, instead of complying with the new environmental rules that would force better waste containment simply looked around the country for areas that had less strict requirements, lower enforcement, and an established dairy industry. Many of them ended up moving to counties in north central Texas and buying up large tracts of cheap land. They shipped their herds south and went on about their business down here just as they had up there. Erath County became one of the state's largest milk producing counties as a result of this migration.
Texas has been a cattle state for generations but most of the larger operations were traditional ranches of 10's of thousands of acres with lots of open land where cattle herds were measured based on # acres/cow metrics. Feedlots where cattle were fattened just before slaughter were the only places where you had large herds crammed into a small area. The dairy industry bought much smaller properties, up to several thousands of acres, and their dairy herds were crammed into these smaller spaces with the wastes being largely allowed to run off into creeks and rivers. It took years before Texas stepped in to try to get a handle on the agri-waste runoff pollution of their rivers and many large rivers in the state still have contamination issues.
Not coincidentally, this same issue affected swine operations in the US causing concentration of pig farms in North Carolina due to lax regulations.
I do want to clarify a few points, on the project page it does provide the following information:
> Distributed Transactions: TiDB uses a two-phase commit protocol to ensure ACID compliance, providing strong consistency. Transactions span multiple nodes, and TiDB's distributed nature ensures data correctness even in the presence of network partitions or node failures.
> High Availability: Built-in Raft consensus protocol ensures reliability and automated failover. Data is stored in multiple replicas, and transactions are committed only after writing to the majority of replicas, guaranteeing strong consistency and availability, even if some replicas fail. Geographic placement of replicas can be configured for different disaster tolerance levels.
There are quite a few. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Plaid, Mercari, and Rakuten shared their experiences with TiDB at PingCAP's annual event last year (2024) - https://www.pingcap.com/htap-summit/.
In the previous event (2023) there were speakers from Airbnb, Databricks, Flipkart, PayPay, and others sharing their experiences as well - https://www.pingcap.com/htap-summit/sept-2023/
Disclosure: Employee of PingCAP the company behind TiDB
If autopilot is 10x safer then preventing its use would lead to more preventable deaths and injuries than allowing it.
I agree that it should be regulated and incidents thoroughly investigated, however letting perfect be the enemy of good leads to stagnation and lack of practical improvement and greater injury to the population as a whole.
>>If autopilot is 10x safer then preventing its use would lead to more preventable deaths and injuries than allowing it.
And yet whenever there is a problem with any plane autopilot it's preemptively disabled fleet wide and pilots have to fly manually even though we absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt know that it's less safe.
If an automated system makes a wrong decision and it contributes to harm/death then it cannot be allowed on public roads full stop, no matter how many lives it saves otherwise.
Depends on what one considers a "problem." As long as the autopilot's failures conditions and mitigation procedures are documented, the burden is largely shifted to the operator.
Autopilot didn't prevent slamming into a mountain? Not a problem as long as it wasn't designed to.
Crashed on landing? No problem, the manual says not to operate it below 500 feet.
Runaway pitch trim? The manual says you must constantly be monitoring the autopilot and disengage it when it's not operating as expected and to pull the autopilot and pitch trim circuit breakers. Clearly insufficient operator training is to blame.
> And yet whenever there is a problem with any plane autopilot it's preemptively disabled fleet wide and pilots have to fly manually even though we absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt know that it's less safe.
just because we do something dumb in one scenario isn't a very persuasive reason to do the same in another.
> then it cannot be allowed on public roads full stop, no matter how many lives it saves otherwise.
ambulances sometimes get into accidents - we should ban all ambulances, no matter how many lives they save otherwise.
So your only concern is, when something goes wrong, need someone to blame. Who cares about lives saved.
Vaccines can cause adverse effects. Let's ban all of them.
If people like you were in charge of anything, we'd still be hitting rocks for fire in caves.
Ok, consider this for a second. You're a director of a hospital that owns a Therac radiotherapy machine for treating cancer. The machine is without any shadow of a doubt saving lives. People without access to it would die or have their prognosis worsen. Yet one day you get a report saying that the machine might sometimes, extremely rarely, accidentally deliver a lethal dose of radiation instead of the therapeutic one.
Do you decide to keep using the machine, or do you order it turned off until that defect can be fixed? Why yes or why not? Why does the same argument apply/not apply in the discussion about self driving cars?
(And in case you haven't heard about it - the Therac radiotherapy machine fault was a real thing, it's being used as a cautionary tell for software development but I sometimes wonder if it should be used in philosophy classes too)
I'd challenge the legitimacy of the claim that it's 10x safer, or even safer at all. The safety data provided isn't compelling to me, it can be games or misrepresented in various ways, as pointed out by others.
yes people would, if we had a reliable metric for safety of these systems besides engaged/disengaged. We don't, and 10x safer with the current metrics is not satisfactory.
The fine is a pittance. I usually scale these to a median household income, let's call it $80k. A quick Google says ESPN's revenue is $2.48B/y. To ESPN, this feels like how a $2.73 fine feels to a median household, or a $0.45 / instance fine.
As the article notes, it's the statutory maximum, so the FCC's hands appear a bit tied.
The fine is a signal that the FCC is paying attention. The FCC has a lot of power in addition to this fine and ESPN doesn't want to provoke them. If ESPN behaves badly enough, Congress can give the FCC what it needs. It's better business to just pay it, move on, and stop using the tones.
Oh I was definitely tempted to! But the ESPN-only revenue was already a stark enough contrast, and technically Disney only owns 80%. (Though I suppose you could do a weighted average of the two parent companies' revenues.)
Model X is no where near as spacious inside as a minivan. I have had a couple of Odyssey’s and they are much more spacious, particularly for the third row seating.
I eventually moved to an Electric Vehicle (Kia EV9) that is quite roomy, but still smaller than the minivan inside.
A500 Mini isn't as cool IMO. It's just a generic arm board running linux with an Amiga emulator. The keys don't even work. May as well just use a Pi or a PC.
Indeed. It's just a cash-grab device exploiting nostalgia.
The software it uses, amiberry, is open source and was made for the more powerful, useful and common Raspberry Pi boards. Getting one of these is a much better idea.
I wouldn't go _that_ far because the case, mouse, and controller are actually really good quality. But yeah, the bundled games are a bit underwhelming and ultimately it's just a Linux/Emulator box.
I wish someone would make an Amiga shell for a Raspberry Pi that's quality like that. I can 3D print my own, but injection molded plastic is still a quality level above.
Yeah, I have one, and the keyboard being non-functional is a real bummer. It's a neat mini console (especially once you add some additional games), but I wish they would make a version with a working keyboard, like they made TheC64. But the quality of the case is great, and the tank mouse definitely is the way to use workbench)
A lot of heating in the UK is gas (so wouldn't drive electricity consumption) and a lot of homes in the UK do not have AC (recent news reports suggest it is under 5% of the homes have it)
To be fair, the LDS doctrine around the fruit from the Garden of Eden and the fall is quite different from the Catholic understanding, it’s seen as a necessary, even a good thing, in the overall plan.
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