Alternativelly, they’ve just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous.

It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an “overdose” than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag.

Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we’re talking about is “The Great Game”, not Tit-Tac-Toe.

Do you have a source for that or is it just a conclusion you reached?

The reason I ask is that I vaguelly remember of seeing somewhere that the way the front of modern ICE cars is designed makes the engine literally fall when a high-speed frontal collision happens exactly so that the front can act as a crumple zone rather than the engine being pushed inside the passenger compartment. That being so, things aren’t quite as simple as you say and I think we need actual real world test results showing that difference in safety rather than mere expectations extrapolated from superficial knowleged about cars.

Now is a very good time to exercise one’s Delayed Gratification ability.

Cogito, ergo sum

As a random person on the Internet I don’t actually have anything to add but felt it would be nice to jump in.

If there had been a “Buy 10, Get 1 free” they could’ve used 11 humans instead of 10 for the same $250.

There’s a reason present day “AI-in-everything” Microsoft bought a code hosting company.

It’s not a “trip of a lifetime” (closest I did to a driving “trip of a lifetime” in Europe was driving from Lisbon to Amsterdam, about 2000km which I did in 2 days), it’s just part of my mental calculation of whether something is fun or not.

City driving is not fun for me, so having to spend 1h each way just to go somewhere to have fun reduces the overall appeal of it vs spending 15m in the tube each way to go somewhere to have fun.

Back when I lived in Lisbon I used to have a 1h commute by car to work because I lived in the outskirts and had to endure traffic jams on the way in, but over the years I lost patience with spending a significant fraction of my life in city traffic and, frankly, don’t have to endure it anymore.

More broadly I would say that your use of miles vs my use of time isn’t a like to like comparison: the problem isn’t distance if you can get there fast or at least in a relaxed way, the problem is when it takes quite a bit to get there and the driving is stressful. Driving out of the city starting from Central London would be like driving out New York from Manhattan: a lot of pain in the arse city driving in the transit just to get to the nearest freeway and then some extra pain from driving in a freeway with lots of traffic until you’re far out enough that there’s a lot less traffic and you can relax, and all this is if you’re lucky and don’t get a traffic jam.

Driving a long distance starting from suburbia can actually be fun, but driving anywhere starting from the center of a big city is not fun.

It really depends on how easy and expensive it is to rent a car last minute.

Also depends on where you live.

When I lived near Central London I ended up selling my very nice car and started cycling because almost all the nice places to go out to were more easilly reached by public transport (plus you could get piss drunk if you felt like without risking anybody’s life driving back like that).

Sure, you could use a car to go out to the countryside, but given that it took almost an hour just to drive out from London, it wasn’t worth it to do on impulse and to do it for vacations I could just rent a car (or, even better, fly away to a country with better weather and rent a car there).

In practice what was happenning was that I was paying around half the value of the car every year for renting a garage and car insurance whilst I only used the car maybe once every 2 months, which financially was incredibly dumb, so I just sold it.

The average claim per person for all their travel expenses during the experiment in Brisbane was $125 – but they saved $300 in car costs. “I hadn’t realised how much money my car eats up,” a 43-year-old man from Brisbane said.

Those $300 for 20 days look like just fuel costs. Add the yearly depreciation value of the car (especially bad for new cars), insurance and maintenance costs and it gets even worse.

Even limiting oneself to only a financial viewpoint (which is quite reductive since the are also big Environmental, Health and Social costs), for most people (especially those who live in cities) cars are stupidly expensive for the utility value that they deliver.

Yet.

And how exactly do we know for certain that all that juicy web access data complete linked to whatever identifying information associated with a Mozilla account isn’t going to be sold?!

Well, it is supposed to go boom

You are correct.

A little digging shows that unlike the CE mark in the EU for electronics, “UL certification isn’t mandatory, but may be required when selling electronic items to retailers”.

UL certification is a requirement for an electric or electronic product to be licensed for sale to consumers in the US. This is enforced on US manufacturers of a product and on importers.

Whilst people buying something from AliExpress for personal use and importing it themselves don’t have to obbey such requirements, those importing them or making them for sale in the US do.

The CE mark does the same thing in the EU.

No idea if in the US there are further licensing requirements for things to be connected to the grid that would close the importing for personal use loophole.

In the age of MBA management, the removal of resilience such as fallback systems because “they’re doing nothing” is the norm.

Nowadays Engineering stuff isn’t done according to Engineering Principles if it conflicts with short term profit maximization.

Since America and Israel attacked Iranian Economic Interests when they bombed oil producing facilities, it’s entirelly fair for Iran to respond in kind.

I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs and instead putting it somewhere else.

Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.

Exactly.

The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.

Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.

I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good, yields very little learning.

So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.