Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.
One thing I was surprised by when driving in Coquitlam where I have cousins is that drivers there would start moving right after the green. This is strange to me because drivers in San Francisco will frequently be stationary for seconds afterwards. Looking at the rough statistics, it appears the RCMP police for smartphone usage in a stricter manner than SFPD does (or at least they write more citations) which makes me think that drivers in that region have adapted by not using their smartphones as much.
I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.
Hah, near me the Police Chief claimed this was fine as they were professional drivers who'd had "special training".
I wonder why this "special training" to allow people to be able to safely text and drive isn't available to all of us... but I think I can hazard some theories...
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen drivers in the Bay Area conducting a full blown Zoom call, video and all.
(I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync’d which otherwise took a half hour.)
It could be Europe has stricter driver's license requirements resulting in fewer people who might succumb to distractions getting behind the wheel. And more availability of walking and public transit options meaning more of those people don't need to drive in the first place. Giant vehicles certainly don't help regardless.
But when we cast around for other explanations, for some reason it's always interesting to zero in on an uncontrollable factor that means we aren't responsible for the situation we find ourselves in.
Btw Europe is full of the same dumb humans that live everywhere else. Granted, they have better bread, cheese, and health care.
>Sedan hits you, you get hit in the knees and fall on the hood. Brodozer hits you, it strikes your chest/head, pushes you over and drives over you.
You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Your two most common options are pavement and windshield. Pavement is worse because cars have a fair bit of engineering that goes into preventing head onto windshield. At the end of the day it's mostly a question about getting hit above or below center of mass.
Modern (ie. larger than they were 20yr ago) crossovers and midsize SUVs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in these stats. But the people who want to talk about this problem tend to drive Rav4s and not Chevy 2500s so the latter gets complained about even though the former outsold it 2:1
Relatedly, minivans are kind of bad no matter how you cut them because it's hard to stay true to the form factor and not have pedestrians go straight into windshield in fairly low speed crashes.
> The issue isn’t mass alone, but also height. Yes, spreading impact over a greater area reduces the force experienced by any given part of your body, but when that surface area rises further and further from the ground, the impact point on your body rises with it. If you’re hit below your center of mass, you’re likely to fall toward the vehicle. If you’re hit at or above that point, you’re likely to be knocked down in front of of the vehicle instead. The latter becomes less survivable due to the poor visibility offered by taller trucks and SUVs.
> “We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash testing for the report. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
Afair, e.g. Land Rover stopped producing the classic Defender due to more stringent pedestrian protection regulations in the EU. They introduced strict front-end safety requirements for cars and SUVs whereas the US does not. So vehicles designed and sold in European (in numbers) are probably safer for pedestrians because it is tested for and required - but there are exceptions for some US trucks somehow.
> You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Not to be combative, but I'd also like to see stats on that - that sounds just as made up. I'd expect a lot of pedestrians to strike the hood (about just as likely as windshield) as most pedestrian accidents happen in parking lots, drive-ways, traffic lights and vehicles exiting across a sidewalk (under 25mph).
> Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object
Several EU car models literally pop up the hood on impact so that the head hits a hood that buckles instead of the engine underneath.
From Wikipedia:
> The hood of most vehicles is usually fabricated from sheet metal, which is a compliant energy absorbing structure which poses a comparatively small threat. Most serious head injuries occur when there is insufficient clearance between the hood and the stiff underlying engine components
> Some models, like the Citroën C6 and Jaguar XK feature a novel pop-up bonnet design, which adds 6.5 cm (2.5", C6) extra clearance over the engine block if the bumper senses a hit. In 2012 and 2015, the Volvo V40 and the Land Rover Discovery Sport have an under-the hood airbag designed to operate if the hood senses a hit
The roads in a lot of places in europe will punish you with death or destruction for being distracted. They might be single laned, windy, and narrow, maybe following a cliff of certain death below.
The US however builds a lot of roads that lure you into thinking its safe to take your eyes out. Even countryside rural roads are dead straight for dozens of miles. We take our narrow certain death cliffside roads and replace them with highways with embanked generous turns and other features like that.
maybe there are other confounding factors that make smartphone utilization much less likely in Europe. Specifically no daily long commute in a car where people get bored and are tempted to use them.
I've seen VISA cards with several banks in France where there is commission after 1 to 3 monthly ATM so I'd be doubtful about VISA having such as requirement.
Historically, AWS own infrastructure relies on us-east-1. Loosing us-east-1 usually means loosing many other AWS Global services which are required for services in other regions to be healthy.
Not always. RTK strips flags and other information. Sometimes you spend more tokens getting them back later. Sure your saved 70% tokens on that tool call, but nothing in the metrics says whether you ran 3 tool calls instead of 1.
There is also a question of whether that stripped output requires more thinking tokens or not.
I'm not sure how Garmin works, but for instance with Google Wallet-compatible watches, you need a phone where wallet can run. I've had this setup for a year where I loaded the cards from another phone and used a watch to pay.
However Wallet didn't like this setup. Tokens expired at varying delays, sometimes a day, sometimes a week or payment failed without reasons.
Nowadays, I just use my bank's app which work fine on GOS.
You only need a phone to add the card to the watch. After that it works without a phone.
I was actually very surprised Garmin supported the country I'm in. They don't even support the language script, I get squiggles, but payments - better than Google Wallet.
Excluding server costs, having that 100Gbps on egress can cost $50k a day. since it's a very high-margin product, AWS support would probably refund or reduce that to hundreds. Not sure how you get to millions either.
Why would AWS refund 100Gbps on egress since the account actively used that bandwidth? AWS would not know if this is legitimate traffic, a (D)DoS or whatever...
At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't see how AWS would be sympathetic to providing any refunds.
AWS is known for refunding or partially refunding people if they accidentally rack up a huge bill in a short amount of time. They even reduce the bill in this case. (I do think reducing a bill in the tens of thousands to hundreds is unlikely though)
I mean if this story is to be believed, AWS reduced the bill from 6500 to 1800.
I think developers accidentally racking up unexpected thousands in costs on their first AWS project is a pretty common phenomenon that their support has standard rules for handling.
I do think the discount is believable, but we don't know the line items AWS applied a discount/removed charges.
The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.
Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.
> Through Google Cloud's Agent Platform: Retention will need to be enabled for your new covered model, and retained data stays in your GCP environment. When models become available, onboarding details will be shared.
That Claude support page says the exact same thing about AWS (“retained data stays in your AWS environment”). AWS’s docs say differently, though, so it seems one of them has incorrect documentation. I wouldn’t necessarily trust the Claude docs to be correct even regarding GCP until some of this is ironed out.
edit: Google’s own docs also say zero data retention isn’t possible with Fable and your data will be retained for 60 days “outside of your account”. I’m doubtful that this data sharing is an AWS-only thing.
The data-sharing surely is for all providers. I think the sentence "When models become available, onboarding details will be shared." hides a lot of things.
MV3 itself isn't what breaks uBlock Origin, it is the bundled removal of capabilities that Chrome decided to do. Firefox MV3 supports full WebRequest "scopes" while Chrome only supports declarativeNetRequest.
I know Chrome has some additional limitations, and in a vacuum MV3 doesn't break UBO as hard - but is blocking of the "Element picker" part of that or inherent to MV3? I rely on that a lot.
Most panels are from China. Panels have a very long lifetime. Over their lifetime they generate way more than their price in oil. Europe is not a huge producer of oil and relies on imports to sustain its usage. Sourcing panels is effectively reducing the amount of money leaving Europe in the long term.
But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...
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