often we're told to add Google XSS-as-a-serv.. I mean Tag Manager, then the non-tech people in Marketing go ham without a care in the world beyond their metrics. Can't blame them, it's what they're measured on.
Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because managers set the priorities.
I recently had to clean up a mess and after days asking what’s in use and what’s not, turns out nothing is really needed, and 80 tracking pixels were added “because that’s how we do it”.
The lowest concentration of BPA that's been shown to be estrogenic according the second article is 0.1pMol/L which is around 230 picograms per litre of blood, or 1.1ng total for an average adult.
BPA's biological half life in humans is up to two to five hours depending on a range of factors (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2685842/), so taking the worst case you'd need to be continually exposed to around 2.5ng of BPA over a day.
So 'safe' as defined right now would be keeping the absorption below that 2.5ng per day threshold.
I don't know how how much BPA in plastics can transfer out per day, the research I've seen seems to indicate that unless it's a food container it's pretty minimal but I don't know enough to evaluate the quality of that research.
Your skin is also a pretty good barrier so only around 2.2% of any BPA on your skin can pass through in an ideal situation, so absorption from non-food sources is much lower (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9210257/)
The other problem is what do they replace BPA with? To be safer it would need at least as well studied as BPA, but often it seems like the 'safer' options are just not very well studied yet and could actually be worse.
> research I've seen seems to indicate that unless it's a food container it's pretty minimal
I use glass jars for storing food. One of the reasons is stuff like BPA leaching from the plastic to the food. Another is that it's much easier to have hundreds of identical jars to have a pretty and consistently filled kitchen cabinets. A third is that transparent plastic becomes less transparent after multiple washes with a sponge.
But what I hit "reply" for was to say that heating plays a role. So putting hot food inside a container is likely worse than putting something at room temperature in a container and then putting it in the fridge.
> 1.1 ng total for an average adult
Wow, that's so little. I wonder if malicious BPA poisoning cases have been reported. It's probably undetectable unless you search for it specifically.
> The other problem is what do they replace BPA with?
I remember reading that BPA could be replaced with BPB. Obviously it may be OK, but to a layman it's like saying "we no longer add rat shit to our food, now it's bat shit".
1.1ng is a very small amount, but the effect is really not that well understood. It’s definitely something we should minimise.
However it’s not a dangerous dose, it’s just the dose that produces detectable changes and we can detect really really small changes. The toxic dose is around 4g/kg body weight. So an average adult would need to consume over 300 grams of pure BPA to be poisoned by it.
Of course the answer is to use non-plastic containers, though the most common plastic used for food (PET - milk bottles, most soft drinks etc) don’t contain any BPA. It’s the reusable ones that do.
I have glass containers for food, though I do still use plastic ones for short term storage for things I won’t heat. Honestly this seems like the best answer, metal, wood and glass if you can.
From what I’ve read most native compiled code doesn’t really check for overflows in optimised builds, but this is more of an issue for JavaScript et al where they may detect the overflow and switch the underlying type? I’m definitely no expert on this.
A bit more reading shows there's a three instruction general case version for 32-bit additions on the 64-bit RISC-V ISA. I'm not familiar with RISC-V assembly and they didn't provide an example, but I _think_ it's as easy as this since 64-bit add wouldn't match the 32-bit overflowed add.
Neither x86-64 nor RISC-V is implemented by running each single instruction. They both recognize patterns in the code and translate those into micro-ops. On high performance chips like Rivos's (now Meta's) I doubt there'd be any difference in the amount of work done.
Code size is a benefit for x86-64 however - no one is arguing that - but you have to trade that against the difficulty of instruction decoding.
I thought the main distinction of RISC-V (and MIPS before it, along with RISCs in general) is that the instructions are themselves of equivalent complexity (or lack thereof) as x86 uops. E.g x86 can add a register to memory, which splits into 3 load / add / store uops, but a RISC would execute those 3 instructions directly.
The main distinction now is RISC-descended designs use a load-modify-store instruction set with all ALU functions being register-register, and consequently have a lot more (visible) registers than CISC-descended ISAs (mostly just x86 really).
Historically RISC instructions were 1:1 with CPU operations, in theory allowing the compiler to better optimise logic, but this isn't really true anymore. High performance ARM CPUs use µOPs and macro-op fusion, though not to the extent of x86 CPUs.
Except it isn't. Code isn't one single pattern repeating again and again; on large enough bodies of code, RISC-V is the most dense, and it's not even close.
Decades of demoscene productions beg to differ. That just means compilers are awful, as they usually are.[1] x86 has far more optimisation opportunities than any RISC.
If I recall my lectures, which were 20odd years ago now.
CISC ISAs were historically designed for humans writing assembly so they have single instructions with complex behaviour and consequently very high instruction density.
RISC was designed to eliminate the complex decoding logic and replace it with compiler logic, using higher throughput from the much reduced decoding logic (or in some cases no decoding at all) to offset the increased number of instructions. Also the transistors that were used for decoding could be used for additional ALUs to increase parallelism.
So RISC by its nature is more verbose.
Does the tradeoff still make sense? Depends who you ask.
Every time my Windows gaming PC updates it nags me about setting up backups to OneDrive.
I cannot install Windows without a Microsoft account unless I apply work-arounds.
It constantly offers Office 365, even adding dummy icons to the start menu.
There are adverts on the login screen.
To be fair I installed Bazzite there, but for a laptop I cannot find an equivalent device at the same price point even ignoring the need for linux drivers.
Mine does not nag me about OneDrive or backups. OneDrive is not even installed. If I search my start menu for OneDrive, nothing even comes up.
Sure, you can't install Windows without a Microsoft account, but realistically a Mac is far less useful if you don't do the same thing. If you don't sign in with an Apple ID you've got zero iPhone integration, for example. I would imagine that 95% of Mac users are signed in to their Apple ID.
Signing in to an account to use commercial software doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I'd rather sign in to my account than deal with entering a product license key and needing to keep track of it.
I have not been offered Office 365 since after the first install.
There are not adverts on my login screen, it's completely blank. Change your settings.
These sales tactics are not unique to Windows, Mac subscriptions are upsold in the system settings and via notifications. They do go away and stay away but they are there when you buy the system.
Even after saying no to OneDrive and doing all I can to remove it, it tends to randomly come back months later and will automatically start uploading my desktop and documents folder to the cloud.
Edit: I even specifically bought the Pro version hoping to be able to shut some of this off.
It's not worth the hassle, but for the Windows machines in my house I set up Windows Server and have all the machines provisioned to an Active Directory domain where I turn off all the crap via Group Policy. You can get by with just editing Group Policy for a standalone Windows Pro copy, but for more than one machine I really didn't want to fiddle with having to update each machine's policy whenever Microsoft does something stupid.
This literally does not happen. Are you on Windows 10? It doesn't happen in 11. It is fully uninstalled. If I search the Start Menu for OneDrive it doesn't even show up.
It very much does happen. I’m one 11. It seems like every time it updates I get the “let’s finish setting up your computer” screen that asks me to setup one drive.
In almost every system with failsafes there will be conditions that can bypass them. The goal is not to make it impossible for the unsafe condition to happen, but to make it so that in the expected uses the failure will not happen.
In this case it's a domestic microwave and the mainboard is housed inside the electronics enclosure, so covering the whole mainboard in salt water is not an expected occurrence in a domestic kitchen.
But there are ~1 billion microwaves in the world... I'm sure it has happened somewhere. As a designer of a billion-sold device, your job is to make sure that the expected number of people harmed by your device is substantially less than one, which gets really hard when all the risks are multiplied by 1e9.
Your job is to make sure the number of people harmed _while using the device as intended in a reasonable situation_ is as close to 0 as possible.
A domestic microwave is for use only on land, indoors, in a domestic kitchen, and in an unmodified form. In these conditions there is no conceivable way that salt water could saturate the main board, or bypass all the interlocks in another way.
Yes there are ways that all the safety systems can be bypassed, but not while a reasonable person is using the device as intended.
> As a designer of a billion-sold device, your job is to make sure that the expected number of people harmed by your device is substantially less than one
Source? People take risk in their day to day life and should expect to take risk. Why would they expect their microwave to be completely free of risk?
At the moment in every jurisdiction I’m aware of the driver is always considered as “in charge” of the vehicle no matter what assistance functions are being used. It’s the driver’s responsibility to avoid collisions in all cases.
If you have a collision and your vehicle is judged at fault by whatever authority does it in your area the you are liable.
Mercedes Drive Pilot (“SAE Level 3”) is certified on some very specific stretches of insterstate in California to not require the driver to be responsible.
that's really dumb of Mercedes take on that liability for little benefit - sell more cars, make more profit? My prediction is MB drops this or goes bankrupt in the next 10 years.
It's a marketing gimmick. The conditions under which it can be used are so restrictive that it's really not useful which means it will be rarely used so Mercedes exposure to liability is really quite small.
Not sure you understand how "The Formula" works. The profit generated by adding this feature will outweigh the cost of any resulting accidents that they take liability for.
A less pessimistic way of phrasing it is that within the boundaries they've defined, their self driving system is so much better than a human that they're willing to assume responsibility for crashes deemed "at-fault" while using the system.
Not intentionally trying to compare that with other automakers, but Mercedes is the only "you can buy now" vehicle (ignoring robotaxis/Waymo/others) that assumes liability with those capabilities. Until other automakers provide that legal guarantee, they're parlor tricks at best that will continue to get folks killed in scenarios that they otherwise wouldn't had they been actually paying attention.
"Your honor, I don't know how to explain this to you any more simply. I wasn't driving, there was a brick on the gas pedal. It's not my responsibility, not my fault!"
Well that will depend on your local laws, but to my knowledge except for certain authorised pilot programs all cars on the road must have a driver.
Where I live if you are in the driver’s seat no matter if you were actually actively driving you are considered to be the driver. This has been well established here in drink-driving cases, but you’d have to ask a lawyer for your area.
On modern macOS applications can flag an input field as secure, which blocks keypress interception. The permission is fairly new, but the actual feature has always been there as part of the window server. I used it back in the 10.4 days to implement macro recording.
Classic Mac OS extensions on the other hand had free rein to modify any part of the kernel. They really could modify anything.
Don't most people already have a plug in their garage? All mine certainly have. There's no need to get full EVSE for most people, a 2.4kW outlet as found almost everywhere outside North America will easily handle daily driving needs for anyone who's not in a travelling job.
Also if everyone in your neighbourhood turning on a space heater strains the grid you have bigger problems.
Utilities have plenty of ways to solve that. We already have electric water heaters on demand controlled circuits and electricity billing that incentivises off-peak use.
And as for range? 400km is plenty for all but one trip a year, if that's an issue for your use perhaps EVs are not for you.
I have no garage and work from home. So no workplace to charge.
So now you’ve added another thing I have to worry about - finding charging somewhere along my 10 minute errand route?
EVs are a bad solution to a problem I don’t have. Hybrids are much better.
For the small amount of driving I do, driving my commuter ICE car with a tiny, 35-mpg 4 cylinder engine is fine… why are the EV cultists so convinced their way is the only way and the rest of us are living in prehistoric times?
Plus, your EV is heavier than my ICE, so your tires shed rubber particulate more quickly than my tires due to the weight, which is also an environmental pollutant (that is toxic enough to kill wildlife, btw)
>> I have no garage and work from home. So no workplace to charge.
So now you’ve added another thing I have to worry about - finding charging somewhere along my 10 minute errand route?
Your car lives somewhere when you're not doing errands. Expect a charging point there as demand for that grows.
Not to mention charging points at the mall, shops, restaurants and so on.
Clearly it will be a long time before EV replaces ICE completely. There was lots of horse infrastructure which changed when cars appeared.
But the pendulum is swinging and each motion there opens up new opportunities.
Also each motion has an impact on existing infrastructure. Expect gas stations to be less common, ditto for mechanics and so on.
>EV's produce 38% less tire & brake dust than ICE vehicles.
>non-exhaust emissions on an ICE vehicle are roughly 1/3 brake dust, 1/3 tire dust and 1/3 road dust. EV's have almost no impact on road dust, 83% lest brake dust and 20% more tire dust.
> though much of this is attributable to a vehicle mix that is more focused on larger vehicles, as it seems like every EV manufacturer is making huge SUVs and few are making small cars
My point exactly. Your new EV has more tire dust (and probably more brake dust) than my old, smaller ICE.
No. It's really easy to install charging points on office parking space and supermarket. You don't need to plug at home when half of the day the car is parked at places with chargers.
Not half a day, but BEVs are impractical today if you don’t have home charging, but throw in restaurants, movie theaters, doctor’s and dentist’s offices, and L2 charging starts to become a practical alternative for many.
In the short run. When I replaced my minivan with a PHEV my gas bill went down $200/month, my electric bill went up $30. Chargers where people park is a long term investment in lower costs for everyone. Hopefully chargers are everywhere in the future so we don't need the ICE at all. (I just bought a EV, I've barely had it a week and already have run out of battery - I was just able to reach a charger, but it required changing my route since there were none along the route I wanted)
No? I haven't seen a "peak oil" article or prediction in at least ten years. It would be GREAT to reduce our dependence, to make them cleaner, to make them more efficient, and to increase the use of renewables. But who is saying we have to "stop" oil and gas?
I was being a bit facetious, but I guess when either they're fortunate to live extremely close to a charger, or they have one in building, but then it seems like they'd be fighting for parking and charging space, which doesn't seem to me to compete favorably in terms of practicality. Or the housing market finally crashes and there's a viable path out of renting for those that want to do so.
When L2 errand charging becomes enough that they can keep up with daily travel by plugging in where they go and park for a while - restaurants,
movie theaters, retail stores, doctor and dentist offices, etc.
Probably not 7 days a week, but a couple days a week, sure.
And of course not everyone. Maybe 10%?
Not that it matters. What do I care about the needs of some Texans? (I mean that non perjorativly). I mean just because ranchers still need horses doesn't mean the rest of us have to use them.
The world will go EV, even much of the US will go EV, regardless of what some folks need.
Almost nobody is driving 200 miles to get to work. Almost everybody will move if their commute is more than half an hour - this is through out history and includes hunter gathers deciding to move the tribe, peasants walking to their field... There are a few people driving that far in the US, but either they are planning to move soon, or they don't expect the job to last long.
There are a lot of people driving more than 200 miles a day for work though. Many of them are in cars because their unique skills are why they need to be there (as opposed to delivery drivers who are bringing cargo).
There are also people who drive a long distance once a week. I know of a rural hospital that pays a lot of doctors to drive in on Thursday so locals don't have to go to the city. (they keep an ER, but the rest of the hospital is empty other than a few nurses the rest of the week)
Marketing and managers should be restricted as well, because managers set the priorities.
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