I was also hoping they'd bring the Folio back. I've got an old Air that does need replacing and have thought about buying an M2 Pro just to find a used Folio with.

I've got an original Thinkpad X13s that I' picked up about a year and a half ago, used, for a travel laptop. It's hard to hate in the same way that M-series MacBooks are now. The battery life is great, the performance is good, and for what I use it for, the compatibility hasn't been an issue. Firefox works great and I can use WSL with an ARM linux and run IntelliJ inside of that.

I wouldn't move to a Windows/ARM full-time just yet, but, it's not bad.

I still hate that I can't just use a credit card + pre-auth (or even cash!) at an EV charging station like I can at every single gas station. The data! It's! Important! To! Investors!

Cash wouldn't work as most charging stations would be constantly broken due to attempts to rob them. It's why even parking meters no longer take cash.

In Amsterdam a lot of the officials that collected the coins actually took a lot for themselves even. All those little coins add up to a lot.

But it should NOT be necessary to give up your privacy. Privacy is a human right.

> In Amsterdam a lot of the officials that collected the coins actually took a lot for themselves even.

Considering the fact that the machine counts the coins it receives, and a value of coins gets deposited in a bank, this seems like the easiest fraud in the world to catch.

If that went on for a long time, that is some horrifically incompetent oversight.

Edit: I'm suddenly realizing this was probably about the pre-digital coin-operated parking meters. Which makes me wonder how could you prevent widespread skimming? Unless they had tamper-proof "odometers" inside that you had to record the value of each time you emptied them?

  > Considering the fact that the machine counts the coins it receives

It doesn't. The added hardware for that would be redundant if you could trust the coin collectors. Remember, these were completely mechanical devices.

Yes, they had mechanical odometers in them.

They did but the values were registered by the same people that emptied them.

Eventually it was very hard to find who tampered with the books but eventually they were caught, which is how we know about it.

> Cash wouldn't work as most charging stations would be constantly broken due to attempts to rob them. It's why even parking meters no longer take cash.

Most gas stations in the US take cash without having to fend off constant robbery attempts. I don't see why EV charging stations could not do the same.

Because most EV charging stations are unattended. It brings the barrier down from armed robbery to vandalism and theft.

Putting cash in a pole in the street is really going to casuse a problem at the amounts that EV charging requires.

Ideally we’d follow in Norways’s footsteps and mandate that new charging stations accept credit cards but that’s probably a lost hope with electric cars being a culture war issue in the US these days.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 included $7.5 billion to establish the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. This program aims to build substantial charging stations every 50 miles along every major travel corridor in the US. The first charging stations funded by it opened earlier this month. NEVI requires that all charging stations built with this funding not require any accounts or apps to initiate a charge, so they will likely all have credit card terminals.

How is it a culture war? I thought that was pretty much over since the cybertruck convinced even hardline republican gas guzzler owners to buy one :P

Elon is very intolerant but at least he is popular with the traditionally hardline climate change denier crowd. I'm really hoping that will make for bipartisan climate action support in the end.

Hasn't happened just yet, they still need more time to think up their excuses as to why they finally caved and bought the clearly superior technology ;)

while the electric truck exists, it is in short supply and so you can't really get it. So they hake time.

This article seems to suggest there still is hold out amongst hardline republicans. Though it also suggests it could be gas costs related...

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/republican-strongholds-are-barel...

A Cybertruck with a dedicated combustion engine for rolling coal, now that would be something.

True enough, the biggest Trump supporter I know bought a Tesla a few years back. But Trump has pivoted to something like “Democrats and globalists support electric cars so electric cars are bad”: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-wishes-electri...

Agreed.

If you want to have some app-based loyalty programs or whatever, the way supermarkets do, that's fine.

But this seems to be a perfect area for consumer regulation.

Americans prefer to just take whatever crap corporations give them, and our public chargers definitely are crap.

Well, you see, imposing any limitations on the god-given rights of corporations gives the invisible hand arthritis.

Not just Norway but also the EU (especially Germany).

Isn't the vehicle itself the authorization for Tesla?

There's an SAE standard for this, but I _also_ don't want that.

I rented an EV, and had to download an app, use 2fa, and store my credit card, to be able to charge at the hotel I was staying at. This was pretty crummy.

Vehicle-based auth, at least w/ rental cars, sounds like a great way to make lots of money with fees.

You can with some charging stations. Well, that’s assuming the card reader works, which is a much less safe assumption than it is with gas pumps.

In the UK it’s going this way. You can tap your contactless payment card to pre-auth then charge

This. Or a Yoga style fold-over in an 11" formfactor.

I picked up an X13s (the ARM one) for travel. It's not perfect -- one thing I like about iOS is that the airline apps are kind of required for IFE, but, my X13s weighs the same as my iPad Pro with a keyboard and can do much more. Trying to use Google Slides or Docs on the iPad is a poor experience.

I was an SRE there (even senior SRE!) -- left in 2018 but have still been pretty in-the-loop for the past few years due to friends there. The question was, how long would thing stay up if everything stopped: the answer was <1 week for everything (including ads, things you don't see, etc). Maybe 2 or 3 for most core functionality.

With some of their service issues in the past few weeks (DC stuff that's been publicized), it could be less. To the very best of my knowledge no substantial resiliency work has been done recently.

I do know that a good number of folks on-call for core services were laid off while on-call, so, that bodes well. I feel bad for everyone left trying to keep things running.

That's very interesting that there isn't enough resiliency baked in to keep it going forever.

In something of this scale, "enough resiliency baked in to keep it going forever" is not possible. There are many reasons for this...

One is that hardware fails and needs to be replaced. That requires people who know how to install the replacement hardware and deploy to it. That's assuming the new hardware is 100% compatible - that won't be the case for more than a handful of years.

Another is currently unknown security vulnerabilities, whether in their own code or in external packages they use. Those vulnerabilities are there and they will be discovered. Once they are, things start being taken down from the outside until the system collapses.

Yet another is bugs. Every system of this scale has a large number of bugs, many of them unknown. Some of those won't be discovered until the right conditions arise - the right combination of data, timing, etc. When they are finally triggered, some of those bugs will take down entire subsystems, some of which are critical to the product functioning.

There are many more examples like this. There is no such thing as indefinite resiliency for anything near this scale.

I have a sun Solaris in my office that was powered up in 1998 and has faithfully served NIS/YP without hardware or software fault since that day.

The modern version of this (kubernetes + AWS/GCP), if designed could likely continue to run for a long long time. Especially a product as simple as twitter.

Congratulations, but that is unrelated to what Twitter is doing. How would your Solaris box hold up to half a billion tweets a day distributed in near real time across a user graph with 100M nodes, all while storing those tweets durably and allowing users to search and retrieve a long history of them? It's not simple at all.

Unlike your Solaris box, they are the target of constant advanced hacking attempts. I've been a part of the response when AWS was doing urgent work because of a security incident. The company I worked at was large enough to be paying AWS over a $1M a month when one such incident required dozens of our engineers working around the clock for three days to deal with AWS's response. We weren't even directly involved in the security issue. But without that engineering effort, our product would have shut down. There were other security incidents we were directly involved in and those would have taken us down without an even bigger response (whether or not we were running in AWS).

And then there are hardware failure rates. Hard drives alone fail at a rate of 1-2% per year[0]. Not a big deal on a single box. A very big deal when you have many thousands of hard drives - multiple drives fail every day. Unless you want to WAY over-allocate storage for redundancy. Even with that, there are surprising vulnerabilities to hardware failure at this scale.

----

[0]https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

But hard drive failures are why you pay a cloud company with live migrate (ie not AWS) for their service. The physical hardware the machine is running on will eventually fail, as you note, but the VM will keep on ticking on basically forever * and you'd never know the hard drive/SSD underneath it failed.

* Live migrate won't upgrade the CPU family you're running on, so eventually someone/a something on your end will be forced to deal with migrating it, but that's O(years).

This is funny as I was just thinking to myself this morning, "My X13 is the worst Thinkpad I've ever owned". The S3/S5 issues aren't limited to Linux, they exist in Windows too. I've set my laptop to just hibernate whenever I close the display to get around the issue, though it's very annoying.

I also made the mistake of optioning mine with the PrivacyGuard screen, but that's on me. I actually can't wait till I can justify upgrading.

Performance is great on the "original" AMD one, 8 cores, 32GB of RAM!

E603, Research Methods, in the writing department.

Among other things, I learned how to read academic papers and how to think like a researcher.

A fun last day of that course was considering "real world situations" through various research lenses ("If I were an anthropologist, what would I make of this situation?", "If I were trying to understand, using critical discourse analysis, why my roommate won't open the chicken door in the morning") has proven super valuable in corporate-life. There's different reasons for different things ("Why don't we have an onboarding doc?") and it's important to consider all of them and figure out what the best course forward is to achieve your objective.

I miss both Maemo and Meego. I had a Nokia N900 that was great and then an N9 that I loved even more.

Meego did use edge swipes in the OS which felt advanced at the time.

DOCSIS 3.1 has support for 1Gbps uploads.

I think we'll see the opposite -- ICE vehicles are going to go up in price as collectors items.

You might be right for the high end (the Bentley example), but the middle/lower end of luxury isn't that interesting as a collectible, cars like a 5 series BMW, or Lexus LS, and could really drop in value.

Seeing how manual transmission cars from the mid aught's are demanding a massive premium (like 100%+ on 1,3, and 5-series), I could see in 2045 ICE cars demanding a premium. Manual ICE cars even more so. But that's assuming they aren't projected to be illegal/heavily taxed by then.

Yep -- already they do, speaking as someone trying to find a manual BMW Wagon.

The supply is already gone and has been for a while. The other comment in this thread on ever-smarter (cloud connected) cars too means that the market for not-cloud-connected cars is going to continue to increase too.

My first car was a manual 316i wagon. There definitely wasn't a premium back then unless you compared it to a ratty Corolla.

For some vehicles, yes.

Such as:

* Toyota Tacoma - yes * Subaru WRX STI - yes

But getting into the honda accord, toyota camry, these are the ICE vehicles that are going to be crazy cheap.

Especially if EVs continue down the "smart car" route with locked down firmwares, dealer-only maintenance, etc.