Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
The helmet business is amazing, and proof that one is born every minute. It deserves to be shown how many logical fallacies there are. Top of the list is anecdotal evidence, everyone with a mouth can tell you about someone that had their life saved by magic styrofoam.
There is a grain of truth to the anecdotal claims. But, even then, this is very much an imagined grain of truth. What makes it fun is if you work for a specialist bicycle shop or up the chain, distributing thousands of helmets. With customer interaction at the showroom level, fitting hundreds of helmets, then selling gazillions at B2B, the question has to be asked, where are the broken ones, the one sent back for money off, as a replacement discount?
Indoctrination into the polystyrene club is also very easy. Customer buys new bicycle, customer gets upsold a helmet, as an easy win. The far more practical high vis jacket costs $5 and you make no profit on that, whereas the $50+ polystyrene is just money for the taking.
The testing was originally to a SNELL standard, but the helmets were too heavy. So manufacturers switched to the lame self-test consumer testing, 'trust us bro'. This became the new benchmark, anything aiming at SNELL or other meaningful test just did not survive the market.
Hence I keep it simple. If cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes (fitness, racing, stunts) then get the helmet and make sure the straps are tight. You will need it for organised events so you might as well get used to wearing it.
If not cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes, but merely for transport, whether that be the commute or errands, then you don't need a helmet. Get the lights, mudguards and high vis instead.
I am learning the counter-logical-fallacies, so I can counter the life saved anecdote with quality nonsense that has the same logical fallacies. For example, "I know a true Scotsman that has been cycling every day for fifty years without a helmet. Once he got hit by a car and his life was saved because he was not wearing an ill-fitting helmet, he would have been strangled by the straps had he been wearing a helmet, plus the driver would have given him less room, so the accident would have been far worse."
I digress, as for the article, the helmet is excellent for conspicuous leisure cycling. Now give me your money!
Of course, wearing a helmet is a choice and many get on just fine without it. I've come off my bike enough times where my helmet prevented a nasty bump to the head to wear one, but I suspect I'd have survived just fine without it. I view my helmet as insurance against my own incompetence - slipping on a wet manhole cover for example. For context I ride thousands of km a year for transport, but have done much riding as a conspicuous leisure activity too. I just wear a helmet and I'm not really bothered by it.
Ah, but it is new to Claude. Claude has main character vibes, so it is always about Claude. Isn't he clever?
Claude can stay in his own lane, I want to know how I can use this during development to simulate uploading photos, so Chrome only is okay for my purposes. But I want to know how to do it, not how much better Claude is than me, forever able to do anything I can do but better.
Context matters, and a big country house in England is not the same thing as a McMansion, unless it is an American inspired newbuild, and plenty exist.
In former times the servants lived in the top floors and worked in the basement floors of a city town house, with 'mews' nearby for the horses. A land owning family with servants was more like a 'small village' than a big house.
The big country house and the estate generally was built from the profits of slavery, so it was 'slavery all the way down', with the English 'slaves' called servants.
Every chunk of stone had to get there by train, canal or by horse power. Irish 'navvies' did the work, so another category of slaves.
Upkeep on these properties was a never ending task, so there was also a requirement for untold amount of handymen, gardeners and the rest of it. Just think of the lawn, which was beyond what the common man could dream of, most peasants did not have gardens as every inch of whatever land they had would be growing crops. The lawn, was a display that the landowner had that much land that he didn't need to have crops on it. With no lawnmowers or RoundUp, a lawn was quite a challenge, whereas today it is just an easy cop out, since RoundUp kills everything that is not a grass.
The whole point of America was 'no kings'. So why the McMansions is probably due to the lack of a class structure, since, if everyone (white male, northern European) is supposed to be equal, the only way to flex status is with a big truck and a McMansion with extra toys. Nobody is getting a medal from the king with a peerage in the House of Lords, are they?
Also, before WW1, in England there was a tradition of craftsmanship. All the guys that could do beautiful work in stone, wood and topiary died in WW1, taking their craft with them. This was not a problem as mechanisation meant that machines could make a lot of this stuff.
In today's world a very large townhouse or a OG English mansion is not going to work as a home. There is too much to clean, heat and maintain, plus, it actually is like a prison being that isolated. The scores of servants made sure these places were hives of activity, and viable as a community of sorts.
The McMansion is a very different beast. They are not good.
As for the article, it is useful in the context of the dreaded ballroom. Clearly there is a proportions issue. But look at the White House and how that works, with lots of people calling the place home and work. The original English Mansion was more like that, not just this stupidly vast space for two people to 'live' in.
My home town was famous for the red cloth that the British Army used to wear. This same red cloth was the main 'trade cloth' for the East India company and native peoples, the world over, just wanted it. The East India company wasn't paying for stuff in silver, the red cloth was worth more than that.
As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.
Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.
Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.
Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.
LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.
We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?
As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?
Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.
As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.
I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.
Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.
It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?
We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?
Nope.
Would any of it survive the test of time?
Nope.
An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that just is not nice. But, use an LLM and you can basically say 'that is a load of rubbish because you cheated'. Painful.
That aside, you do have something that could be really good. But you can't leave the reader underwhelmed or else they won't be back or signing up for more. Writing original content is hard. If I had to write an essay for school homework on my hometown's special red colour, it would take me all week to do research. Even then I would have barely scraped the surface. Writing a compelling essay would also require skill at writing, plus I would need someone else to proof-read, edit and fact check for me.
For the next colour I would be back to square one, and if this colour took me far from the history and culture of my home town, I might be way off the mark with assumptions made. Note that Winsor and Newton would not hire me, if writing that slow, unless I was a 'distinguished fellow' at some art place of note.
Too easy. In the UK there are far more torturous roundabouts, for example, Five Ways in Birmingham, notable because you have to inch forward up a hill, always in traffic, typically with a manual gearbox, to finally get to the roundabout where the three lanes of traffic seems to already be doing 50 mph, meaning that you have to channel your drag racing skills to just get on there, without slipping backwards, damaging the clutch or coming a cropper.
London has some specials too, including the traffic around Hyde Park Corner, which is like a roundabout in vacuum form. Should so much as a square foot of tarmac become vacant then it will magically suck in four taxis, two double decker buses and a dozen UberEats delivery guys, making any progress tough.
Chiswick roundabout, where the M4 motorway, gateway to the West, begins is also not for those lacking testicular fortitude, my mum got stuck going round and round that one, we weren't quite dizzy by the time we got off, but it was getting that way.
All is nothing though. You have got to do France, Arc de Triomphe. Cobblestones, many, many lanes, every car with dents in it and priority given to those entering the roundabout rather than those on it already. No American in an American vehicle would be able to make it through that one!
Not really, it is different in America, where everyone is utterly car dependent. Raise US fuel prices from barely nothing to barely nothing plus a tenth of a cent and TikTok explodes with Americans sat in cars, junk food in hand, saying some utter nonsense about how crraazy the new gas prices are.
Meanwhile, in Europe, where petrol prices have always been vastly higher than what any American has ever paid, if the price goes up, then meh. Same deal in Asia, it is not as if Japan has riots due to the price of 'gas'.
There is a funny side to this, sometimes untold atrocities are committed, maybe with a decapitation strike here, a double-tap on a school there, maybe with a few mosques for palate cleansing purposes, for nobody in America to care about that, just their gas prices.
Zoning comes into it too. Where I am, in the UK, there are many minimum wage jobs where the staff will be walking, getting the bus or getting the train to work. Apart from anything, many businesses just do not have car parking spaces for customers, never mind staff.
The class of journalists are heavily car dependent though, so, for them, gas prices are going to be huge news, because it affects them. They just have to go to a garage forecourt, interview a few 'talking heads' about how atrocious the prices are, and they have their story.
I write this having not been to a petrol station in thirty years, and currently living in a block of twelve flats (apartments) where nobody has a car. We do have a fantastic selection of hedgehogs, foxes, rabbits, squirrels and birds though, all alive due to the magic of practically no cars.
But none of us are going to make the news for saying 'meh, keep Hormuz closed, good riddance to it!', whilst feeding monkey nuts to named squirrels (on TikTok). If we were slurping on McDepression Meals, moaning about gas prices from a massive truck that cost $50K, then we would get 'heard'.
Have you considered the fact the majority of the US is not designed for public transit, or it doesn’t exist at all? Most cities aren’t even walkable let alone practical for bike transit due to long distance commutes and lack of infrastructure?“hurrr americans are just addicted to cars” is a really reductive take.
Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
After Vietnam, many accessibility features for folks in wheelchairs were mandated, this also favours the bicycle.
Grades in America are excellent for cycling. If you a mere mortal, going over an Alp in Europe will take all day and leave you pretty much unable to do much the following day. Meanwhile, in the USA, you can cycle over the major mountain ranges with considerable ease, when compared to the Alps.
Grid patterns are also most welcome on a bicycle. I know suburban McMansion land doesn't have grids, and getting lost in those places is cycling hell because the houses all look the same, however, Big Auto made these absurd developments possible, along with some white flight from cities where the black man dared to move to.
As for long distance commutes, what a waste. And for what? Many service sector jobs just don't warrant people driving two hours each way just to earn a crust. It all comes at a cost to community.
Although there is cradle to grave car dependency in the USA, one true fact about American people is that they are the best when it comes to hospitality. This matters on a bicycle and, sadly, in Europe, there just isn't the same hospitality.
All considered, warts and all, America is excellent for cycling, at least in the nine Westernmost states. The roads generally come with a handy 'edge' which serves as a cycle lane and the people are fab.
Bring back the streetcar, the broadway railways and Main Street. Kick the corporations to the kerb and the job is a good one. The richest country in the world got to the moon many decades ago. The roads already exist, the space for railways exists, what doesn't exist is the mindset, which has been reduced to cradle-to-grave car dependency.
Yes, societies have made different choices over the course of 100+ years. How do you suggest a city like say, LA is fixed? What is a commuter from dayton ohio to cincinnati supposed to do?
The gp comment made it sound like something americans just choose, when the reality of the situation is it is a necessary part of life. The people participating in it didn’t make this choice. Literally everyone wants something better and no one wants to be beholden to $6 gas prices.
They do choose it though. Infra policies and budget allocations don’t just grow on trees. Every decision that got us here has been “chosen by Americans”.
LA could be fixed incrementally by improving frequency, signal priority, and dedicated lanes for buses. Then go from there, but technically there’s enough right of way to build out the rail network by sacrificing the monstrous car network.
The reality is that there will be short-term inconvenience for long-term gain, and it will only get worse the deeper we dig our heels in. And if there’s one thing that Americans hate: it’s short-term inconvenience.
Voters certainly don’t choose it. This is chosen by unelected councils appointed by representatives with motives not driven by the same motives as voters. What is to be done about that?
Most comprehensive write up of JPEG et al. I have ever come across.
I think the MozJPEG compression optimisations deserves a mention, as does where we started, with RLE encoding for printer things.
Also important for my personal understanding of JPEG is the context: slow CPUs and analogue screens. OG JPEG was optimised for this, MozJPEG changed the look up tables and the ubiquitous 'turbo' JPEG library to use a few more CPU cycles and save a few more bytes, whilst fixing the banding that was actually okay in the analogue days of old CRT monitors.
As per your points, Europe really can't compete, particularly when power is considered. However, frontier models that require city-sized data centres might not be all they are cracked up to be.
In China they seem to be nonchalantly doing a lot with AI for specific rather than 'ask me anything' tasks. To them, they are quite used to everyday applications that work well within limited domains, no vast data centre needed, just on-device. Hence the hype is no big deal.
Europe needs to think again about what can be done to make Europe attractive for software development, and I have seen no helpful encouragement from UK or European governments over the last few decades. No word of a lie, all we got in the UK was the BBC Micro, way back in the early 1980s, and since then tech has been culturally uncool.
This cultural aspect has not gone away, if a guy is a software engineer then he isn't going to get lucky with the lasses, they will run a mile.
What gets me is that the UK or places in Europe such as those places where finance matters, could have had active policing and law enforcement of data breaches and hacking, with sensible standards for storing customer data, making Europe the best place to host your data, purely for the legal protections. But we ended up with cookie notices and anti-slavery statements.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
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