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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Traction is not the only factor. How does this new tire affect steering? How much noise does it make as it rolls on the ground? How much noise does it make as air flows over it at high speed? How durable is it? How does it handle high rotational speeds? How does it handle impact? How does it handle braking? How does it handle different weather and road conditions, different temperatures? How does it treat the road surface? And can it be manufactured at such huge scales? There are plenty of reasons why it might very well be completely unsuitable as car tires.



  • It’s a very crude way of detecting presence for a variety of reasons, and likely won’t be as useful as you imagine.

    The biggest problem is how modern smartphones handle networking when they’re locked. They enter a power saving state where they don’t respond to all pings, or they respond late enough that the pinger decides the device is just not there. Of course there are ways around it, but those are things you need to do explicitly so it won’t work on all devices until you’ve taken the time to set it up.

    And since it detects a mobile device’s existence in the local wireless network rather than the actual presence of a human being, it’s not very flexible at all. What if you want to detect the presence of a guest? Are you gonna make sure they’re on your network with their devices set up to properly respond to pings? What if you forgot to turn on your phone’s wifi after turning it off?

    I mean it does work once you’ve set it up, but do expect it to have a very limited scope in what you can and cannot do with it.




  • Oculus headsets are for gaming, mostly. There’s a rather humongous social and practical gap between wearing one of those in the privacy of your living room and casually wearing one outside in public. There never was such a massive gap for the iPad or whatever. Maybe if we were already used to the likes of Google glass, but we all know what happened to that one.

    I’m honestly not laughing at zuck, at least not for this one. Besides not believing it’s not gonna catch on, at least not this first generation, I’m actively hoping it doesn’t. The world absolutely does not need people walking around in public with a dozen cameras attached to their faces, with LCD screens between their eyes and mine at all times. I wouldn’t be comfortable with that shit and I don’t want to get comfortable with it either.


  • None of those had a point nearly as questionable as this headset thing. The ipod was an advanced mp3 player, which was very popular and common tech at the time. The iPhone was an advanced phone with a large touchscreen, which was rapidly becoming very common at the time. The iPad was an advanced tablet, which was a concept that had already been tried many times by many other companies by then. The air pods are just advanced wireless earbuds, which nobody could ever deny were rapidly becoming more popular.

    VR headsets are fundamentally different from all of those, in that there’s no technological and social precedence quite like it. People used mp3 players and watches and phones before Apple did something new. Nobody was wondering the point of a better mp3 player that could hold massive amounts of songs. But the history of humankind says nothing about the masses’ willingness to walk around in public with big ass high tech ski goggles strapped to their faces. VR is much, much more unknown compared to those.


  • Drugs kill germs by messing with their biological systems. They target specific processes, like preventing enzyme from properly bonding so that it fails to do something important in the reproductive cycle or whatever. If a new generation of bacteria evolve such that that specific process works differently, it could kill the effectiveness of the drug. And that’s what happens when something becomes resistant to a certain drug. Suddenly the aforementioned enzyme and the reproductive cycle are ever so slightly different, and as a result the drug can’t do what it used to do, at least not as effectively.

    But UV just straight up breaks up the bonds between molecules. There’s nothing biological about it, its destruciveness is entirely physical. The photons get in there and start destroying molecules, living or not. It’s not easy or likely at all for a strain of bacteria to randomly evolve resistance against physical destruction at a molecular level. They’re generally too small to have a protective layer to shield them against that, like our skin does.