Good point. Can only trust the device and service as far as the company. And nobody is giving good reason to trust Cape.

Statistics, anyone?

If we’re a simple ‘normal’ population, your wife’s idea holds; there should be 1 in 1000 athlete in every 1000 people. to get a 1 in 1000 athletic performance with a 50% confidence you need only take 693 samples. So if many thousands have played, you’d expect to have seen peak performance.

But we aren’t distributed like that. Z score analysis of a measurable sport indicates a known top athlete like Usain Bolt is in the order of 5 standard deviations from the norm (depending what we consider the norm data set). That’s more like 1 in a million to one in 10 million to get a Bolt. Which implies millions need to try (and train) to get a Bolt level performance (3 humans in that tier so far, implies between 3 & 30 million have tried). So a Bolt seems to be reaching human limits, reinforcing the wife position position for that sport - we are approaching the human limit.

But wait - that is a popular sport, with a single simple measure. If there were multiple relevant independent measures (say hitting and pitching, or running and throwing), even just 2, the odds become astronomical of finding the best. A dual 1 in 1000 is a 1 in a million. A dual z=5 athlete is 1 in 12 trillion.

So the implication is that for more complex sports where multiple attributes apply, it is much more likely we have not yet seen peak human capabilities. It’s also much harder to measure and recognize when we do - so props to the legendary players, and keep searching for them. We won’t know how good they really were until we sample (play) the sport for hundreds or thousands of years. Finding peak is incredibly lucky/unlikely for our most popular complex sports.

Thanks for the feedback. For clarity, Cape is offering a GrapheneOS installed out of box to the user for a surcharge. This is what connected the title: https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-supports-grapheneos

Not quite. Dark forest says it’s dangerous out there, so everyone else is quiet. Not that we’re dangerous, but that we’re at risk by being noisy.

We pose no real threat to any other civilization, we can’t get to them.

It’s possible we’re being avoided because we’re loathsome in some way or various ways, but that’s not dark forest.

It’s also possible we pose a risk we don’t understand (disease, culture, loudness) so we’re avoided / quarantined, but that is also not dark forest.

More like Ostracized Planet.

Turns out this is also the answer to the Fermi paradox. We’re quarantined.

Also, burying doesn’t work in all geography, despite assumptions from some know it all folks.

I grew up in a filled in wetland with buried lines. Between occasionally having outages due to water affecting the grid, and lines that like to resurface as soils sink and flow, it wasn’t ideal and probably explains some Florida grid choices.

Then I lived in the mountains and in dense forest. Good luck luck burying lines in rugged mountains full of granite and ravine.

And heavy forest is also an issue. You gonna go around all the trees? Cut them down?

Grid reliability and line safety is a serious issue. We lose people and towns (see - Paradise fire) when it isn’t right. But the obvious solution in your corner of the world doesn’t work everywhere. Redundant connections, infrastructure maintenance, local supply all matter to many.

And yes, good reliable backup options, including the massive investment in the driveway, can and do certainly help. As an EV driver who has lived through many days of blackout, I can say that at first, the EV is super helpful. Warm up, charge the phone battery, even run an extension cord in for smaller loads. But this won’t last long. After a day or two, charging the EV is its own problem.

I also have a (small affordable) backup generator! And I know how to use it for critical loads (fridge, wifi / comms, light, chargers). When I was in more vulnerable places, I had a backup backup generator which allowed small engine work on the primary during blackouts, and with both firing meant I could trickle charge the car during day and use the battery for silent backup overnight.

I work on this stuff. Pretty interesting situation with Chinese competition.

Western culture has both normalized a safety first culture and sensationalized all flying accidents. FAA was built to uphold these things. The barriers to entry are so high, that effectively zero new companies or innovative products were successful for 50 years. Today tech companies are leaning in to lead the new markets, but it takes billions to get through the barriers, and most find it better to launch in less regulated markets. Zipline from CA, for example, has been flying medical drone delivery in Africa for many years.

Chinese leadership decide what priorities are, and are willing to tolerate some failure and loss. They bring products to market quicker internally, the products are less mature. This gives them the opportunity to iterate in the field, which is a competitive advantage. But with lower barriers to entry may come inferior products, and time will tell whether those orgs iterate to succeed faster than Western companies aiming for high initial capabilities, or if the Western companies have enough war chests to carry them to market with superior products or if they burn up trying.

At the moment, my career hinges on the Western approach, but I very much appreciate every step to minimize barriers.

And don’t worry so much, honestly. These things will be comparatively safe before they drop off your order or pick up your kids, no riskier than the ride in today. Unless you are an early adopter is a less regulated market, then keep your head up.

I remember, surprisingly, wondering wtf. "It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.

The ‘Fluorescent’ theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn’t have a catchy name, so I’ve never heard anything about it."

The underfunded school, or its expensive insurance will pay, raising rates and eroding the service of public education further.

I found out here in CA public schools are paying several percent of total budget to cover liability from the past where kids were harmed.

These are not for profit, these are not businesses. When they pay, the taxpayers pay, and the kids lose service.

But whatever, she got hers. Big smile.

But, it doesn’t change much, really. Folks need to move on from charge rate fetish or go deeper.

My >5 year old Tesla does 250kW, this says 1000kW But - you dont actually charge 4x faster at 1 MW. Nor do you want to. 250kW doesn’t charge 2.5 faster than 100kW either, in my experience. This is because this is the limit, not the average. And the averages are slower for many reasons. Including you dont want to slam energy into your very expensive battery that much faster than you take it out, it will wear it out.

And you know what? 100kW is good enough to charge over a meal or store visit. Packs are usually less than 100 kWh, and sessions are <<100%. And plugging in longer at level 2 / 11kW is better for the battery and grid if you’re in no hurry.

See also: ranker.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranker

This seems like the most relevant fact that most folks dont know. Games industry is WAY bigger than streaming. Digital media companies know this, and want to get a piece of the market.

• In 2022, the global gaming industry generated an estimated $184.4 billion.

• In 2022, the global recorded music industry generated $26.2 billion.

• In 2022, the global movie industry generated $26 billion in box office revenue.

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesagencycouncil/2023/11/17/the-gaming-industry-a-behemoth-with-unprecedented-global-reach/

@pluralistic hangs out on Masto and shares his weekly posts and updates.

And he’s right. Corporations enshittified the internet.

Precision and volume are the key metrics. They have precision here, but it looks like they won’t get volume.

“E-beam lithography machines cannot produce chips at a large scale like Dutch company ASML’s DUV and EUV lithography systems, but they excel in the testing stage of production, offering high-precision circuit patterning and design flexibility. Priced lower than imported machines, Xizhi can pattern circuit lines as narrow as 8 nanometres, with a positioning accuracy of 0.6 nanometres – matching international standards.”

This is very true for me. Same for a lot of history museums, which are full of historic arts and crafts.

Like, some native art is just old craft, not actually good art to me, but some ancient cultures had a wild perspective and the art matches.

Elbows, gentlemen!

Legends, wish I heard the conversation to go with the pic.