You're right - I apologize. Sycophancy is indeed a better word to describe my behaviour. Would like me to rewrite the article and replace the usage of flattery with sycophancy?
A similar but more recent career trajectory: Elliot Hill, the incoming Nike CEO started at Nike as a store sales intern and was already head of Nike EMEA retail by around age 34 (in the year 2000)
Last night from London the most I could see with my naked eye was diffuse patches of faint pink and green - sometimes highlighted by marginally brighter white-pink streaks that cut across the patches. The camera however picked them up as dramatic bright pink/green columns of light with rarely any trace of the blackness of the sky.
When I was in Iceland a few years ago though - I distinctly remember being easily able to make out super bright and well define dancing wavy bands of bright green, pink, purple and orange (with high contrast compared to the surrounding dark sky) with my naked eye. The camera again picked up the same thing but with the blackness of the sky covered by a green /pink coloured background - something definitely brighter but less well defined that what I could see with my naked eye (and the camera images were not necessarily superior than what I could see in this case).
TL:DR; I’ve seen both versions of what you describe with my naked eye and it’s definitely not bullshit! When people say they can’t see anything like the pictures - I would have to guess that they either have never been in an area with significant activity or maybe didn’t have dark enough skies without light pollution.
Reminds me of the time I ordered a $5 nano drone from AliExpress, and after 2 months Indian customs sent me a very threatening ‘show cause’ notice demanding I pay $50 as a fine and appear before the customs officer or whoever to explain why I should not be prosecuted for the illegal importation of illegal goods (no drone with the letter of course). I opted to ignore the matter
I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.
So I’m reasonably sure some some customs officer’s kid ended up enjoying the $5 drone I ordered. The circle of life I guess?
Holidays homes exists because owners are speculating that tourists will pay a premium that compensates for the time that the rooms stay unoccupied and that overall it will be more profitable than renting it out for ‘100% occupancy’ to a local tenant at a lower daily rate (or equivalent monthly rent)
If a town gets popular among rich tourists and supply remains limited, the tourists will price out the locals (as is already apparent)
Zoning/limiting the number of airbnbs in proportion to the the total housing stock can be one solution to stop the tourist industry from gobbling everything else up (at the expense of the tourist economy)
Not an economist, but an extreme solution to achieve 100% efficiency, i.e occupancy would be for everyone (including locals) to become nomads and be willing to move homes everyday based on daily spot rates for housing and take up any unoccupied house that day based on what they can afford. (I.e a combined market where tourists and locals both live the hotel/Airbnb lifestyle). Sounds horrible though.
The apparent inefficiency (in terms of unnoccupied rooms/houses) IMO arises from the very real inconvenience and costs involved in moving houses too frequently. Contrast that with tourists who want to definitely want to stay in a city only for a few days. The two classes will always compete without intervention that favors one over the other - or tries to find some arbitrary balance
Plus every bugfix that eventually gets discovered now requires an update to be shipped to end users.
Atleast with websites, devs can ship a fix on the server immediately.
So the impact of different browsers behaving differently is much greater when distributing binaries with Neutralinojs. Having a bundled browser (eg Electron) atleast mitigates this vector for bugs
In London, Citymapper shows the cost of each trip which can be very useful as there are often many routes that might take a similar amount of time but cost different (eg. sometimes you can take skip zone 1 for a few extra minutes or understand why you're paying extra when taking a train instead of tube in South London). It also recommends the best exit to take quite accurately for train/tube stations.
Citymapper is also much quicker to incorporate changed schedules and excludes delayed / cancelled trains from results within minutes of the changes being announced.
For altered schedules, Google is not only slower to react but also just posts a generic link to the TfL website - and you then have to parse the TfL notice yourself to understand which stations / bus stops are closed etc. The routes suggested by Google also still include cancelled trains / buses - it's your job to double check by visiting the TfL / train operator's websites.
Not sure how Tesla or even Twitter is exposed to India for Musk wanting to please the Indian government.
As big as India is, it keeps being considered as the ‘next billion’ revenue generators for tech companies - but not sure when that day will actually arrive.
Teslas aren’t for sale in India, not that many will be afford it (besides the few virtue signaling billionaires / millionaires who might buy it after acquiring their dream Ferrari or whatever). Nor does India contribute to the supply chain AFAIK.
Pretty sure Indians don’t contribute to significant % of ad or subscription revenue for Twitter or other tech companies either (compared to USA or Europe - outliers being websites like Quora) given the low purchasing power. I recall New York and London together making more $$$ in a day for Uber than the whole of India
So not sure why tech companies are afraid of taking on India, especially Musk. Or maybe just doing what the India govt wants instead of fighting is another way of signaling that they don’t care what happens in India anymore
The reply by the Chromium engineer (from Google? - I'm not sure) to a long thread of people from several companies quantifying the benefits of JPEG XL and requesting that it be supported is just sad:
> Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:
> - Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely
> - There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL
> - The new image format does not bring sufficient increm
ental benefits over > existing formats to warrant enabling it by default
> - By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome
---
If I were to put on my tinfoil hat, I would imagine the people involved here are desperate to put 'Removed unused code and removed maintenance burden by X%' in there performance reviews for this year