Bluestrike2
I'm still not quite sure what calculation would have a marked location like that as a "no-go," and re-reading the error messages doesn't really clarify the logic. When it says "too tall to clear safely from there" I'm reading that as the building is too tall and thus you can't fly above it, but that's clearly wrong on two levels. Likewise, the building height + 400 feet was still well below the floors of the relevant Class B and Class C airspace shelves around SFO and OAK. Best guess is that the 80 foot exclusion zone around a building the program applies is probably to blame.
There are some other problems I noticed, but I'll send those to the OP via the feedback form on the site.
> Your landing point is 7 ft (2 m) from a 164 ft (50 m)-tall building — taller than drones may fly, so we keep at least 80 ft (25 m) from it.
The numbers are from just clicking a random spot, but I'm kind of confused about how you're interpreting the regulations. In the US, the maximum allowable altitude is 400 feet AGL per § 107.51(b), albeit with a structure exemption for Part 107 pilots. Within a 400 foot radius around a structure, you can fly 400 feet above said structure's maximum height. That drops down to 400 feet AGL the moment you go beyond that radius, however.
Setting aside both the math error with the building height and the structure exemption, what's the basis for the exclusion zone that's being referenced? Granted, you absolutely want horizontal separation near buildings to account for winds that can easily slam a drone into a window, but the error message could imply that your 80 foot clearance is a nonexistent regulatory rule. I'm guessing that's just a conservative safety margin to make flight planning easier, but you should explicitly identify it as such so as to avoid ambiguity or the implication that it's a prescriptive FAA regulation. There's a reason why clarity and precision are so critical in pretty much any aviation document.
Anyhow, it's an interesting concept, one that I could see it being useful in planning but I'd double check some of the altitude logic. I'd also add references to error messages that point to the relevant regulations that trigger the warnings.
0. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
The cinematographer would have composed shots for the main 1.43:1 aspect ratio first while taking into consideration the other aspect ratios (the viewfinder will overlay the different framelines to help make those decisions). The DP then gets to go back in during post and recompose each shot for the different formats as needed, tweaking what was originally shot to do their best to maintain a cohesive feel and emphasis across each crop. With five different formats for The Odyssey[0], I'm sure that was a fun experience.
It's not that one format is inherently better. The frame is a storytelling tool, and you can use different aspect ratios to influence how audiences perceive the film.[1] It's when you start changing it afterwards with little regard for the director's original intentions that we see problems. The old pan-and-scan movie releases for VHS or cheap 16:9 conversions are frustrating examples.
0. https://www.odysseymovie.co.uk/explore-formats/
1. https://www.cined.com/aspect-ratio-as-a-storytelling-tool-a-...
I really struggle to understand what's so damned difficult about this. They've admitted touchscreens annoy the hell out of drivers and capacitive touch buttons are even worse. Is it really going to take yet another lifecycle before they actually do something about it?
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
LLMs don't, and so the tropes get repeated ad nauseam. It doesn't help that social media posts are a huge part of their training data, and there's a large body of research on how Twitter and social media in general have altered grammar and sentence construction towards patterns more commonly found in oral-based traditions as users sought out ways to make their voices heard.
It's easy to imagine a more polished version of a line like "It's not X. It's Y!" being tossed out during a speech precisely because it can be dramatic and punchy. When it's done in every other paragraph, however, it can become rather disconcerting.
> If FSD (Supervised) was active at any point within five seconds leading up to a collision event, Tesla considers the collision to have occurred with FSD (Supervised) engaged for purposes of calculating collision rates for the Vehicle Safety Report. This approach accounts for the time required for drivers to recognize potential hazards and take manual control of the vehicle. This calculation ensures that our reported collision rates for FSD (Supervised) capture not only collisions that occur while the system is actively controlling the vehicle, but also scenarios where a driver may disengage the system or where the system aborts on its own shortly before impact.[0]
In theory, that should more than cover the common perception-response times of around ~1 to 1.5 seconds used as a rule of thumb for most car accidents. But I'm quite curious what research has been done on the disengagement process as driver assistance systems return control to the driver and its impact on driver response times and their overall alertness.
If drivers trust the car to handle braking and steering for you, are we really going to see perception–response times that low, or have we changed the behavior being measured? Instead of timing a direct response to a stimulus, we’re now including the time required to re-engage their attention (even if they're nominally "paying attention"), transition to full control of the vehicle, and then react to the stimulus that they're now barreling down on.
For that matter, this approach is making the implicit assumption that pressing the brake pedal or turning the steering while is a sign of now-active control and awareness. Is it? Or could it just be a sort of instinctual reaction? I've been in the passenger seat when a driver has slammed on the brakes, only to find myself moving my right foot as if to hit an imaginary brake pedal even knowing I obviously wasn't the one driving. Hell, I remember my mom doing that back when I was learning to drive during normal braking.
0. https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety#:~:text=within five seconds
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
Em dashes are strong; they can take the abuse. While I'm right there with you on dreaming of a renaissance in quality writing, that's likely more fantastical than my own hopes that we'd see a resurgence in quality em dash usage. At this point, I'd probably settle for outright stagnation in writing ability.
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
Sigh. That's not what I claimed. I can accept his mother's limited statement from the charging document at face value, and still point out that we still know very little about his ideological leanings. Why did she consider him moving left? Was it just because of gay rights? Did his other views shift as well? Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I have no clue, but I want answers to these questions if only because they can contribute to the effort of better understanding radicalization pathways and the process by which some random kid decided to commit an act of political violence.
We know that shooters rarely have cohesive, logical ideologies. The fact that a shooter decides to become a shooter in the first place is evidence that their personal ideology has shifted in some truly extreme ways that puts them--or should put them--outside the normal political discourse. Put another way, radicalization can take people to some truly unexpected places and it's entirely reasonable to want a nuanced view before jumping to affix labels because while labels can help us understand some things, they can also obscure other aspects and create entirely separate problems. Especially when those labels then get for partisan purposes and to undermine the political discourse.
As for the casings? We've got memes and video game references.[0] The most overtly political parts are "hey fascist, CATCH" with a video game code thrown in for good measure and an 19th century folksong that later became an anti-Mussolini resistance anthem. The others are memes. Do they all have meaning for the shooter? Obviously, since he went through the effort to engrave the casings. At the same time, their immaturity and oddness should be pointed out as well, as they undermine the idea that this was some sort of rational consequence of a cohesive political ideology.
> Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
Perhaps you should re-read the sentence before trying to read something into it that wasn't present? My point was simple: even setting aside the ethical aspects of the question (simple answer: outside of baby Hitler hypotheticals, it's bad--and even with Baby Hitler, most people will acknowledge they're trying to leverage his future actions to make literal baby murder pencil out because they recognize that baby murder is a prima facie immoral act), political assassination is an insanely stupid means to shift public opinion and pretty much any politician, activist, or advisor--whether on the right or left--will tell you the same thing. Feel free to substitute right-leaning for left-leaning in my original comment if "left-leaning" made the sentence read as something I hadn't intended. I certainly didn't intend to suggest that somehow only left-leaning folks are capable of recognizing that political assassination is a very bad idea with tons of unintended consequences. Anyone with even a basic grasp on history is more than capable of knowing how dumb it is.
Hell, we've got literal case studies showing how political assassinations tend to blow up in everyone's face. The CIA has a list of coups and political assassinations that pretty much all resulted in serious blowback that undermined their intended outcomes--and often resulted in the very thing they wanted to prevent.
So, yeah, I think that if the shooter shopped the idea that murdering Charlie Kirk would somehow magically make things better for gay or trans people to gay and trans advocacy groups--or influential figures on the left more broadly--they'd almost unanimously tell him he's a moron and notify the FBI even if they thought Kirk was a pox on American political discourse. It's an insane proposition, and only in the mind of someone who has serious problems would it somehow make sense.
I also think that the reverse situation--where the shooter wanted to benefit some conservative constituency or ideology by murdering a liberal political activist and shopped the idea around conservative politicians and activists--would likely result in the same call to the FBI.
0. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-bu...
The charging document[0] said that his mother claimed "that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented." There's also a text message he sent, which said "since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga." That's it. Acquaintances said "he wasn't too fond of Trump or Charlie [Kirk]," but we still haven't seen much that explains the specifics of why beyond the gay and trans rights angle. A former high school classmate said "[w]hen I knew him and his family, they were like diehard Trump" and that he was politically conservative and supported Trump "ahead of the 2020 election."[1]
As for what changed and why, we don't know. Did he stop supporting Trump because of gay and trans rights? Did he still believe in other conservative ideas? Simply labeling him as a leftist implies a cohesive ideology, but ideology is rarely so simple or straightforward even for normal people who don't decide to commit political assassinations.
Beyond that, a lot of even ideologically-motivated shooters have some awfully peculiar and non-cohesive ideologies. If the suspect agrees with 80% of a particular tribe's most common views, but that last 20% consists of some truly batshit ideas that have very little if any support, are they still a member of that tribe? Would that tribe even want them? Would they themselves want to be part of that tribe? Plenty of conservatives who believed fully in the movement's ideas broke with Trump in 2016 solely on the basis of his personal character.
They can also grab onto ideas from other tribes, to the point where investigators wind up crawling through something that's less a cohesive political ideology and more a smorgasbord of ideas they pinned together. I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
0. https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/...
1. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/12/us/tyler-robinson-charlie-kir...
Modern copper-based treatments--e.g. ACQ or CA--still cause skin and eye irritation. If you try to sand it so that people sitting in your new chair don't get a nasty splinter somewhere best avoided, you can compromise the effectiveness of the treatment (even when the treatment gets full penetration, it's still most effective on the outer layers you're now sanding away). Plus, while the dust you create when working with it might not include arsenic, it's still nasty to breathe in and can cause respiratory problems. Staining P/T wood can be a whole ordeal in itself, and because interact much more closely with furniture than say a deck, any imperfections will be more noticeable.
Even then, it's not like P/T furniture isn't going to require ongoing maintenance in the future. At which point, you're better off with something like cedar or white oak. Hell, with a decent outdoor grade finish and proper care, even untreated pine is going to last for years without rotting away underneath you.
Since Trump is relying on declarations of national emergencies for his tariffs, there's the question whether it's even legal given that Berman Amendments to the IEEPA[0] explicitly exempt "informational materials, including but not limited to, publications, *films*, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, compact disks, CD ROMs, artworks, and news wire feeds" from the President's authority under IEEPA.[1]
Even if we set that aside and ignore the likely legal challenges, how would you actually implement them? It's not like a movie or TV episode "produced" overseas gets transmitted into the US each time somebody wants to watch it. It's a digital file, and you're really only sending it once. So when do you tariff the damn thing, how do you manage to actually do it since there's not exactly a literal port of entry for the internet, and what exactly do you value it at? The system isn't built to track and tariff info being uploaded to random servers, and making it work would require all sorts of new law.
Plus, what's the legal definition of "production" he wants to use? What constitutes foreign production? Can some of the producing just be done remotely? What if raw footage is uploaded instead and then it's edited here? Or a nearly finished copy that just needs something minor done to be considered ready? Hollywood accountants are in a league of their own. Put them in a room with lawyers and accountants whose focus is the creative eccentricities of tariff engineering--hello, chicken tax people[0]--and I shudder to imagine what they'd get up to.
We're only a few months in at this point, and I feel like I'm losing my mind.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/2333...
Plus, the hardware is just the initial starting point. Your initial outlay will quickly be eclipsed by the dev hours spent working on Vision versions of your app(s), and that's when the opportunity costs become particularly noticeable. Time spent on a Vision app that may have no real market for years is time you could be spending adding features, testing changes, fixing bugs, marketing, etc. Skipping on Vision Pro is really a no-brainer for most indie developers, at least for the foreseeable future.
In some things, expectations are made to be disappointed. This is one of those.
We know that people use all sorts of cognitive shortcuts to make processing their environments easier. It doesn't matter if you're smart, dumb, foolish, or perfectly average. It's just how our brains have evolved to function, and companies have been consulting with industrial and organizational psychologists for decades to help them optimize their marketing and business strategies to maximize the chances that those shortcuts play out in a way that breaks in their favor. Before I/O psychologists, companies tried to do the same by guess and trial and error...and they stumbled upon lots of strategies that were later confirmed by psychological experiments.
Cereal boxes marketed to children have cartoon characters whose eyes are drawn looking down so as to appear as if they're making eye contact with kids walking down the cereal aisle.[0] There are all sorts of "tricks" commonly used by salespeople selling things to sophisticated buyers who are capable of recognize them for what they are. Why did pharma reps take doctors to dinner and give them cheap pens and swag? Or consider the success of psychological pricing[1] and how those strategies somehow manage to be successful despite it being commonly accepted wisdom that odd prices (i.e. $1.99 instead of $2) is a marketing gimmick. We know it's a gimmick, and yet, it still has an impact on our buying behavior.
Yes, the text is there below it, but the whole point of a dark pattern is to manipulate a large enough percentage of buyers/users in a way that generates more revenue than is lost due to any frustration or annoyance created by the same patterns. Most people skim through websites, pluck out key words, and continue on. We can bemoan people for not reading the fine print, but that's not going to change the behavior.
As for the beef metaphor, per unit pricing can absolutely be used to trip up would-be buyers into buying a bit more than they planned. Not because the foolish shoppers don't know any better, but because mixed units usually require a bit more cognitive engagement. Grocery stores absolutely recognize that and benefit from it. On the other hand, you can't really sell beef in a way other than by weight, so it's the opportunity for abuse is much more limited.
> Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed. There's approximately zero people who were aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.
Sure, because Adobe purposely hides information about the fee. That's one of the dark pattern at play. In the absence of that information, users will insert their own expectations to create meaning. If there's a fee, we'd expect it's probably a reasonable one (even if we have countless examples in our lives of how fees can be anything but reasonable). Does half the annual cost of a subscription seem reasonable to most people? Would that be most people's first guess? Probably not. I might not have been clear about this in my original comment, but there are multiple dark patterns at work here.
> This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each other",[...]
That particular dark pattern is less about people confusing two different numbers with each other when they're directly in front of them, so much as it is about giving you two different numbers to remember two weeks after you've made your decision and gone on with your life. Literally nobody on the planet is going to keep the free trial or cancellation period as a mental priority over the course of two weeks, so it becomes little more than a random thought at the back of your mind. At best, you might jot it down or set aside the receipt until closer to the deadline. The pattern's purpose is that, if you think of the cancellation/trial periods at all, the numbers will be easily conflated. Think about the times in your life when you've asked yourself something like did I see/do/hear [insert thing] last Monday or was it Tuesday? and weren't quite confident in your answer.
Dark patterns doesn't have to trip up all subscribers or even most of them. But if it trips up a some of them, well, Adobe isn't going to complain about the opportunity. Multiple, more subtle dark patterns together can work just as effectively as one particularly vicious one. They can even be preferable, in that they won't piss off your customers nearly as much, either on their own or as a whole.
0. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/04/food-psychologists-...
Is it the most manipulative dark pattern in e-commerce? Hardly--there are plenty far more vicious--but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.
"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the main pricing page[0]. You've now been primed to focus on the $59.99 price. Only when you select a plan and a modal pops up do you see that there's a separate monthly option available from the annual, billed monthly option that's been helpfully pre-selected or a third annual, prepaid option.
The point is to quickly shepherd subscribers through the payment process. The user sees the $59.99 option they expected is pre-selected, so most hit continue and move on. If they look beyond the price in bold to the plan descriptions in smaller italics, well, there are literally decades of eye tracking studies showing users skim websites rather than carefully reading every single word. The price in bold draws in the eye, the word "monthly" is present so the user catches the word, and then they move on to the continue button.
Adobe could have easily labeled the plan Annual, billed in 12 installments or even Annual, billed in monthly installments to better differentiate the two options. They didn't for a reason. The word "monthly" comes with certain expectations. Using it for both the actual monthly plan and the default annual, billed monthly plan allows those expectations to bleed over to both.
While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days, you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to any point during the payment process up until the sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms were they present.
Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee. That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription Terms page.[1]
Adobe could easily just choose to settle for a straight-up monthly payment plan with no bullshit and completely sidestep recurring--but largely toothless, given the state of most alternatives to their software--criticism over their billing practices. They could eliminate the dark patterns and make their plan selection and payment process more transparent. They don't, presumably because those patterns generate more revenue than the lost goodwill they create is worth. That goodwill is diffused, and even if people grumble about it online, it generally doesn't rise to the level of leaving.
If you know the tree is going to immediately start dying, you're just going to find the cheapest, least healthy sapling at the nursery. Had they let you wait until the tree is more likely to survive, there's a better chance you'd be willing to spend a bit more to buy an older/larger sapling that'll look better and provide more shade from the start. Plus, the temporary tree slowly dying would probably be less visually appealing than an empty spot for a few months.
There are reasons why we plant street trees: improved aesthetics, increased home value, shade along the street and sidewalks, traffic calming effects, etc. By ignoring the reason behind them and just focusing on checking the box, your HOA was just begging for some malicious compliance that undermined the benefits of the replacement tree.
The original article suggests that Ukraine may end up having to replace the electronic countermeasures hardware to get around this in the future, so I'd expect any attempts to "un-brick"/work around the lack of support will eventually be along those lines, even if it results in some performance degradation.
No matter how they approach this, it's going to be a horrifically difficult and expensive task.
0. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-to-withho...
The immediate answer is that we simply weren't interested in supporting major new manned missions. Manned spaceflight in general requires serious, ongoing political support across administrations. At the height of the space race, public support pretty much never rose above 50 percent in the United States.[1] The literal high mark was 53% immediately after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon, which is honestly mind-boggling to think about. We've completely white-washed the existence of serious political opposition[1] to the Apollo program that plagued it from the beginning to the end because--looking back--it seems almost absurd, as if the very idea that half the country had no interest in going to the moon is an insult to the American psyche.
It's honestly amazing that we managed to follow up with the Space Shuttle at all. The STS program was shaped by a great many compromises NASA had to make in order to elicit political and military support. John Logsdon's After Apollo is a wonderful read on the subject.
Anyhow, it's not like we can't go back. It's not like orbital mechanics changed on us at some point and now we're all stuck in LEO. It's just a political choice, and we can make a new one whenever we want. It's just hard, in large part because we don't have the cold war and constant fear of imminent nuclear war to push the program through congress.
Beyond the political, to go back means redesigning everything that was done for Apollo. That's not a slight on American engineering or manufacturing capabilities. Everything--from the Saturn V, to the lunar module, and the countless pieces of equipment that helped get both where they needed to go--was designed for the manufacturing capabilities and techniques of the 1960s. You can't just grab the plans for the old Rocketdyne F-1 and start building them anew. The welds alone[2] represent a fundamental shift in capabilities and thinking. Common CAD design and analysis programs would have had Apollo engineers singing in the hallways in joy once they got over the shock.
They took what they had, and they made it work brilliantly. Change that context, and they would have designed a different engine, and the same goes for everything else.
0. https://www.space.com/10601-apollo-moon-program-public-suppo...
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...
When one of your threat vectors is a massive ball of nuclear fire right on top of the federal government in DC, your offsite backup policy is going to be absurd overkill by the standards of any other organization on this planet. That doesn't mean it's flawed.
> ...many of the people in charge don't even know how to use a website. Now for the first time, tech industry people have the opportunity to help run these computer systems, and you're afraid they're the ones who'll be incompetent and accidentally break everything?
Are you honestly suggesting that the people who built these systems, maintained them, and updated them to reflect often significant changes in rules and regulations over the course of decades somehow don't know how those systems work? If they were so damned clueless, those COBOL systems would have sputtered out and died decades ago. The fact that they've continued to run for all this time is practically prima facie evidence that the system works just fine by industry standards for that kind of legacy code.
No doubt there's plenty of stuff buried in the codebase that bugs the hell out of the developers working on it, but you get that with any complex legacy code. It's the nature of the beast. Do you think there's nothing in Google's monorepo that some of their engineers don't quite like but doesn't rise to a big enough issue to warrant refactoring right now? Any other FAANG company? Or large tech company in general?
You're writing as though a bunch of junior developers--and that describes pretty much all of the publicly known DOGE employees so far--are wizards who can just waltz right in and magic up a better solution just because they're from the "tech industry."
Setting aside the unlikely chances that those juniors--no matter how skilled or talented--have any experience with COBOL, mainframes, or even just decades-old legacy code, is anyone going to suggest that something like the federal government's payment system isn't defined by an immense amount of complex business logic so as to comply with legislative requirements? It's not something you just start playing around with.
I can't think of any tech company that would take a junior developer, toss them overboard in the middle of the freezing Atlantic, grant them sudo access, and tell them to do whatever the hell they want with critical systems before they drown and--somehow--take the ship with them. Worse yet, those juniors were chosen for ideology fervor and/or purity, so what happens when the normal review processes and experienced senior developers are pushed aside because they're in the way and part of the "deep state conspiracy" that doesn't want them to "[fix] the government" as you put it?
Not only is that a recipe for disaster for the company itself, it's a damned good way to take an otherwise talented junior developer and permanently ruin them. Instead of mentoring them so they can work well as part of a team, you're basically creating a toxic working environment that's going to turn them all feral. By the time they crawl out the other side and the public hears all about what they've been up to, what company is going to be stupid enough to a developer with "DOGE" on their resume? Beyond that, you're conflating a whole bunch of different issues here with federal software contracts and IT, while putting the tech industry on a really peculiar pedestal.
Besides, if the goal is to discover waste/fraud/abuse, the obvious answer is to hire a bunch of forensic accountants and let them dig into everything. Those are the people who actually find that kind of stuff, and they're incredibly skilled at their job. If it's there, given the time, they'll find it. But it's a slow-going process, so we instead see a bunch of engineers focusing on random transactions so they can ask themselves (1) "do I like that one?" and (2) "do I think it's legitimate?" because it's faster.
That's not exactly how you fix anything, least of all a country.
The GitHub-style editors are nice in that when a user sees the syntax directly when they press a formatting button in the markdown-toolbar-element, it makes associating a hash symbol with a headline or two asterisks surrounding a word with bold text pretty straightforward. In that sense, they teach you through using it since the syntax is fairly simple for the basics for someone seeing it the first time. Use it a couple of times, and you'll skip touching the buttons--at least for the basics.
That said, I think a Writebook-style editor[0] mentioned elsewhere may have some advantages for people with less computer experience, but I don't think a straight GitHub-style one like this is bad in those circumstances. It's quite good, especially if you pair it with some instructions (whether they be in a modal or whatever have you).
Probably, but look at it from the 1970s. The environmental movement was at its greatest legislative power, the major federal environmental legislation passed at the time was often bipartisan since environmental issues weren't nearly so neatly ideologically coded as they are now, and you had a bunch of high-profile environmental disasters that kept the issue at the forefront of politics. You also had energy crises throughout the 70s. All of that severely undermined public trust in the industry.
Despite their horrible public image since then, the fossil fuel industry has accomplished a great deal politically. They managed to convince an entire political party that climate change doesn't exist despite decades of research and ever-increasing amounts of evidence. They've fended off greater legislative and regulatory oversight repeatedly since then. And while we may not be paying them to "save the world," we're still giving them a great deal of subsidies in the form of tax benefits, consumer incentives that end up increasing the usage of their products, and the massive gift of not taxing their significant negative externalities. So we are, at least, paying them.
Put simply, their lobbyists have always been skilled, as evident by their accomplishments despite the decades-long reality that the majority of Americans don't much like or trust them. So is it really that much of a stretch to expect that they could have gotten significant federal support for a clean energy transition that started back in the 1970s and was gradual enough that it didn't shock markets and the consumers? Or that, if they were able to secure subsidies and preferential tax treatment to extract fossil fuels, that they couldn't do the same for not extracting them?
Anyhow, if I didn't make it clear enough, the sacrifice would have been entirely symbolic. Exxon, for example, would have always survived the transition. It's just that their brand would have undergone a sort of phoenix-esque rebirth: Exxon the oil company would have gradually faded out of existence, while Exxon the renewable energy company came into existence at the same time. It would have been a marketing and PR message, but unlike with the attempts at greenwashing, the fossil fuel side of the company would have actually faded away. The message would have even been truthful in a way: it would have been a serious sacrifice of sorts on their part.
It's just that it could have been a sacrifice that didn't actually cost them much--and had they played their cards right, it might have been one that let them come out ahead in the end.
One would expect the average CEO would literally kill for a roadmap of the future. They had it, and more. Exxon, ARCO, and others even made early R&D investments that helped pioneer terrestrial solar power, not to mention their extensive R&D capabilities more broadly. Sticking with the metaphor, they had the map and some of the most important tools for the journey ahead.
Fifty years were long enough even a financial moron could have developed a long-term transition plan that avoided stranded assets and massive losses. And they--and their people--weren't financial morons. Hell, much of their capital equipment and facilities investments had expected lifespans of a similar length. They had everything needed to create the mother of all soft landings.
Hell, they could have engineered an outcome where they came out well ahead. Being able to rebrand yourself as the company that chose to sacrifice itself to save the world buys you a hell of a lot of goodwill you can leverage for subsidies in Washington. We’d have paid them for it and thanked them for the privilege.
It couldn’t have been that much harder than convincing an entire political party that the problem didn’t exist. Oil companies convincing the public they were shitty companies that needed to be reborn? If they focused on the dying part of rebirth, that wouldn’t have been a very difficult sell even back then.
Only someone who failed upwards could have been gifted a hand like that and still manage to choose the worst possible path for both the world and their own company. All they managed to do was delay the transition and make it more expensive for their company and the world.
Heads should have rolled years ago when the problem became glaringly obvious.
Sure, but why bother? That would involve a ton of overhead and server time for a system that's still going to miss a lot of travel, thereby limiting revenue. I question whether the added expense of that kind of surveillance system would even recover enough revenue to break even. The same goes for mandatory GPS reporting devices, plus the civil liberties issues associated with such systems would make passing such a tax even more difficult.
Most countries have some sort of annual safety/emissions inspection, so any mileage-based tax could just use the odometer readings from the inspection. Sure, a mechanic could falsify paperwork, but how likely is that when it'll eventually come to light? If you want to sell the car, you're going to have to eventually admit the miles you hid so that they match the odometer reading at the time of title transfer. That means you're going to have no choice but to pay the tax eventually.
No need to try and build a more perfect mouse trap.
This stuff can be hard, and sometimes, you just have to refactor later on instead of trying to nail down every possibility for the model, despite trying to figure out likely issues in the near-term. In which case, the goal is to keep in mind that data models will eventually change over time, and consider how that knowledge might change what you're writing now to make that process less painful.
As for locations, a quick Google search found a genuine New York City R17 subway car[0] that can be rented out in LA. The Sierra Northern Railway--a freight carrier in California--has rented out[1] its rolling stock, facilities, and tracks to film productions for nearly a century. They've got quite the roster, spanning multiple eras. There's also Amtrak, the various local/regional metro systems, other rental companies, and even private collectors if they need something specific.
As for stations, that's even easier. Various urban backlots have underground subway station entrances[2] where you could characters exiting the station. Or the station platform itself is just a long room; you don't have to show the actual tracks, or you could composite in a train moving across the frame, etc. Plenty of permanent sets can play that role. Set designers do far more with less all the time. Hell, you can just reference it off-screen for a sitcom. That's a huge chunk of Seinfeld (or any sitcom). Shit happens, everyone reacts...often poorly, with hilarious results.
0. https://www.thevillaserena.com/subway-car-standing-set.asp
2. https://www.alamy.com/subway-entrance-in-the-soho-set-area-b...