I disagree. The plug is usually part of an appliance connector cable, that has no idea what happens to be on the other side aswell. If you size that cable for the same current as the socket, the cable itself is protected by the circuit breaker.
The correct spot for the fuse is the appliance itself. Fuses used to be easily replaceable, often with fuse holders [1]. I have, however, never seen a computer with one.
There's simply never a reason for a user to replace a fuse in a properly designed device. If a fuse blows then it means something has gone horribly wrong and replacing the fuse won't fix it.
The exception would be a device that sends mains more-or-less directly to a user device, then a fuse would be protecting against a fault in the user device and should be replaceable. A lamp that takes a regular light bulb would be a good example of this.
True, but in that case the fuse only needs to be as easy to replace as whatever else you're replacing. If there's internal socketed components then the fuse only needs to be internal and socketed. If everything is soldered to a board then it's fine to have the fuse soldered too.
Many older appliances did expect the user to put some external bits in that would be across mains, or maybe across a transformer to mains, and in that case the fuse was just as replaceable as the user-provided part.
The fuse in the plug comes from a history of not wanting everything to blow up in the face of "I spilt my tea into the toaster". Very simple device, probably fine once it's dried out.
But really the value of having the fuse in the plug is that if it blows, the live wire in the cable is definitely disconnected all the way to the wall, so whatever has happened you know as best you can that it's not in a state where it could still get worse.
Most computer PSUs have a fuse inside, and it is quite easy to replace them.
I know because many moons ago I blew one, in the era when PSUs had a toggle between 120V and 230V, and I set it to 120V in a country that runs at 230V...
I feel like the humanoid form is getting in the way for that, and that a "Spot" like design with a hand on top is better suited for that. Also i think laundry and dishes are already 95% automated since about 50 years.
"Tech" was incredible light on CapExp compared with everything else (until AI hit, that is). That is what allowed its explosive growth. On the one hand alphabet is not used to that. On the other hand it is turning into a more normal business with more CapExp, and like other more "normal" business it uses more external investment. As a general rule of thumb: The more capex, the more leverage; for example commodity extraction, infrastructure or power generation are very capex heavy, and heavily leveraged.
Roads are not solving transportation, they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.
The interview started with the most mundane question "Who are you?", and the very first sentence of Wales is either a lie or misleading. The journalists asks for clarification (thats a journalists job, btw), and in his second sentence of the interview Wales insults the journalist. I'm pretty sure who is the jerk here.
It also was Wales who bought up the topic, not the journalist. If he considers it a stupid topic he does not want to talk about, why is it the very first thing he talks about?
Sanger was originally hired to edit Nupedia, a web encyclopedia project with a strict peer review process, and only worked for Wales for about a year. Wikipedia was started as a side project (with Sanger contributing to the concept and some early organizing), but Wikipedia quickly became much more successful while Nupedia basically never got off the ground. My impression is that Sanger wanted to impose his own vision on Wikipedia, but couldn't because the community of volunteer editors disagreed, and when Wales stopped paying him as a full time Nupedia editor (Wales's company was tight on cash at that time), he stopped any involvement. This was long before most of the actual work of Wikipedia happened, and that should have been the end of the story.
But ever since, Sanger has been trash talking Wikipedia as a project and community ("broken beyond repair") and trying to undermine it. A few years later he started a competing project (which was predictably a total failure). For two decades he has been promoting himself as "cofounder of Wikipedia". Interviewer after interviewer asks the same lazy questions about the subject, without ever adding any new insight. (You can see that Sanger's ghost is chasing Wikipedia even into this discussion.)
It's beating a dead horse, and entirely off the topic of what the interview was supposed to be about. Answering the question clearly and accurately takes a lot of time and finesse, which is wasted on the interviewer and most of the audience. Wales clearly screwed up in that interview, but it's not hard to see where he's coming from, psychologically.
What an interview!
I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
>(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
Please don't do that. The map is simply not good enough and does not have enough context (road quality, terrain, trail difficulty) for anything but very causal activity. Even then I highly recommend to use a proper map, electronic or paper.
It has a lot more map data accessible and you can even overlay National Park Service maps, land ownership, accurate cell service grids, mountain biking trails, weather conditions and things like that.
Disclaimer: Just because you see a route on a map, digital or paper, does not mean it is passable today. Or it may be passable but at an extremely arduous pace.
We used the walking directions for dual sport motorcycles once. It was pretty nice. We did have a few places where it became sketchy. Those and maybe more places would be sketchy for walking too. Not that google maps could do much about it. Terrain is a living thing. These were mostly huge cracks in the earth due to rain water.
Trail? Terrain? I use it for walking for 10-20mins around a (mostly flat) city and I expect that’s what 90% of people use it for, the comment didn’t mention hiking
It depends what you are doing but for hill walking in Italy I found the footpathapp.com app good. There are no decent paper maps in the area I go and Google maps are also rubbish for local paths but the app kind of draws in paths based on satellite images I think and you can draw on it to mark the ones you've been on.
Dubai has an entire active operation. It looks like it does work, but how well is debated. Seems to have enough of an impact (correlation or causation) that they haven't shut it down yet.
> However, there are only 24 permanent residents and five active farms on Hamnøya. Therefore, there is regular transport of tankers, concentrate feed and livestock trucks.
> Hamnøya is an island in Vevelstad Municipality in Nordland county, Norway. The 16.6-square-kilometre (6.4 sq mi) island lies about 500 to 700 metres (0.3 to 0.4 mi) off shore from the mainland of the municipality, separated by the Vevelstadsundet strait. The island is only accessible by boat and in 2021 it had 35 permanent residents living on the island.
I'm not sure if it's cheaper to upgrade both posts, but a bridge doesn't look so silly.
Arabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
Maltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.
I think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful.
The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.
Can’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
It's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.
Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
Oh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)?
Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
>Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
> > 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim
> It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language.
It's both. The idea that Ukrainian is an uneducated farmer's dialect of Russian is a common talking point in the "Greater Russia / Russkiy Mir" narrative. Conversely, asserting the status of the Ukrainian language is a big part of Ukrainian identity in the face of an imperial invasion.
> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language.
The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest.
I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?
It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.
>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.
Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).
This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
