Humanius

I’m not working today :D

January 1st is a national holiday in the Netherlands, and I took three bridge days (vacation days to bridge the gap between a public holiday and a weekend) between Christmas and New Year’s.
On top of that I have every other Friday off, and that happened to coincide with this week.

So with only three vacation days spent I have 11 days off from the 25th of December to the 4th of January.

I’m using the time to move house, so not much relaxing sadly.

I knew Weird Al wasn’t real! He’s like Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny

Clearly there is places where pump theft is not that common or tackled in some other way, because there are countries where post-pay is still the default.

I do know that at some post-pay pumps the cashier has the ability to lock and unlock the pumps from inside

Unmanned stations have existed for quite some time here, they are just not the only way to fuel up.
Manned stations are still very common, if not the default, and if a station is manned it is usually not prepaid.

In the Netherlands it’s a mix of both these days.

During the daytime you pump, and then walk inside to pay afterwards. At night, when the building itself is closed, you pay using the terminal and only then are you allowed to start fueling up

There is also unmanned stations without a shop. They are pre-paid all day by default.

From top left to bottom right, horizontal first:

• Email
• Password Manager
• Calendar
• VPN
• Drive
• Authenticator
• Mascot for their LLM

The only ones that are a bit ambiguous are the Password Manager and the VPN logos imo

They may also decide not to scale up production. After all, they just started making 2-3x on existing products.

Another thing to consider is that the current spike in demand is almost entirely fueled by datacenters used for AI.

It takes years to set up new manufacturing facilities, and the AI bubble popping is still going to happen at one point or another. They may simply decide not to increase manufacturing capacity because they believe that this spike in demand is temporary.

Building new capacity costs money, and if the demand suddenly drops you cannot make that money back on sales.

Don’t Stop Me Now is great too

If you can’t have sex with the sex-machine making machine, what even is the point?

There is a difference between human-scale and humanoid.

Human-scale just means the robot needs to fit in a space where humans should also fit, while humanoid means it is supposed to resemble a humans not just in size, but also in shape. A humanoid robot would generally have a torso, two arms, two legs, and probably a head.

As an example, a roomba fits in a human environment but is not humanoid. You could hypothetically make a humanoid robot that is capable of using an ordinary vacuum to vacuum the same space, but it would be significantly more complex and more expensive to do that. A purpose-built roomba is a much more cost-effective solution for cleaning up after humans.

Given that it’s a humanoid robot, I suspect that this is more of a marketing stunt than any practical deployment of robots.

Humanoid robots don’t make a ton of sense in manufacturing. Why mimic the sub-optimal anatomy of a human when you can make your robotic work slave have any appendage you want, which are designed to be optinal for their task along the assembly line?

Humanoid robots mostly only make sense in spaces that need to be designed for humans (like homes or hospitals) where the robot needs to regularly interact with human infrastructure.

Hypothetically the police could come with a warrant and force you to hand over the footage you recorded. It’s a higher barrier than if footage is being uploaded to the cloud, but it can still happen.

And even if the cameras are not uploading their footage to the cloud, it still wouldn’t sit well with me if every other house has a camera pointed at the public street

Where I live it is technically illegal to record the public street with an automated camera, but it’s not really being enforced. So there is Ring cameras everywhere.

Big companies using the informal you in formal communication can be seen as a way to try to make themselves feel smaller, more approachable, more person-like than they actually are.

I’m not saying that is necessarily the reason behind it, but formal or informal you do invoke different feelings and associations when they are used.

Formal you (u) shows respect, whereas informal you (jij) is more personal and buddy-buddy.

I’m also Dutch and I still occasionally use it when I want to be polite to an older person I do not know very well, or to someone who is in a position where I want to show a certain form of “respect” (higher social standing?)

That is probably also why the government uses “u” in its communication. It is proper to be seen as being respectful to your citizens. And saying “jij” after “u” is less likely to offend anyone than saying “u” after “jij”

The rules are a bit vague when you are supposed to use it, and most people will go “zeg maar jij hoor” (you can say [informal] you) after you start with “u” (formal you)

Would you think other countries are just idiots that don’t know burning garbage to generate power is better than just burying them?

Yes, and garbage incineration to generate power or other forms of energy is a thing that happens in many countries

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Waste-incineration-capacities-by-EU-MS-Medarac-et-al-2014_fig37_304917594

The green dots represent electricity-generation plants, and the red dots represent plants that are used to generate both electricity and (presumably district) heating. Figure is from a paper from 2014, which I found after a quick Google.

The greenhouse emissions problem depends on where that garbage would otherwise end up, and what would happen with it.

If the garbage would otherwise be recycled fully then incineration would seem like a worse option. But if the garbage would otherwise end up in a landfill, it leads to decomposition and methane production. Methane is one of the worst greenhouse gasses out there, so incineration might be preferable to just leaving it be.

I’m no expert whatsoever, so take my comment with a grain of salt… I may be misinformed

With that line of reasoning there is nothing the Chinese state can do that would ever get your approval.
My comment was also not in reference to China burning garbage, but your blanket statement that burning garbage isn’t eco.

I’m no fan of the CCP, but I prefer to at least engage with the point rather than automatically dismissing anything they do as bad.

From my understanding it can be done relatively cleanly with filtration, and its much better for the environment than letting it sit on a landfill generating methane

(Not an expert, so I might be incorrect)

Emoji aren’t strictly prescriptive with their meaning. They are generic symbols that can have many meanings in different contexts and cultures.

The name of an emoji is more a suggestion than anything else.

Yes, but it’ll take them another ten years