• 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • You’re correct.

    "It doesn’t make sense for chocolate bars to be divided into equal-sized chunks when there is so much inequality in the chocolate industry! The unequally-sized chunks of our 6.35 oz bars are a palatable way of reminding Choco Fans and Serious Friends that the profts in the chocolate industry are unequally divided.

    And in case you haven’t noticed, the bottom of our bars depicts the West African coastline. The chunks just above it represent the Gulf of Guinea. From left to right, you have Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin (terribly politically incorrect, we know, but we had to combine them to create enough space for a hazelnut), Nigeria and part of Cameroon."

    https://us.tonyschocolonely.com/pages/faqs


  • Yep. My consumer concerns are less of retail sticker-shock than people not realizing how dependent they are on consumer surplus. Even a few thousand a year in tariff related expenditure can be quite impactful on comfort.

    Sticker-shock will happen with the tariff-adjacent removal of de minimis. Right now it’s China, but it was threatened against Canada and Mexico too (officially delayed, whatever that may mean). A $50 per-item charge is going to be quite a surprise to many.

    E.g. if Canada is going to be levied like China, then my plan of getting a pair of oversized Cam-Lock kits for my Canadian-made Arkel bike panniers is gone out the window. There’s no way I’ll buy small parts when the total package cost is the same as getting a whole new set of panniers.


  • Correct, tariffs are not a consumption tax. That fact doesn’t mean prices will not increase, nor does it mean that small increases don’t have a big impact. We, the common people, will have have to go about our lives with less. Maybe wear your shirts an extra day because laundering more regularly consumes more soap. Perhaps it’s going without avocado on your lunch sandwiches. You’ll still have shirts and sandwiches, but you certainly wouldn’t be as clean or as filled. (See the “surplus” chapter of your high-school/undergrad econ books.)


  • The honking thing specifically is another skewed fact. The neighbors want the Waymos, they just had a hard time getting ahold of the right folks at Waymo. That includes Sophia Tung, the neighbor who set up the honking video stream that Jason used.

    As a local in the area, I can say for certain that the majority of SF wants the cars there. There’s more resistance further down the peninsula, but it’s intermixed with anti-taxi messaging. It’s hard to tell if it’s about the cars or about “those kind of people” having access to their city.

    San Francisco neighbors say repeated Waymo honking is keeping them up at night

    Christopher Cherry who lives in the building next door said he was “really excited” to have Waymo in the neighborhood, thinking it would bring more security and quiet to the area.

    The residents who spoke with NBC Bay Area said they are not opposed to having the Waymo cars nearby. But they say they want to see a more neighborly response from the new autonomous vehicle company on the block.

    “We love having them there, we just would like for them to stop honking their horn at four in the morning repeatedly,” Cherry said.

    San Francisco neighbors say Waymo honking continues, global audience follows along live

    The incidents were captured on resident Sophia Tung’s YouTube live stream

    Tung and many of her neighbors said that they are Waymo customers and actually like the Waymo technology. But what they don’t like is the repeated, overnight noise.


  • Well, formerly operating companies. The Uber and Cruise examples stopped both of them dead. Uber left the business entirely and Cruise had its license to operate revoked.

    That’s just omitting info. There’s also straight up wrong stuff, like residents not wanting it. As crazy as it sounds, at least with SF, the residents’ reps wrote the regulation law and haven’t had a measure to reject self-driving cars (at least K passed). The majority want to see these cars. Also, Facebook dumped their move fast motto a decade ago because of how bad it was (self-harm problems).

    It’s unfortunate too. I like Jason’s rants, but it’s too distracting when he gets a quick google level of facts wrong.










  • I’m not car-free, but I do all my grocery shopping without a car. In fact, I’m at my local grocer as I type at 1.7 miles away taking 250 feet elevation gain and 210 feet loss. I understand your pain!

    Here’s why I still think a bike fits your situation. Namely an inexpensive folding bike with a front basket and rack.

    Hills are conquered in the same way as a cart: walking uphill. Also known as “hike a bike.” Folding bikes are usually also allowed on busses, so you could take a bus one way. You could time your departure to a bus schedule and shop knowing you don’t have to rush or spend a long time at the store.

    Folders can be brought inside and consume about the same space as a folding trailer.

    My overall point is a folding bike is a trailer that you can ride downhill in. Electric would be a nice upgrade, but it’s not necessary.




  • You’re probably decoding noise or in the middle of the bit stream.

    What you’re looking for is called “preamble.” That’s a sequence of bits used to synchronize the decoder (marks the start of data, useful in modulation schemes for clock recovery, and a few other things).

    Looking at minimodem’s manual, try using the sync-byte option. Prepend your tar stream with a string of bytes, like 0x01, before sending to minimodem for encoding. Then use the sync code option to mark the start of the tar bit stream. This is as simple as cat preamble.bin myfiles.tar | minimodem --tx …

    Other things to consider: start small with 300 baud BFSK before speeding up. Test with wav files before attempting physical tape or speakers and a microphone.