This is fantastic! Do you know if there's an open source project/framework powering this site? Seems really valuable for powering inner-source and private developer communities.
#joist60 is trending on Twitter and lots of Toronto startups and software organizations are supporting those laid off. Some of your peers are tweeting that hashtag as well. Head there and take a look at the offers.
I'm not convinced that this is an instance of autopilot "saving the day", as the title of the driver's video would suggest.
The driver states in his video description that he was "watching stopped traffic to my right". Think how you would react were you in full control of a car in that instance. You have a virtually stopped lane of traffic to your right, you see cars braking about 100 ft ahead of you. Wouldn't you start slowing down? I would, as clearly travelling as fast as the driver is where all surrounding traffic is slowing or stopped doesn't make sense, however the driver doesn't appear to slow down at all, by his own admission focused on the cars to his right. Was he legitimately distracted by cars to his right, or was he depending on the car's situational awareness? I'm leaning towards the latter, what I believe is an affordance offered by autopilot systems.
I think we'll start hearing and seeing many such "success" stories of close calls involving autopilot, but I'm not sure how many of these will be incidents of autopilot truly saving an otherwise attentive driver by reacting faster/better than the attentive driver. It seems to me that autopilot is going to be both cause and saviour in far too many cases.
The advantage of the autopilot is that its reproducible, 100% of the time. When something could have been done better given a situation, the code is fixed and the autopilot will handle the situation better every single future time.
Humans arent as reliable. And then of course theres perfect collision course distance calculations and millisecond reflexes.
Google has posted some interesting situations where their cars have predicted other driver behavior and avoided accidents in situations where it is quite possible an average human driver would not have been able to make the same prediction and avoided the accident. I agree that not every situation like this would have resulted in an accident for certain, I also strongly suspect the computers are much better at avoiding these types of accidents more consistently than humans.
I watched the video for the first time full-screen, as if I was driving, and tried to stomp my foot when I would have applied the brakes. I would have been in an accident.
I've always thought drivers of automatic transmissions seem less aware of what is happening around them, because they don't have to pay as much attention.
Since joining the 3 pedal master race, going back to an auto definitely doesn't engage me as much as manual.
I have a gut feeling that people who drive manual cars are less likely to get in an accident simply because you kinda have to pay more attention, its harder to text and drive, etc. Also, in the US it seems like generally the only people that drive manual these days are people that enjoy driving and take it more seriously so I would expect less accidents due to that as well. I don't have any data to back any of that up so take it as you will.
Still, even the best driver isn't gonna react as fast.
I guess it's a trade off - the more the car does for you the less you have to think about what you're doing, but then again I see people driving in the dark without their lights on all the time.
Design looks great, though I've encountered a bug. When I click "Get Started" the signup modal displays. Clicking the browser's back button after this removes the signup form, but leaves the modal in place. Continuing to hit the back button appears to toggle display of the signup form. Hitting the 'x' in the top right corner will dismiss the modal.
> Originally Phoenix was the Gecko engine in a native UI window without all the XUL overhead
I'm not sure Phoenix was ever a reaction to XUL. Phoenix was more a reaction to the kitchen sink feature-list of Netscape 5 and Mozilla Application Suite, seeking to pare down the feature set to a minimally viable browser.
In XUL (and moreso XBL) Mozilla had a web technology that there was talk of submitting for standardization and which brought with it a level of expression that HTML didn't offer at the time. As HTML, CSS and JavaScript have evolved, XUL/XBL bring less and less to the table.
Still no Nastaliq [1] for Urdu and Persian script. There's a great piece on Medium [2] about the death of the Urdu script at the hands of the more structured Arabic Naskh font.
I saw the article before and I too was deeply moved by it, but don't you think you could word this better so as not to make it sound so blasé? "Pah, no nastaliq, useless!" -- this is an amazing project.
+1. It sounds incredibly condescending the way it's written right now. Like the omission of Nastaliq is a great tragedy and Google should be deeply ashamed.
> Like the omission of Nastaliq is a great tragedy and Google should be deeply ashamed.
Well, the heading says «Beautiful and free fonts for all languages» and the OP noticed that it fails to include at least one important script/language combination.
A. I wouldn't exactly call an almost-dead not-incredibly-commonly-used script "important". Especially when others, which are available on Noto, are more widely used.
B. There's much better ways of phrasing the request than the way it was written.
First of all, I wouldn't call one specific use case proving that it isn't almost dead. Just because it's being used in one case, for Bollywood wedding songs, does not mean it isn't "almost dead". Secondly, it was by the OPs own admission that the language is dying.
> Many Google services employ commenting/voting/rating etc, handling these in different, separate siloed systems makes no sense.
Why doesn't that make sense? Is a YouTube user naturally a Google Drive user? A Gmail user naturally a Blogger user? This seems to only make sense to Google, and not their users.
I don't know how much overlap there was between YouTube users and Google account users, but Google merged the two simply to boost the profile of Google+. People who wanted to comment on YouTube videos with their Google+ pals and their real identities were already doing that -- on Google+. The forcing of Google+ on YouTube offered no discernible benefit to YouTube users that could not have been offered while maintaining YouTube as a distinct social network.
As a Google+ user, the utter disregard towards YouTube and its distinct identity severely annoyed me.
