Define "budding system that was working". Before the ACA, the number of uninsured Americans was around 50 million and insurance companies routinely denied coverage or charge higher premiums based on pre-existing health conditions. ACA is not perfect (due in no small part to the concessions that had to be made in congress to get enough votes) but i'd say it's been a net win.
Going back to a pre-ACA system won't lower premiums that much. Medical costs have risen in the last decade, same as any other goods or services, and the way US healthcare is structured, with hospital and doctors negotiating with a profit driven middleman (insurance companies) makes it almost impossible to change the rising premiums.
US healthcare will continue to be a mess until there's a universal healthcare system or single payer system similar to any other developed country on earth.
To be fair, Meta is also not the first company to launch smart glasses with a display.
But the reality of it is that it's probably still to early to say if these devices will have mainstream appeal. I see a lot of people saying "well, i no longer need to take the phone out my pocket", but that has been the case for a couple of years with smartwatches, for example, and it has not meaningfully changed our dependency from the smartphone or the smartphone market dynamics that much.
At Apple Stores, laptops screens have to be opened exactly at 76 degrees. I wonder if they use this sensor and specific software for adjustment (I'm not implying this is the only reason it's there)
It seems like it would be much quicker and easier to just have a piece of plastic or something cut at a 76 degree angle that they can place on the laptop and fold the screen up to.
Could be that the demo OS reports some metric on how often the laptops are set to 76deg and how often customers move it. Probably a whole ton of usages of the sensor and if it's price comparable to the old close sensor they used to use it would be easy to justify.
I've heard employees use the measurements app in their iPhones sometimes to adjust in the mornings, but having a sensor in the laptop lid seems like a much easier way to do it and you don't need to carry anything with you.
It would not, since you don't want to carry a piece of plastic all day long to set the angle correctly. Most people just use their phones to check the angle though.
I'm assuming so. Apparently it's an angle that "invites" people to use the computers, but I don't think there's anything specific about 76 degrees that makes it better than, say, 73 or 82. As long as you can see the content from an average height, it should work. Most likely they just settle on that angle because it looked good to the store team that was staging the first store, measured it, turned out to be 76 and kept it the same across stores since then for consistency.
I believe the rumor is that 76 degrees is slightly uncomfortable enough to look at that it makes you want to adjust the screen, which in turn makes you more likely to try the device.
Yep this seems like it makes a lot of sense— and adding on, picking a measurement means that all of them can be the same (consistency, as you said)- having variation in the same row would look bad from a distance
If it runs on Linux, it should be fairly easy to run it on MacOS through the Game Porting Toolkit. Crossover (or Porting Kit if you don't want to pay for Crossover) should handle it.
Running modern games on Linux requires Vulkan, which has iffy support in MacOS at best (and MacOS isn’t officially supported by Valve’s compatibility tools).
It is iffy but serviceable. In this case, seems like Octopath Traveller 2 Windows version works well with GPTK. I haven't tried but Whisky, or Porting Kit should be able to handle it. Reddit has some people running it at good fps.
I don't think that's what DOGE is doing. Seems extremely vindictive and ideological in the way it's acting and time will tell but I would not be surprised if it ends costing the taxpayers more in the long run.
Argentina and US are very different countries, starting these cuts with very different economic realities. For example, 55% of all registered workers are employed by the government in Argentina. Although not a directly comparable metric (since in the US you also need to account for state and local civil workers), the US federal government employs around 3 million people. That's just 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce.
Again, DOGE operates from the premise that the federal government is bloated. Although this is a very popular message, I'd love to see some more objective data to support this and I doubt that CDC or USAID are the agencies where the bloat is. Like I said, their actions seem vindictive and careless. Also, likely to result in legal cases that will drag for years and end up costing taxpayer more than the supposed savings.
The main con is that once you fire the workers that you thought you didn't need (but that you did indeed need) hiring them back becomes more expensive and a lengthy process. Some of the firings are already causing chaos in vital teams among several agencies and have forced DOGE to try to reverse course (bird flu monitoring, nuclear response...).
And that's not to mention the dire situation you put the people you are firing in. Laying off people from their jobs is never "an experiment" unless you are willing to suspend every trace of empathy.
There is fat, but I'd venture not much on the CDC, FEMA or USAID. A big part of this mess is that fat is concentrated on areas that are very unpopular to cut, like military expenditure, or in legacy processes and systems that will take years and a lot of upfront investment to streamline (and that DOGE won't touch).
If you meet an average government worker in the US, you quickly realize how little they make and how understaffed their departments tend to be. People underestimate how complex government work is and how different it is from what you do at a regular business.
DOGE has also very specifically targeted the CFPB and, according to The Verge, the team within the organization specialized in understanding Big Tech’s entrance into financial products (Musk is supposedly about to launch X's banking services).
My alarm clock (old school radio alarm clock with big red digits) is plugged in and resets to 00:00 when there's no power. I would notice even the smallest outage this way (unless it happens exactly at midnight and lasts less than a minute).
That has happened maybe twice over the last 16 years. In both cases the outages were a few minutes at best. I live in Berlin; power outages are extremely rare here.
That 13.7 minutes is not for all house holds. In the rare case an outage happen, the very limited amount of households affected by that would experience that duration on average. And lets face it if something knocks out a major power line, which does happen, that single incident might take a few hours to resolve and would probably drag that average way up. Which means that I expect the median outage duration is probably a lot lower than the average; in the order of seconds or minutes at best.
"The number of interruptions per customer in 2023 was 0.34, which means that each customer is only affected by a disruption once every three years on average."
That sounds more like it. I generally only adjust the time on my alarm clock when daylight saving requires me to; twice a year.
Yes, super rare and short in Berlin. I'm originally from a rural area where overground high voltage lines between villages are common. There it's typically 1-2 hours of outage every 3-5 years or so. The local utility company has some truck-mounted generators to help out in smaller outages.
As an anectdotal data point, I live in Poland (Warsaw) and I can't remember the last time I had a power interruption at my home. I don't use UPSs at all, and my NAS gets years of uptime, unless I decide to reboot it.
This gets much worse if you live in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and I would guess that the German average is mostly driven by countryside, not big cities.
I had similar experience in the UK. Maybe 3-4 outages in the first nearly 30 years of my life. Moved to the states and even living in the outskirts of Seattle I used to get multiple outages in a year.
The funny thing is, every time people from not-the-states talk about how rare power outages are, americans feel this bizarre urge to defend their power companies and grids, coming up with incredibly contortions to explain why it's not even remotely possible to do power the same in the states as elsewhere in the world. One memorable conversation here on HN ended up with the poster, facing the fact that yes, even in countries with lower population density still manage to bury their power cables (because they were claiming people were too far apart), somehow decided that it was because the states didn't have the expertise or equipment for burying power cables. Apparently no one here has diggers, and things like sewage pipes and gas pipes just run over the surface.
When I lived in the Czech countryside, we used to have about one outage per year, and it was almost always a planned one, when the grid required maintenance or expansion/upgrade (new houses being built).
In the city, there is something like one outage per 4 years, usually due to an extreme thunderstorm or floods. And it usually lasts under 20 minutes.
Reliability of the grid is a major indicator of infrastructure quality and I am somewhat surprised by the fact that Americans tolerate so many outages and consider them somehow natural.
The typical German experience could be described as "every decades your street loses power for two hours at a time" (which comes out to about that average). As you say, it's worse in rural areas and better in urban areas, though maybe less extreme than in Poland. But power interruptions are typically short and highly localized. Nobody would even think of getting a generator in case the power goes out, and outside a server room nobody has an UPS
Anecdotally, everyone I know in the US who has a generator didn’t get it because of random power outages, but because of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and blizzards.
At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.
But problem in recent years was the dead ash trees from emerald ash borer, they took a few years to fully die and weaken but now they just collapse into lines on a good wind gust.
Localities that have their own utilities never go down (Madison, NJ), my area is covered by Firstenergy that cheaps out and keeps only a skeleton crew in NJ, so when stuff like the poles snap at end of my driveway it takes 3-4 days to send crews from texas or ohio to replace it.
> At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.
I had no idea your basic infrastructure was so bad.
Why not demand buried cables? Trees can't fall on them, drunk drivers can't knock them down.
On the other hand, here in Europe I've never had any problems remotely so common and severe, not in any place I lived, even with overhead power lines, including the tiny remote (by local standards) Welsh hamlet: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AtGFM9C5xJ6GrMJz5?g_st=com.google.ma...
I'm not an American, but Australia has a comparable number of power outages. A big factor is cost, and population density is what causes cost to be a concern. The EU has a population density that's three times higher than the US; underground lines are three times more expensive than overhead.
Australia is of course ten times less dense than the US, comparable to Idaho, but we have a unique combination of moderately dense land in the east and south west plus shockingly sparse areas with little to no infrastructure at all.
Likewise Australia, the outback is about 70%-85%-ish of the country depending who I ask, with about 607k people in it, so if the Aboriginal Australians were to secede with it, the rest suddenly gets x3-x6 the population density with no actual change to their experiences.
I think what would be useful is a histogram of population densities, or for example a percentile based metric: population density covering 99/95% of population.
I'm thinking something like "From the average person's perspective, how many people are within 100m, 500m, 1km, 5km, 10km, and 50km?"
The questions that seem to matter, and for which population density is a proxy, are: how crowded does it feel, and how easy is it to get to the socioeconomic advantages of being near other people (infrastructure, commuting, shopping, community sports, faith buildings, pubs, etc.)?
Those sorts of natural disasters are happening over once a year in many metropolitan areas these days, including places where they used to be incredibly rare.
Ah, but a power outage is kind of fun. It is like a little bit of survivalism, but you know the power will be back fairly soon. There’s a whole ritual, fill the tub, get some candles, figure out how to keep the food cold.
The links actually cover this, since EIA tracks major events in power disruptions and separates them in the graph. US network is still orders of magnitude worse than Germany.
If I read the provided source correctly, if you exclude those events the average US customer still has two hours of power outages per year. That's a lot better than five, but still nearly an order of magnitude worse than 13 minutes.
Atlanta, GA has underground power transmission through much of the city (and specifically my neighborhood within the city) and we can still lose power in storms. What isn’t underground currently is being moved there in much of the city. However, the transmission equipment is still outside and still has physical limits. There’s only so much water, so much wind, and so much lightning electrical systems can take without someone going dark. Underground trunks can also flood and short so they’re not a full panacea in areas that have heavy storms.
We’ve had a mild storm season the past two years and we’ve maybe been down seconds in total in my area.
While the average I’m sure is correct, the distribution is going to depend a lot on what is going on with nature. When I lived in California I lived in an LADWP area so I didn’t experience rolling blackouts. As a kid I had friends that would come over because they lived in an Edison area and play time in air conditioning at my house was much more enjoyable in August. If you were to find the average downtime during that period of time I expect it would saddle everyone with 10-15 minutes of outages even though my area never went down and my friends lost power for a few hours each week during heat waves.
I wish that was the case. Coincidentally, I live in Atlanta, also within the city (ITP, close to Piedmont Park) and all my neighborhood has above ground power transmission. Coming from Europe, it's infuriating. Not a year passes that we don't get two or three blackouts and a fair decent number of brownouts. That includes the past two years.
no they are not, they intentionally remove every reference to this not being r1 from the cli and changed the names from the ones both Deepseek and Huggingface used.
> DeepSeek's first-generation of reasoning models with comparable performance to OpenAI-o1, including six dense models distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Llama and Qwen.
Well I guess if you are in the Enterprise Java naming model you would expect something like "VisitorModelUtilsListGetterAdapterInterceptorMessageManagerDrivenObserverPool"
If you look at their API docs you will see:
model: name of the model to push in the form of <namespace>/<model>:<tag>
I don't think there is any reason to jump to the conclusion it is some type of conspiracy here, just naming things based on a API that probably didn't think about distillation when they created it.
Yeah, they're so clear in fact that they call the distilled models "R1" in the url and everywhere on the page[1], instead of using the "DeepSeek-R1-Distill-" prefix, as DeepSeek themselves do[2].
Going back to a pre-ACA system won't lower premiums that much. Medical costs have risen in the last decade, same as any other goods or services, and the way US healthcare is structured, with hospital and doctors negotiating with a profit driven middleman (insurance companies) makes it almost impossible to change the rising premiums.
US healthcare will continue to be a mess until there's a universal healthcare system or single payer system similar to any other developed country on earth.