The telcos had a brief opportunity to repair their reputation in Canada by riding a wave of patriotism. But no…

Well I guess he’s effected some change there in that he’s got me working hard to avoid reddit.

I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.

Oh wow I hadn’t realized that!

I checked on their web site. They say it can handle up to 140W for a 3-hour charge, which I assume means 28Vx5A. The minimum is 30W (20Vx1.5A).

That’s interesting. I wonder what the battery voltage is? Since most ebikes are up in the 36-48V range and USB-C maxes out at 20V, they’d presumably need to do some step up transforming in there?

That’s cool that the connector is bidirectional for charging portable electronics off your bike. I discovered my bike has a stealth USB-A output hidden behind a rubberized cover under the instrument panel. I didn’t even know it was there for like a year, but it’s awesome!

That’s an interesting idea of having swappable battery packs rather than sitting around waiting for the thing to charge. I remember in the early days of EVs, there was some talk about that but it’s much harder to pull off with the huge batteries in a car.

Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?

In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.

This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.

For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.

Huh. I always thought he was from Aurora, Ontario.

Yeah seriously don’t tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it’s going to go badly…

I guess if you look at the track record of how tariffs have played out in the past, there has tended not to be a lot of price relief in going with domestic producers.

Take something like aluminum. While the US does have a domestic industry, it couldn’t possibly meet demand in the short term at least. So industries hoping to source aluminum may initially flock to the domestic product, causing a run on it that raises prices. At the end of the day, they’ll wind up paying something close to what the imported aluminum costs. This is the new price of aluminum. Live with it.

In the long term, the domestic industry may grow to the point that it displaces the imports. Will that lead to price relief? Again, uncertain. There are reasons why certain parts of the world produce much of the world supply of X, and cost of production is one of them. Also, counter-tariffs may reduce the growth potential of a domestic industry, leading to less investment.

It’s not just the US of course. Everyone everywhere will be paying more for everything. Tariffs just suck.

I saw one of these on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix AZ, but never heard one played. It’s so huge you can’t reach those frets at the top there, so the inventor had to come up with a keyed mechanism you see the guy working in the photo.

Given how things are these days, I fear this would be the day you’d be forced to go into work to make up for any wfh you do.

Can’t say I’m surprised by the push to plastics given the 25% tariff on aluminum.

That’s cute!

My daughter has a chinchilla who likes to hold up signs like this.

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Climatology and meteorology are separate disciplines with their own very different modelling. I studied the former way back when, and it wasn’t even in the same department at my university (geography vs physics). Climatology is about long-term trends and focuses more on energy fluxes, general circulation patterns (both in the atmosphere and oceans), the hydrological cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. Meteorology is about the near-term. It focuses on the fluid and thermodynamics of specific weather systems, and how to process/interpret real-time data.

Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I’d get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you’re doing. As long as it doesn’t clash…

Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!

One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.

Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?

Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.

Really! Could you play it again?

Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I’m sure I could harmonize to it! 👍

I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I’m hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

I’ve been playing around with the free-threaded build of 3.13 and it seems pretty stable with the standard library at least. Most of what I’ve read suggests the only problems have been with 3rd party libraries that make unsafe assumptions about the GIL being around. But I’ve tried it out with my own production code and it’s been rock solid and performant (at least by Python standards).