Stuck in a World of Twin Languages and 600 Pronouns tells the story of a dimension-hopping linguist trying to understand and survive a language spoken by intelligent and/or cybernetic palm trees. Each chapter brings new orthographic and societal horrors. And yes, there's a tonal variant, since creator ZeWei has experience making songs with conlangs.
China will "gradually raise" its retirement age for the first time since the 1950s, as the country confronts an ageing population and a dwindling pension budget. From a report: The top legislative body on Friday approved proposals to raise the statutory retirement age from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs, and from 55 to 58 for females in white-collar jobs. Men will see an increase from 60 to 63. China's current retirement ages are among the lowest in the world.
According to the plan passed on Friday, the change will set in from 1 January 2025, with the respective retirement ages raised every few months over the next 15 years, said Chinese state media. Retiring before the statutory age will not be allowed, state news agency Xinhua reported, although people can extend their retirement by no more than three years. Starting 2030, employees will also have to make more contributions to the social security system in order to receive pensions. By 2039, they would have to clock 20 years of contributions to access their pensions.
Today is Craig's birthday. I've been looking at it in my calendar all week, with fondness and sadness. He would have been 53. He fought cancer for over two years before this lap around the sun was
truncated on April 2
. He was a huge part of my life while he was here. He has continued to be so through the ways he helped me, the friends and relationships I made and kept through him, and the experiences I would otherwise have missed if he had not introduced me to various concepts, groups, and spaces. He supported me in all I did.
I wanted to put something out into the world to honor him on his birthday. Craig encouraged everyone he knew to create and put things out into the world. Nothing was considered too insignificant to matter, everything counted. "The world" didn't have to mean at large, creating something for yourself in your personal world was more than enough. I am relearning how to knit, and today I knitted a new lace pattern in purple yarn. It doesn't look quite right, but it doesn't matter. I created it.
Today, I encourage you to do the same. Whether you knew Craig or not, create something and share it with someone. If you don't feel that you have anyone to share it with, share it with me. If someone shares something they created with you, give them support. Add something positive to the world. Create, share, and support.
[Guy] found a nice wide 11-inch bar LCD that was the right aspect ratio to suit the “bumper sticker” aesthetic. It had an HDMI interface, so he decided to drive it with a Raspbery Pi Zero 2W. Power for the system was derived from 12-volt lines going to his vehicle’s rear view camera. For an enclosure, he simply stuck the Pi and a buck converter on the back of the display and heat shrinked the whole thing. He also threw some magnets in there to stick it to the car.
How does the screen know what song to display? Well, [Guy] already has his Spotify listens scrobbling to Last.fm. Thus, he just made a script that scrapes his Last.fm page, which runs on a Particle Boron microcontroller, which has a cellular connection of its own. The Boron gets the song data, and spits it over to the Pi via Bluetooth. Then the Pi generates an image for the display.
Oh, and there’s also a neat Easter Egg. In honor of brat summer, the background changes to #8ACE00 green if the system detects you’re listening to Charli XCX. Neat.
It’s a neat build with a lot of moving parts. We’re surprised we haven’t seen anything like this before though, it’s really rather fun. Also, how’s about that taste of the old Internet—when was the last time you heard somebody mention scrobbling? Gosh, we’re getting old.
Debian does not have an official way to configure
networking. Instead, it has four
recommended ways to configure networking, one of which is the
venerable ifupdown, which
has part of Debian since the turn of the century and is showing its
age. A conversation about its maintainability and possible replacement with ifupdown‑ng has
led to discussions about the default network-management tools for
Debian "trixie"
(Debian 13, which expected in 2025) and beyond. No route to consensus
has been found, yet.
Waymo's driverless cars have a much lower crash rate than human drivers, with fewer than one injury-causing crash per million miles driven, compared to an estimated 64 crashes by human drivers over the same distance. As Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee notes, a significant portion of Waymo's most severe crashes involved human drivers rear-ending the Waymo vehicles. From the report: Twenty injuries might sound like a lot, but Waymo's driverless cars have traveled more than 22 million miles. So driverless Waymo taxis have been involved in fewer than one injury-causing crash for every million miles of driving -- a much better rate than a typical human driver. Last week Waymo released a new website to help the public put statistics like this in perspective. Waymo estimates that typical drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix -- Waymo's two biggest markets -- would have caused 64 crashes over those 22 million miles. So Waymo vehicles get into injury-causing crashes less than one-third as often, per mile, as human-driven vehicles.
Waymo claims an even more dramatic improvement for crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag. Driverless Waymos have experienced just five crashes like that, and Waymo estimates that typical human drivers in Phoenix and San Francisco would have experienced 31 airbag crashes over 22 million miles. That implies driverless Waymos are one-sixth as likely as human drivers to experience this type of crash. The new data comes at a critical time for Waymo, which is rapidly scaling up its robotaxi service. A year ago, Waymo was providing 10,000 rides per week. Last month, Waymo announced it was providing 100,000 rides per week. We can expect more growth in the coming months.
So it really matters whether Waymo is making our roads safer or more dangerous. And all the evidence so far suggests that it's making them safer. It's not just the small number of crashes Waymo vehicles experience -- it's also the nature of those crashes. Out of the 23 most serious Waymo crashes, 16 involved a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. Three others involved a human-driven car running a red light before hitting a Waymo. There were no serious crashes where a Waymo ran a red light, rear-ended another car, or engaged in other clear-cut misbehavior.
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