These calculators never made much sense to me. The whole point of getting a bigger screen is to cover a larger portion of your field of view. Sitting close to a giant TV is like being in your own cinema.
The point they use is that our vision angles are fixed and if you sit too close you won't see the whole screen at once. What's the point of having bigger screen in that case? Also the angles of viewing won't let you see that juicy colorful picture at the sides even if you turn your head.
As for the cinema, there are a limited amount of seats where you can get the best immersion and they are in the sweet spot of screen size/distance
Those calculations are way too conservative for the screen to cover your field of view. Unless you mean your fovea but then that's much smaller. Also depending on the display tech you can see colors at angles just fine.
It baffles me that the 8K is discussed without taking the screen size into consideration. 8K in 77 inch TV is not that much different from 4k in 50 inch TV if you focus on PPI. Such big TVs also require certain distance to be able to watch them. Good luck finding an apartment or house in EU where you can fit 77 inch tv to comfortably watch it.
Security has certain cost associated to implement it. That makes product more expensive without any additional market value. There must be certain external incentives to motivate spending extra effort
> Security has certain cost associated to implement it
The article makes a strong case that, at least for minimum viable/ordinary security measures, the cost is $0.
The projector in question wasn't missing features that would have consumed any amount of the issuing company's margin to implement; it was missing features that would have consumed at most a couple of meetings and a junior dev spending 30min watching the first three YouTube results for "consumer device security issues", and then another 30min copy/pasting standard mitigations into place.
If they'd done the basic due diligence of putting a lock on the metaphorical door, they wouldn't have even had to spend the QA cycles making sure the lock was secure (though that would be nice). But instead they opted to ship sans security entirely.
> the cost is $0
> at most a couple of meetings and a junior dev spending 30min watching the first three YouTube results for "consumer device security issues", and then another 30min copy/pasting standard mitigations into place.
That's not $0 in my math. That's a total effort easily worth of a few thousands if not more from all aligning parties.
That is mostly true, PLA is ONLY biodegradable in a facility that can handle that. Your run of the mill recycling center in your city probably can't or won't take your PLA prints.
And then only if it's pure PLA with no additives. Which most PLA has to improve speed of printing or strength or some other property. In practice, I'd wager that 90% of commercially available PLA fillament is not actually biodegradable.
Less creep, slightly better at absorbing shocks without breaking, better failure behaviour (PLA can suddenly shatter leaving sharp edges, PETG tends to deform elastically first).
The problem is that they're useless during winter in Ukrain. There is barely any energy generated between November and March. And heatpump won't work during frequent outages. Nice but kinda useless gesture
Solar is about 50% as productive during the depths of winter than the summer at 50 degrees North (65% or so of the peak power, but obviously the duration of sunlight is reduced). "Barely any"/"Useless" is not accurate. Solar arrays remain productive during the winter, even at Northern latitudes.
Heat pumps obviously offer more heat output per kW than electric alternatives. It makes limited supply much more tenable and valuable.
You forgot clouds. German experience shows they are at times, on average, only about 2% as effective (24 hours average, i.e. min vs max). And around 5% weekly average min vs max (battery storage over even longer periods is hard to imagine).
Modern PV cells are pretty effective even in cloudy weather. Mine seem to produce more energy on overcast wintery days than on sunny wintery days because there are fewer harsh shadows that way.
It's solar generation which doesn't work in winter in Ukraine, not the heat pumps. And as Russia is targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure as their main tactic, with the goal of getting the population to accept Putin's domination to avoid freezing to death, the heat pumps would only be useful if local solar worked.
Exactly. Micro grids keep on functioning unless they are hit directly. Batteries can charge up when there's power from solar, the grid, rooftop wind, generators, EVs that can provide power back, and so on. There are many options here; batteries don't care where the power comes from. That kind of resilience is very hard to take out with drones once you have it. Centralized grids are much less resilient.
I expect Ukrainians don't actually need to be told this and are already getting creative with ensuring they have power. There's plenty of incentive there to make sure they are not overly dependent on centralized power and heating infrastructure. Of course it takes time to fix and upgrade all buildings; that's why the Russians can still have huge impact with their nightly strikes against civilian infrastructure.
I think Russia and Puting will get credited for inadvertently speeding up the energy transition across Europe by a few decades. Everybody is going cold turkey on Russian gas and the replacement isn't LNG. That's more of a stop gap solution until something more economical can be put in place. We're having pretty harsh winter here in Germany (and elsewhere in the EU). There's not a lot of talk about gas prices in the news so far. That's because we've had a few years to diversify our energy sources. LNG is now a big part of the mix, obviously. But the high price of that is also an incentive for people to consider alternatives like heat pumps.
We're talking about business challenges/features which can be solved by using either of the solutions and analyzing pros/cons. It's not like Redis is bad, but sometimes it's an over-engineered solution and too costly
And once you start listening there, your video suggestions feed becomes a music feed thus degrade the video experience. Vids and music must be separate
"New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving."
> now are a part of European Transport Safety Council requirements
Actually, no, no official EU organization nor any council mandates that. It's Euro NCAP, an independent organization, who decided they'll include tactile control in their car safety evaluation. It is literally explained in that article.
It will still make a difference, but this is not something EU did.
The NCAP and the ETSC usually work very close together.
A lot of times safety innovations are first introduced on NCAP ratings, then the ETSC carefully evaluates adoption and will then advocate for those requirements to become legally binding regulations.
A technical standard will then typically be designed at the UNECE, Then the European Commission will propose it to be discussed and voted both by the EU Parliament and the European Council.
It is not like the NCAP is just the EU version of the US "Consumer Reports". While not a part of the EU, it is a non-profit thoroughly embedded into the development of automotive safety standards in the EU.
Having driven a lot of cars with a fuckton of buttons on the steering wheel, how exactly do people use these without having to look down? One or two multi-function buttons connected to a screen is great, but there is no way I would be able to safely use that mess of physical buttons shown in the photos.
By feel. Not everyone uses all the buttons all the time, but stuff you use a lot is easily operated without taking eyes off the road. It pairs well with the other upside of physical controls, the manufacturer can’t move them out from under you with a software update.
I've owned such cars for many years and no, I've never learned all the buttons. Also, I'm not advocating for a touchscreen, but a small number of buttons plus a screen is far more ideal than a massive mess of buttons. This shit has always been a UX nightmare, it sucks that it's coming back.
I knew all the buttons on my steering wheel within weeks. They're very convenient because your hands are already on the wheel. Touchscreen buttons are just not a replacement.
Yeah, there's, like, I don't know, 25 buttons if you count the stalks? That's a lot I guess, but I wouldn't want to turn down my music or skip the track by looking over at a touch screen and guessing.
I normally don't look at them, you know by heart which is which and ours has also one up/down sticking out knob on each side (volume & cruise speed control). Combined with very nicely visible laser heads up display I never look on dashboard nor computer screen in the middle while driving.
Staying continuously visually connected with all environment simplifies driving and definitely improves safety. Also thanx to that heads up display I didn't get a single speeding fine while by default driving at the very limit of allowed speed, including our radar-infested towns and highways.
2010-level of tech of bmw f11 is enough for me, the only real improvement would be full unsupervised self driving which isn't coming anytime soon.
The touchscreen on my 2010 Prius stopped responding, I could still use the "Voice Control" button on the steering wheel. Waiting 10 seconds each time to navigate the menu by voice, hoping it heard me clearly each time.
Surely voice commands can replace buttons and touch interfaces in 2026!
You just feel around for it. Buttons on the steering wheel can be a lifesaver because you don't have to reach down or even look at it, you know what you're doing.
Most people drive the same car most days. Either many or most people (I don’t have stats) drive a different car some days. There’s entire companies — Hertz, Avis, etc — with business models based around this observation.
Speak for yourself. I can adjust all of my physical climate controls, radio, wipers, and cruise control without taking my eyes off the road. Maybe some fumbling to pick the right blower angle.
Some manufacturers have massively screwed up the cruise control buttons. On Rivians, for example, the car will instruct you to take control of steering if you will soon enter an area where it can’t do assisted steering. Fine, except that the only control that can transition directly from assisted steering to plan enhanced cruise is to jerk the steering wheel, which is distinctly uncool. So you instead cancel cruise entirely and then re-engage it.
To add insult to injury, despite the fact that the speed up and speed down buttons are actual physical buttons, they are so aggressively denounced that there’s a loop: press button, wait, press, read screen to see if you’re making progress, press, etc.
Anyway, the point is that, while physical buttons in predictable locations can make it possible to operate something without looking, it still needs a good design and implementation.
I mean "even" in a Tesla you can adjust volume, next/previous track, wipers, cruise control (among other things) with a physical button, and climate controls are in a fixed location on the screen (and are typically left on auto).
Sounds like the IIHS which has been imposing 'mandates' on car manufacturers with little proof that these mandates are effective. These mandates are costing us all millions in upfront and insurance rates but I never see any evidence that they are worth the cost they impose. Not opposed to the mandates specifically just the lack of cost benefit analysis.
Can you be more specific about these “mandates” you take issue with?
IIHS doesn’t have any mandate power over manufacturers (they are not a regulatory body) but they do align with insurance company interests, whose goals are to pay out less for damages from vehicle incidents, and therefore IIHS logically would theoretically be focused on actuarial data-driven analysis. If you have specific examples of where this has not been the case, I’d love to learn more.
Here are some where IIHS punishes cars that don't meet its features with dubious evidence of improving safety...
Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) with Pedestrian Detection: IIHS rates vehicles on forward collision avoidance, including pedestrian scenarios, but systems often underperform in real-world conditions like nighttime or with larger vehicles (e.g., trucks or motorcycles). Studies show virtually no crash reduction at night, and features can create false alerts, weather-related failures, or a false sense of security, potentially dulling driver awareness without clear evidence of broad effectiveness at higher speeds.
Roof Strength Test: Vehicles must withstand a force equivalent to a certain multiple of their weight (e.g., 4x for a "good" rating) to simulate rollover protection. Critics, including automotive industry analyses, argue there's no statistically reliable evidence that increasing roof strength beyond basic levels (e.g., from 2.5 to 3.5 strength-to-weight ratio) reduces injury risk, with claims relying on unsupported extrapolations from low-strength data and anomalous results.
Updated Side Impact Test (Introduced 2021): This tougher test uses a heavier, faster-moving barrier (4,200 lbs at 37 mph) to mimic modern SUV strikes. It's criticized for disadvantaging smaller vehicles unfairly, incorporating misleading variables (e.g., tire grip affecting results), and prioritizing structural deformation over occupant outcomes, potentially leading to "poor" ratings despite good dummy readings. Detractors view it as more marketing-driven than reflective of common real-world crashes, with little evidence that the changes proportionally save lives beyond the original test.
Sounds like AI slopish article. A whole section about "Why most enterprises don't" with many words but no actual data or analysis. Just assumptions based on orthogonal report.
AI won't give you much productivity if the problem you're challenged with is the human problem. That could happen both to startups and enterprises.
For normal size apartments 55-65 inch is indeed the best size considering the distances. It's a pity that the manufactures don't make 8k 55 inch TVs..
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