I don't get this kind of vitriol toward cruise goers. I like to plan trips as an adventure like you and 6 years ago had zero desire to ever go on a cruise. I ended up going on one because my in-laws wanted to do a European cruise with extended family for their retirement celebration. They don't drink, they enjoy their life and got to celebrate with family so no loneliness. They are just older and don't have the physicality or mental desire to plan and go on adventures anymore. They wanted a more catered experience for their celebration.
I actually enjoyed the cruise way more than I thought I would. The cruise allowed people to do what they want. My in-laws and others with less physical ability could go on bus tours or taxi around. People like me that preferred adventure can spend 8 hours walking through different nooks and crannies of the city. Being on deck in an open sea was nice and peaceful. I had been to Europe a few times before, but the cruise allowed me to go and walk around port cities that I wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, without substantially more cost. Each with some interesting bits to walk through and good food to eat. It was a good, quick, demo for whether I wanted to plan a future trip to that city.
If I were planning a trip now for my immediate fanily, I wouldn't do a cruise. I do not spew vitriol and insults at those that do though. Most of them aren't as pathetic as you have been led to think.
Same here. My elderly parents love cruises, but I didn't see the allure. Went on one and it was "OK." I spent most of the time in one of the hot tubs where "Tommy From Boston" was a permanent fixture. He had an infinite number of stories in the queue that he had to tell anyone who climbed into the tub, and probably drank over 100 beers a day. It wasn't bad, and I wouldn't go out of my way to plan a cruise, but it wasn't the pure torture and torment that some people are posting here.
As a person who definitely has big issues with the cruise industry as a whole this was the best pro-cruises comment I read in the whole thread, especially this bit :
> but the cruise allowed me to go and walk around port cities that I wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, without substantially more cost
However, I still note that it was written by a person who identifies as someone generally uninterested in cruises i.e. not the typical cruise-ship enthusiast.
A previous commenter mentioned that cruises (paraphrase) “lack the colonial feel of mexican resorts” which is a testament to the power of consumerist illusion.
An all inclusive resort in the caribbean is also likely to be shitty to staff. Most people are drinking coffee or eating chocolate that has slavery somewhere along the supply line.
I think you can make the case that cruising is an unethical industry, either because of exploitative labor practices or environmental damage. But almost nobody who is criticizing cruising as a vacation is starting here. Instead, cruises are called trashy and fake in comparison to "authentic" travel experiences.
Yea, I know the staff can be treated terribly. I can see how the OP I replied to can get the impression that all cruise goers are bitter/terrible people if their anecdotes are mostly staff complaints. I never talked or dealt with staff other than ordering food/drinks. I saw plenty of people talking rudely to staff with petty complaints. I saw one of the entertainers yelling because one woman grabbed his crotch as they passed by. The staff have to deal with the worst/rudest/entitled cruise goers and get paid way too little for it.
Do you apply the same scrutiny to other leisure activities in your life?
If you've ever been to a chinese restaurant or hired a landscaper you are dealing in the same or similar unpleasantness that you attribute to cruise staff. Assuming you are American FWIW.
Yeah agreed. They're quite a solid and easy choice when you need to cater to the lowest common denominator (not meant at all in a derogatory sense!)
If you're planning a holiday for ages spanning 2-75 for 3-5 families. What other holidays will have food that satisfies everyone's particular tastes, has activities for all ages and has a full suite of excursions or equally ringfenced "nothing" time. Its also comparatively safe.
All without putting the onus on someone to organise a huge trip with lots of competing interests and spending habits.
Sure, there are probably alternatives but I can understand the appeal even though I'm still pretty happy planning my own adventures when its me and my wife.
Can you give examples of this? I was recently looking for a car and saw the discounts and credits for a Tesla and thought it was finally time to go electric. Then I started researching the interface and saw so many people talking about how clunky it was and they decided to just use bluetooth with their phone to listen to music rather than the interface or even worse hacks where they setup a web server on their phone to mirror to the interface and have to type urls so they can use waze.
My wife has a Honda CRV with android auto and it works great when I drive it. We both use Youtube Premium (formerly Google Music) for our music and I use (soon to be going away) Google Podcasts for my podcasts. Those both work great with Android Auto. My understanding from looking it up is that it is near impossible to use non-supported software with a tesla without ugly hacks. My experience with Android Auto is good that it, or something better, is an absolute requirement on my next car. From my research, it seemed like Tesla added more walled garden annoyances than improvements.
1. The navigation works really well for me. Including routing via superchargers
2. The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)
3. The screen is very responsive. Touch UI is fast.
4. The backup and side camera view is the best I’ve seen on cars.
5. Record the last X minutes from all cameras when you honk (someone backed into my car and it’s nice to have easy access to the video footage via the usb stick)
6. Auto defogging.
7. Heating and de-icing the car from the app when I’m having breakfast.
8. Autosteer (the free included one) works surprisingly well. It handles more roads and situations than I’ve seen on other manufacturers
9. Auto detect different drivers from the phone key and sets their seat/steering/settings (and even their spotify account)
There’s dozen more small things that show the attention to detail that some car manufacturers also have in their hardware but almost never have in their software.
It’s not all perfect (eg the Spotify app could be better) but it’s a lot better than any other car or rental I’ve been in, including carplay).
2-8 do sound great. They are the reasons I was looking at a Tesla. Hadn't even heard of some of those. The car I'm looking to replace is a 2009 toyota corolla commuter car that is really starting to have maintenance issues. The right speakers even stopped working a few years ago. The speaker on my phone is better so I just put the sound all the way up and use that. The audio sucks, but it's easy. I sit down, press play, and I'm listening to what I want.
My wife's CRV is a 2018 which I only drive when we are driving long distances. Still, I just plug my phone in and all my data is there on android auto. I have starred places on google maps going back almost 15 years. I click a place on recents and it maps me there. I press shuffle on youtube music and it has all my history there to play through. Youtube music also has the download option so I can play music in non-signal areas. That was another thing I couldn't seem to find an answer for with a Tesla. Does spotify work without a signal? If so, how much storage does the tesla offer to spotify? I have multi-gigs of downloaded music on my phone. We hit 30+ minute terrible signal areas on our holiday travels to family.
The options seemed to be switch my apps to spotify/tesla navigation for "car riding" and have to double-entry everything from my home-listening or completely switchover. Which could maybe work for spotify (does that have the same option to upload your own music that google music had?), but definitely wouldn't work for tesla navigation. Then there's the privacy concerns that I'm now sharing more data with two places rather than one. Then the added monthly fee of using Tesla's data plan vs. android auto being free. All that made me think that getting a tesla would only increase my annoyances and costs rather than providing me a benefit. The advantages you listed are really, really nice, but hard to justify with the rest of it.
You're also a paying customer of one of those services that you're sharing data with. It doesn't automatically mean that they'll be any better, and Tesla has had quite a few privacy-related fuckups, but one is in the business of selling your data, the other isn't. Take it for what it's worth. Lately they've been pushing quite a lot of privacy related things, but it may just be virtue signalling on their part. One feature I really like is the ability to share a destination from Google Maps on my phone to the car and it will instantly route there.
For some strange reason the Spotify app in Tesla doens't have the option to download playlists, it will only buffer ahead and cache things. I've had it happen that it stopped playing because it lost connectivity and I tried to shuffle ahead quite a few times. I think all Teslas come with at least 60GB of internal user accessible storage, you can also expand that by just plugging in a USB-drive in the glovebox. The Tidal app in Tesla does offer offline playlists, and much higher bitrate. I think Tesla is doing their audio engineers a disservice by the atrocious bitrate that they provide through the Spotify and Apple Music app. And Tidal is borderline unusable if you want innovative and ground breaking features like Shuffle, but apparently that is coming this "holiday update".
You don't need to have a "Premium Subscription" to use Spotify or any other streaming service in a Tesla, you just set up a hotspot on your phone and it will automatically connect to it. I've also seen some people connect a mobile hotspot to the glovebox USB-port. Some of them even come with additional storage and things like internal battery so it'll stay connected even when the car powers down the infotainment system. If you have an iPhone it's a little more convoluted, but it's easily sorted out with just using a Shortcut to enable hotspot that fires automatically when it connects to your car.
Tesla does a lot of things very well, and some things just don't make any sense at all. Like when they removed the "repeat playlist" option in Spotify for a year or so. It made impossible to use shuffle, as you'd usually reach the end of the playlist within a couple of shuffles, and it would just change to radio or something. It still supported the option, I could toggle it on in the Spotify app on my phone, they just removed the UI element. Luckily it came back not that long ago.
FWIW a lot of the things in 2-8 aren't unique to Tesla.
My non-Tesla does 3, 4 (camera view seems higher res than the Model Y I test drove, although I don't find the blind spot cameras that helpful because you have to take your eyes off the road to use them), 6, 7, 8 (Although I don't have enough experience to say how Tesla's compares), and 9 (except the Spotify bit, but since I use Android Auto and anyone who DJs in my car has either that or Carplay it's a non-issue)
I was doubting for a while until I took a test drive. You can ask for the last test drive on Saturday evening and keep it till Monday morning. At least here in Belgium that works and you get to properly test it. Which helped to try out the baby and kid chairs we use.
> The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)
But do you still have a key?
My phone ran out of battery some 80 km far from home last Thursday because I forgot to charge it. I could enter my car and drive back home because I open it and start the engine with a traditional physical key.
I do have the keycard in my wallet but often travel without it. On longer trips, my wife is usually with us so we have two phone keys and the likelihood of both of us forgetting to charge are slim ( also, the wireless pads in the car is where you usually store it )
Additionally, if I were to be stranded somewhere there are 2 other people with phone keys that I could contact for them to remotely open the car, or just find a charger somewhere.
I have had more bad luck losing physical phone keys in the past.
Yeah, a card. A very inconvenient form factor compared to a key. I forgot that new cars use cards more and more. A key can be put in a pocket and never breaks. A card needs a holder to protect it.
You can always get a key fob, you just have to buy it separately.
I'll never go back to a car without being able to use my phone as a (reliable) key and store the credit card sized backup key in my wallet. Because it's just that - a backup key. In over two years I've used the key a total of zero times. And one thing I've noticed is that key fobs seems to become bigger and bigger, every year. Just look at the new Volvo key fob. It's the same size as AirPods charging case.
I bought a BMW i4, not a Tesla 3, so this is just my comparison. But Tesla software works really well, they have navigation to chargers, something that doesn’t really work in the BMW, you are pretty much on your own. They have sentinal mode, and it actually doesn’t suck like BMW’s drive recorder does. You can open your car with your phone, like for real via UWB, not just some NFC thing that works only in one place, or over the slow cellular unlock. I guess I didn’t explore the Spotify/music streaming experience.
I still chose the BMW because the better interior and build quality, but it was definitely a sacrifice.
I have an i3, pre-carplay, and I like that the computer works well with just a jog wheel.
It has a navigate to charger feature that works reasonably well (though there are too many steps to “only show fast chargers”, and many stations are broken, though hopefully the tesla supercharger deal will fix that…)
Range estimates seem to be accurate, unlike Tesla’s high-balling.
Anyway, I’m hoping they can do at least that well moving forward.
The navigate to charger lotion in BMW maps is just too hard to bother with. It’s almost better tk just ask siri to navigate to a charger of some kind. The jog wheel is nice, but I get away with voice for most functions. I hope it improves over time, especially the random GPS bug that displaces you by 100 meters and makes navigation useless.
I also own an i4 and I still prefer its navigation system to Google Maps or Tesla. Navigating to chargers works perfectly, and it notifies you in realtime if for some reason it gets occupied.
Yes, Tesla sentry mode is really good, but I really cannot live without a parking front and lateral cameras in the narrow streets of Europe. Specially without a working PDC system.
I’m very happy with my i4, best car I’ve ever owned. And much better that all my Tesla experiences.
I too appreciate my parking cameras given the tight parking situation I have here in urban Seattle. It is also sorely needed because the i4 is a huge compact while I was used to parking a smaller sub-compact.
BMW navigation system is not very good for my needs. Maybe it is just better suited to Europe? That would explain the German-accented English it uses :). Our charging networks are so few and so saturated here in the PNW that it probably wouldn't mean much anyways.
I switched to 95% firefox in 2021. I needed ad block on my phone browser due to some awful (but necessary) sites. I still use gmail for my main email and use other google-specific apps in my browser/phone. So I keep a chrome browser installed on my PC with my main google account logged in. I only use that for google stuff though. All other browsing is done in firefox. It's worked out great for me.
I don't use either of those features, but the one reason I stick with Pixel phones is bloatware. The amount of useless bloatware that comes with most phones is horrid. I went with a Samsung tablet because Google (at the time) stopped making tablets. The tablet hardware is good, but even after 2 years of owning the device, I still get nagged constantly for not using samsung specific apps/features that I have zero use for. Google does do some nagging on Pixel phones for their silly features, but I have found them much easier to turn off.
Unfortunately Motorola phones are not great when it comes to OS updates. Two major OS updates and then security patches for some time after that. Which sounds okay on paper, but man are they slow with them. I finally got Android 13 on my Edge 20 just last week! Their "bimonthly" security updates occasionally come a month late too. Maybe the experience would be different with a flagship rather than a midrange device, but I'm not willing to risk my money on such a gamble - my next phone won't be a Motorola. A shame too, their latest foldable looks quite nice.
I've been entertaining a theory that the update slowness and little bloat are somehow related - with how slow they're with updates, they probably don't have the time to code up any more bloat either.
If you are willing to use Roms you can have it earlier. My G42 is still on 12 and LineageOS at 13. Still like the phone a lot. Thinking about buying a spare one.
My guess has been that Huffman is just following Musk. My further guess is that he has actually either seeked or been given unsolicited advice from Musk about standing firm. Despite all the whining and complaints about Musk's handling of Twitter, the masses still use it. I see Twitter links on most sites I go to. Huffman thinks reddit is too big for a loud minority to shout down and he is probably correct. Reddit will become a pariah for some, but still used by the masses and Huffman and his investors will get their money. I'm on the side of the strikers and don't personally plan to use reddit daily anymore, but I view that as my personal stance and don't think it will have an effect on anything. I'm OK with that.
funnily, I was whispered that exact same thing when I was doing internal interview rounds for a big tech company before the 2008 recession. The group of newly hired heard pitches from a bunch of different groups that needed people and we were able to have some say into which group we joined. I took the advice to heart and went with the group that was considered by most employees to be the most sure thing and, by far, the most solid financially. 2 years later, that group's position in the market cratered and the layoff axe fell on a large percentage of people. I still don't disagree with your advice, but it is often hard to predict what will still be a business viable group in the future.
I wish I could provide a useful summary, but I had it on while I was prepping for a meeting so I wasn't really paying attention. I was more surprised at my timing of seeing it on HN, searching for his twitch profile, and then right then he was going through the article I had open in another tab.
I think if you're a subscriber (I'm not) you can replay his stream from earlier.
I do remember he said somethings like...
> 'the chess stuff that they're talking about isn't 100% accurate, but close enough. No one will know/care about that who's reading the article'
> 'it seems the things they're quoting they've pulled from previous streams'
Thanks for the local insight. I found it very interesting. How did they handle the pandemic? Where did you end up moving to and what was the reason you decided to move?
Well.. when the pandemic first started people were more wild, we all had masks and hand gel everywhere before they started doing it even in USA. My gf's parents were evangelical christinans so they believed all sorts of wild stuff, and I just went with it. After a week or two the family got more lax because of birthdays and family events and it was pretty much unavoidable, we all got covid. I was coughing for a day, and my gf couldnt taste anything for a few days, the rest of the family was fine. maybe a month after that,everyone said fuck it and things went back to normal more or less. It was pretty funny seeing the Comando enforce mask wearing when the government didn't. I ended up not staying with my gf, COVID and cabin fever and living under her parents house really screwed up our relationship.
do you have any tips for finding a good recruiter? I've never actually searched for one. I get recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn and they are pretty bad in my opinion. The ones I've followed up with know very little about the job they are hiring for and trying to get useful answers back from them is a giant pain.
Select the best-looking roles from the contacts you get, then audition the recruiters. Depending on your experience, this may mean relying on your gut. It also means meeting in person if possible, or at least on the phone. You want synchronous communications and the highest semantic bandwidth you can get. If they won't give you half an hour, that alone is a huge red flag. There's some other pointers in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029857
Keep searching and hang on to the ones who are funny and genuine. I've failed to get a job with an awesome recruiter and ended up getting placed with them for a different role 12 years later.
None of them know tech but a few of them are smart enough to understand that they don't know tech and to focus on mastering the social market.
I'd heard and read about the "hot hand" effect being a fallacy in a lot of places. It never made sense to me. I'm glad it is finally getting debunked.
Anyone who has played sports for a length of time would likely say that they feel more in control of their body at certain times. It could be because the brain chemistry becomes temporarily balanced, reducing anxiety, so their brain doesn't distract them as much. It could be a lingering pain/headache suddenly disappearing so it no longer becomes a physical distraction. It could be something directly related to muscle control, like minor tremors going away giving you more direct control over your body. In the case of sports with "fine tuning" like basketball where if you feel you are shooting short, you make the change to put more strength into it to "hone in" on the basket and start hitting shots. So, there are definitely times where you not only feel more capable of doing what you need to do over a short period of time. Due to current circumstances, you actually are more capable.
Yes, whatever the reason, we all have good days and bad days.
What you're talking about is what the statisticians call nonstationarity: on one day you make 30% of your shots, while on another day you make 40%, or whatever. Then your teammates, estimating your probability of making the next shot based on how they've observed you playing that day, decide whether to give you the ball more or less often. That would be one explanation -- and to my mind, a perfectly reasonable one -- of the "hot hand" theory.
But that's not what the authors of the original paper measured; and interestingly enough, it's also not the theory that Collins has now un-debunked. That involves a different measure, called autocorrelation, which measures "streakiness": how the odds of your making the next shot change based on whether you made the previous one. Autocorrelation and nonstationarity are orthogonal -- you can have either one without the other.
If you create a shot-vector per day, then any vector will lack autocorrelation.
If you you create a shot-vector for the whole season, then there will be autocorrelation.
Why?
P(n = good | n-1 = good)
= P(n = good | currently good day) P(currently good day | n-1 = good) + P(n = good | currently bad day) P(currently bad day | n-1 = good)
> P(n = good)
Also regarding verhausts example, the process he describes clearly has autocorrelation.
>Anyone who has played sports for a length of time would likely say
I played sports, one particularly to a highly competitive level, and I'm not sure I agree with feeling a conscious sense of more control of my body. Sure, some days feel better than other. But there are just far too many variables, so you can always point to something as the "cause" of your sudden string of what I'd consider good luck, but might also look like ability.
In fact, I'd say this is the major fallacy of sports analysis: post-hoc reasoning of results. Caveat: I haven't read the "hot hand" research.
I actually enjoyed the cruise way more than I thought I would. The cruise allowed people to do what they want. My in-laws and others with less physical ability could go on bus tours or taxi around. People like me that preferred adventure can spend 8 hours walking through different nooks and crannies of the city. Being on deck in an open sea was nice and peaceful. I had been to Europe a few times before, but the cruise allowed me to go and walk around port cities that I wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, without substantially more cost. Each with some interesting bits to walk through and good food to eat. It was a good, quick, demo for whether I wanted to plan a future trip to that city.
If I were planning a trip now for my immediate fanily, I wouldn't do a cruise. I do not spew vitriol and insults at those that do though. Most of them aren't as pathetic as you have been led to think.