Unfortunately Sonic does not cover the whole bay, and certainly not all SF. I am still waiting for Sonic to cover the heart of the City (Eureka Valley).
I have a V12 and had V6 cordless before and I am quite impressed by these including the Pencil one. It made vacuuming at our home quite simple even for kids. Where do you see they are lacking?
Okay maybe I am an outlier, but when I vacuum my place (1400 sqft), it takes about 1hr. I fill half of the container with dust. I am kinda thorough, maybe borderline OCD :)
And so I need a vacuum that is not going to lose power, so I am happy to stay corded, with full sucking power all the way.
I can see the Pencil useful for a quick limited vacuuming.
The most brain intensive activity I ever did at school, happened in the very last two years (so, ~20 years at school lead to it), when I rubbed my brain to Lambda Prolog.
I almost had headaches after intense thinking of problems and ways to solve them in lambda prolog. That was the most interesting and satisfying to physically feel the effect of high focus combined with applying what was a new logic.
Computer science at the university, taught me how to learn and explore new ideas. I might sound like my grandpa who told me when I was 8yo that using calculator would lead to people not able to count... and here I am saying that LLM might lead to people who do not know how to write.
Actually, I am a bit concern that we might produce more text in the short term because it is becoming cheap to write tons of documentation with LLMs. But those feel like death by Terms and Conditions, i.e. text that no one reads. So not only we would lose our ability to write, but we can seriously affect our ability to read. Sure LLM can summarize as well, but then we lose the nuances.
Nature is lazy, but should we be lazy and delegate our ability to think (read/write), to a software ? Think about it :)
I think we need to find some ethical and sustainable alternatives to emergency communications. HAM radio is still very much around along with alternative satellite communications. There's also been some DIY efforts in using LoraWAN-based messengers and such.
Natural language is poor medium at communicating rules and orders. The current state of affair in US is a prime example.
We are still debating what some laws and amendments mean. The meaning of words change over time, lack of historical context, etc.
I would love natural language to operate machines, but I have been programming since mid 80's and the stubbornness of the computer languages (from BASIC, to go) strikes a good balance, and puts enough responsibility on the emitter to precisely express what he wants the machine to do.
No skin in the game. Looking at the old one https://www.mta.info/map/36946 vs. the new one https://www.mta.info/map/5256, and not being a New Yorker, I would prefer the old map as it allows me to appreciate the distances and contextualize more.
But I can see a New Yorker preferring the new map to get just the subway lines and connections.
I prefer the old map and I would argue it’s better. The old geographically accurate map is better for tourists, but the streamlined map is easier for locals to read.
IMO, locals don’t really look at transit maps since they have them memorized and only travel the same few lines regularly.
It’s tourists that are unfamiliar with the lines that need to read these maps. They also want to know the distance between stations.
So it becomes the question: who is the transit map made for?
I think they both deserve to exist, and need to. The one map is invaluable when I’m navigating somewhere specific by my own hand; the other map is critical to comprehend the system and how the different lines parallel and overlap.
Compare the subway map with a real map of New York and you'll find that it leads you to all kinds of wrong ideas about directions, distances and relative positions of things.
