Have you ever baked cookies and wondered why the recipe is exactly that way and no other? If you changed this ingredient up or that temperature, would it make the cookies even better? I certainly have had these thoughts. It’s the reason why most of the things I bake aren’t very edible… When it comes to programming, these thoughts arise too. What if I wrote this part as a separate function? If I hard-coded this bit over there, would it make the code easier? Can I rewrite those ten ugly lines into
I came across PedalMe cargo bike company last year, and was impressed. It provides a last-mile cargo and passenger ebike service. All of its riders are employed full-time, with pre-scheduled shifts and hourly pay (instead of the per-delivery income in the gig economy model). Sounds pretty good, hey? But there’s a quirk — their riders are not allowed to wear bike helmets. Pedal Me ecargo bikes carry people and goods across London. Image: Pedal Me According to the company’s latest newsletter: We
There’s been tremendous excitement about recent results from the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in the UK, hinting that the dream of nuclear fusion power is inching closer to reality. We know that fusion works – it is the process that powers the Sun, providing heat and light to the Earth. But for decades it has proved difficult to make the transition from scientific laboratory experiments to sustained power production. The fundamental aim of fusion is to bring atomic nuclei merging together
In 2022, it’s not a surprising thing for a phone company to launch a device that feels like just an incremental update to its predecessor. But it’s slightly surprising when a manufacturer churns out a phone that’s made from the stock of phone parts of a model released last year. The OnePlus 9RT is one such example. Before you bring out your pitchforks, I want to clarify that it’s a good device to live with. And if you’re currently using a phone that’s a couple of years old, it’s even a good buy.
Phone manufacturers spent most of the 2010s shrinking bezels and seeing how large a design they could get away with. Eventually, pretty much every phone on the market was just one big screen housed in a metal and glass chassis. Phones couldn’t get any larger without looking absurd. There was pretty much nowhere left to go. And so, the folding phone was born. The advent of folding displays has opened the door to all sorts of new form factors, but so far the market seems to have settled on the two
In what many saw as a surprise move, Meta has promoted former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg to its president of global affairs. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, Clegg is now “a senior leader at the level of myself … who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally”. What should we make of this? It is too optimistic to think that Meta’s culture of personal data mining and manipulation might finally be coming to an end? Meta, formerly known as Facebook
This article was originally published by Christopher Carey on Cities Today, the leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders. For the latest updates, follow Cities Today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, or sign up for Cities Today News. Estonia’s capital Tallinn is introducing a digital transport model which it says can forecast and analyze the city’s mobility needs to improve urban planning. The tool includes d
This article was originally published on .cult by Adrien Book. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. Remember 2016? Pokemon GO was sweeping the world, and many felt that we were on the cusp of an Augmented Reality revolution. Obviously, this hasn’t materialized. Fast forward to today, and we’re yet again having a very similar conversa
This week in the US, AT&T retired its 3G network to make room for newer 5G cellular bands. While most of our smartphones are embedded with 4G or 5G chips, a lot of transport infrastructure runs on old-school 3G cellular networks. Think of a large number of telematics and IoT-connected devices. As 3G retires, they no longer operate without upgrading to 4G connectivity. In other words, unless your connected devices connect to 4G or higher, your devices are bricked. The entire transport ecosystem
Last year, startup-investor Shekhar Kirani made a controversial series of tweets. In them was a list of characteristics he thinks are found in the best software developers — so-called “10x engineers”. Some of the qualities he mentioned were things like hating meetings, not mentoring other team members, and always using dark color schemes (as someone who sets a white background in my editors, that last one affected me personally). Putting aside its bizarre shallowness, the tweet encourages tolera