I was wondering why street lights don't have motion sensors. Maybe it's because the range of the sensors is too low. Typical PIR stuff won't work very well at that distance. Or maybe the lights going on and off all the time would be distracting or annoying for residents.

It was a decision that weighed up the pros and cons.

Pros:
- Broader spectrum light has better colour rendering, i.e. you can see things like road markings and hazards better with it. Sodium is very narrow spectrum.
- CCTV can see a lot better with broad spectrum.
- Whiter light appears brighter to humans even when the light output is lower than redder light.
- LEDs are more efficient at higher colour temperatures, although the difference is small now.

Cons:
- Can mess up the natural day/night cycle for living things, from insects to humans.
- Some people prefer orange.

If it is bothering you then contact your council. They can install a shield that stops it shining into your bedroom.

It says "combat" and "fight back", but it seems like it just protects the user and does nothing to retaliate.

I think anyone how serves a cat probably knows that AI doesn't need to be particularly complex or intelligent to take over the world. Cats don't have object permanence or the ability to reason, and they still easily get humans to work for them for free.

Brave has betrayed user trust far too many times. They currently offer a paid version that claims not to monetize you, but how can you trust them? Besides, they are not keeping Manifest V2 either, they won't maintain it after Google removes it.

He hacked it together in a weekend with little thought. As is often the case, the worst option becomes the de-facto standard. See Markdown for another example.

I thought common Slashdot wisdom was to disable Javascript because only a madman runs unknown code downloaded from the internet on every website he visits.

They were thinking that the web is their platform. The whole reason they created Chrome was because they wanted the web to be the platform, not the underlying OS. Chomebooks are mostly just a web browser.

Googlebooks are abandoning that to have proper apps. They seem to be hoping that it can become as much as a gaming platform as Android.

It's sad that McD is the standard for quick, known quantity food. In Japan they have little noodle places that are just as fast, but the food is infinitely better, both in terms of taste and nutrition.

Creating Javascript is not something to be proud of.

Either way, Firefox's decline has nothing to do with him. It's because Chrome is good. I know, Google steals all your data, but most people just want a browser that is fast and easy to use. If they care about privacy, there are numerous forks to choose from.

I use Firefox, but the compatibility issues and long standing bugs are frustrating. Most people would probably give up, and even I look at new Chrome based browsers to see if moving back is feasible now and then. I think the lack of uBlock on Chrome will probably keep me here, but I'm far from a typical user.

Go to about:config and toggle browser.nova.enabled to false.

I read the Ars interview with one of the guys who worked on this, and he justified it by saying that for broad appeal they need to have a modern looking UI. That may be true, but only if they also have a strong base of speed and compatibility.

He mentioned that they are using AI to help develop things faster, which may be good if it helps catch back up for speed and compatibility. I think what they really need to do is straighten the codebase out and make it easier to build, so that other browsers can adopt it like they have adopted Chromium. I know there are forks, but they are little more than skins and default settings changes.

Joking aside, I used to think sci-fi stories about AI teaching itself to operate machines and systems was a bit outlandish. Turns out I was wrong, a generic chatbot can already drive a car, albeit badly.

We are probably screwed. If climate change doesn't get us, AI will.

The US is not a social democracy.

Thinking about it now, I don't think any social democratic countries have nuclear weapons. They tend to have very, very good healthcare too.

You can say that about any democracy, but the social ones are at least designed to prevent any individual or any party getting too much power. If you look at them, the governments are almost always broad coalitions.

2-bit crypto schemes

I think the president is running a grave risk of his key being brute-forced!