This records the weekly technology content worth sharing, released every Friday.
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Cover image
at Xinchun Village, Bijie City, Guizhou Province, where a lighting basketball court has been built inside a natural cave, saving farmland while providing shelter from wind and rain, and keeping warm in winter and cool in summer.via）
The Double-Edged Sword of Autonomous Ride-Hailing Vehicles
Autonomous Ride-Hailing Vehicles in Wuhanhave been the latest buzz in the news.
Several hundred "Luobo Kuai跑" company taxis, completely driverless, are picking up and dropping off passengers on the streets of Wuhan (primarily in the Donghu New Technology Development Zone).
We may have all thought that one day, autonomous driving would become a reality, replacing human drivers, but we never expected it would happen so soon.
However, it's not yet completely driverless. Some photos have circulated online showing that each vehicle is monitored by someone in the cloud, and remote control can be taken in emergencies.
According toreport,萝卜快跑 now operates in 12 cities (Shanghai, Fuzhou, Jiaxing, Yangquan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Beijing, Hefei, Guangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, and Shenzhen), with 4 cities being fully driverless (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wuhan), while the rest have safety operators on board.
However, Wuhan is the only city that allows 7x24-hour operation across the entire city, while the others are limited to specific areas during certain hours.
This is why autonomous driving first took off in Wuhan. Because it is currently the only Chinese city where autonomous driving is truly implemented.
Its policies are the most lenient, having introduced the "Three Allowances" in 2022: allowing driverless vehicles without safety operators, operating on public roads, and commercial services. The area Wuhan has opened for autonomous driving is said to be the largest in the world.
However, this advantage probably won't last long. After萝卜快跑 gained popularity, other cities quickly followed suit. On July 8th, Shanghai will soon announce, allowing driverless taxis without safety operators, with public testing expected within a week.
The central government has also clearly expressed support and is promoting "integrated vehicle-road-cloud system" as a national development direction. Beijing has even stipulated in writing that all newly built, renovated, or expanded roads must reserve space on both sides for intelligent infrastructure.
In short, driverless technology is no longer just lab-based; nationwide testing and large-scale applications are on the horizon .
I believe this is a good thing. (1) Driverless technology can drive industrial upgrading and transformation; (2) enhance national competitiveness, ensuring the competitive edge of China's automotive manufacturing, transportation, and software industries; (3) benefit consumers.
However, autonomous driving also has a negative and harmful side to society. That is it will replace human drivers, causing unemployment . This cannot be ignored.
Autonomous driving has lower fares and operates 24 hours a day, making it impossible for human drivers to compete. Luobo Kuai跑 in Wuhan, with fares less than 1 yuan per kilometer, are significantly lower than ride-hailing services, let alone taxis (Wuhan's taxi starting fare is 10 yuan for the first 3 kilometers, then 1.8 yuan per kilometer).
Taxi companies in Wuhan are already struggling. An open letter from Wuhan Construction Passenger Transport Co., Ltd. has been circulating online, asking for help. , it is a cry for help.
"Currently, (our company's) drivers earn around 200 to 300 yuan in gross income per day, which is barely enough to sustain themselves.
This has led to conflicts between drivers and the company, with drivers complaining daily in the driver group about the company and management's inaction.
With the recent surge in autonomous ride-hailing vehicles, tech monopolizes resources, stealing jobs from ordinary people , many traditional taxi drivers struggle to make a living and are forced out of the industry. "
Unemployment is a serious social issue. If autonomous taxis replace human drivers en masse, it will affect many people's livelihoods. For social stability, the government needs to impose restrictions on autonomous taxis .
I have a few suggestions.
(1) Freight transport is better than passenger transport. Freight transport involves longer distances and is more demanding, making it more suitable for autonomous vehicles.
(2) Buses are better than taxis. Buses are already short of drivers, and autonomous vehicles can increase service frequency, promoting green travel.
(3) Suburban and rural areas are better than urban areas, as they are less accessible and have a greater need for autonomous vehicles.
(4) Autonomous taxis in urban areas, with management fees collected by the government, ensure that fares are not lower than those of human drivers. The extra revenue is used to support the transformation of the taxi industry.
Technology Trends
Besides wearing it on the wrist, what other uses can smartwatches have?
An American company has ingeniously invented a case to put the Apple Watch inside.
This case mimics the shape of the iPod, featuring buttons and a dial for user operation.
It successfully transforms the smartwatch into a portable device.
Users have long complained that smartphones are too large, and they only want a simple, small device that can tell time, play music, check the weather, make calls, and send messages. This device undoubtedly meets that demand.
This month, Guangzhou has built the world's first dual-head wind turbine.
A conventional wind turbine has only one head, but this one has two.
These two heads rotate in opposite directions,据说 they can cancel out the torque forces each other generates, resulting in greater stability.
The direct benefit of this design is that it can withstand Category 5 hurricanes (wind speeds of 260 km/h) and 30-meter-high sea waves. Of course, it can also generate more electricity.
An American legislator suffers from a brain nerve disease and has lost the ability to speak.
She came up with a solution: using her past speech recordings to train an AI model, allowing the AI to replicate her voice.
Recently, she released a video online. Although she cannot speak herself, an AI model used her voice to deliver a message to her supporters.
For those who have lost their voice, AI voice replication is truly a great solution, allowing them to continue speaking with their own voice.
The only downside is that the model must pronounce according to the script and cannot be used for real-time communication.
Everyone claps, but there are many different clapping postures. Are they different?
Researchers from the University of Crete in Greece analyzed various clapping postures (上图). They found that when both hands are at a 45-degree angle and partially overlap (A2 in the image above), the sound produced is the loudest, reaching 85.2 dB.
Additionally, when both hands are at a 45-degree angle, but the palms are fully overlapping and slightly arched to form a cavity (A1+ in the image above), the frequency of the sound produced is the lowest.
Article
1、Websites Without 404 Errors（English）
This article introduces a simple trick: regardless of what URL a user enters, find the most similar correct URL from the database, thereby eliminating 404 errors (errors for pages not found).
2、Using JavaScript to Detect Capital Lock Keys（English）
Many people accidentally leave the capital lock keys on when entering passwords. This article explains how to use JavaScript to detect whether the capital lock keys are pressed.
3、SaaS Facilities for Solopreneurs（English）
An article from 2021, where the author details how he set up infrastructure to run an external SaaS service alone.
4、How to set up an SSH honeypot (English)
This article introduces how to set up the honeypot tool Cowrie, to record the behavior of malicious loggers, and the analysis methods can be seen in subsequent articles .
5、Mock testing is an anti-pattern (English)
The author opposes using mock in software testing to simulate various external conditions and proposes various methods to minimize the use of mock.
Tools
An online web-based whiteboard tool.
2、Ditto
A Nostr-based social media, equivalent to building your own Twitter. The main feature of the Nostr network is that user accounts are a pair of keys, completely owned by the users and not controlled by the website administrators.
3、MathLive
A web component used for inputting mathematical formulas on web pages.(@shlroland Submission)
4、fideo
a cross-platform desktop software used to record live streaming content, supporting major domestic and international live streaming platforms. (@chenfan0 Submission)
an open-source relational database developed by Ant Group, a substitute for MySQL. (@liboyang0730 Submission)
6、Shell360
a cross-platform SSH client app that supports Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, and Android.@nashaofu Submission)
A simplified version of Pastebin, based on the Flask framework, for learning and reference. (Submitted by @yuxiaoy1)
8、Lima
A Linux virtual machine for Mac computers, used to run Linux on Apple laptops. There is also a Mac-specific Docker environment based on it, Colima.
9、progress
Linux command-line tools to display progress bars for operations like cp, mv, dd.
10、yt-fts
A Python script that downloads all subtitle files of a YouTube channel and creates a full-text search.
11、VanJS
A JS library similar to React but only retains the most minimal API, with a size of only 1.2 KB.
AI-related
1、WordSea
An online English dictionary that displays definitions along with an AI-generated image to help reinforce memory.
An open-source tool that converts English videos into Chinese voiceovers. (@kitety Submission)
A WordPress plugin that uses AI to generate articles and illustrations on a specified topic.
Resources
This repository includes commercially available free Chinese character fonts, currently with 199 types.（@jaywcjlove Submission）
Shares Chinese tech blog articles daily.（@chlinlearn Submission）
3、SaltyLeo's Book Metadata API
An API to search for Chinese books, returning metadata such as title, author, description, publisher, cover, price, etc.（@SaltyLeo Submission）
A movie poster library, collecting over 3,500 4K movie posters, providing an API, can be played as a screen saver on a TV.
Images
A computer science professor at MIT, likes to use everyday items to create mathematical shapes.
Below is the star spiral he made with paper clips.
Below is the Borromean rings.
Below are some other works.
2、Cigarette Sales and Lung Cancer Mortality
There are two curves in the figure below: the purple one represents the annual sales volume of cigarettes in the United States, and the red one represents the mortality rate of lung cancer.
It can be seen that the shapes of the two curves are identical, indicating a strong correlation, with the mortality rate of lung cancer lagging behind cigarette sales by about 25 to 30 years.
In 1964, cigarette sales in the United States reached their peak and then declined year by year; in the early 1990s, the mortality rate of lung cancer peaked and then declined year by year.
Abstract
1、Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
I am an engineer responsible for managing the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS).
I like AWS, and I attend their developer conference every year. The conference in 2022 was fantastic, with a lot of content about cloud services.
The conference in 2023 introduced generative AI, with a lot of AI-related content from customer interaction to content creation, from refactoring to operations. Although I think it's hype, to be honest, I'm also very excited about the opportunities brought by generative AI.
At the conference in 2024, for some reason, AWS became maniacal about generative AI, with at least 80% of the content related to AI, with little else.
This seems to tell developers that AWS is now focused on generative AI and seems no longer concerned with anything else.
I feel that the divide between AWS and me is growing larger, and what I value is no longer what they value. The more they talk about AI, the more implicitly they indicate that, in their eyes, databases are unimportant, scalable infrastructure is unimportant, maintainable applications are unimportant, and only AI matters.
This means the budget for the products I like will be reduced, and I might not get the next feature I want, or only get it at a slower pace.
In short, AWS is subtly telling developers to stop focusing on core infrastructure and instead spend their time on generative AI. I believe this is wrong. Because only with the underlying infrastructure functioning can AI exist. We developers use AWS simply because we want to build and support our own businesses, not to let AI solve all problems in the future, knowing that AI cannot achieve that.
I hope AWS does not ignore its roots and shows us that you still value the businesses and products you have supported in the past. By listening to developer opinions and addressing their pain points, help them build better applications.
I am your customer, I beg you: please let me be a cloud engineer again.
Speech
1、
The end may come at any time. At Tesla, we have the most advanced doomsday technology.
-- Musk
2,
The internet is filled with garbage articles optimized for SEO to trick clicks. Content that could be said in a few sentences is now stretched into many paragraphs just to make readers scroll through n banner ads.
3,
If you have a project, idea, or feature you want people to know about and discuss, then create a dedicated page for it. This allows others to easily share and reference your work.
ChatGPT's chat page lacks clear documentation and a dedicated introduction page. This makes it difficult for people who like the feature to effectively share and promote it.
-- "Provide some links for people to discuss"
4,
According to the second law of thermodynamics, life is unnatural. Because energy tends to disperse rather than concentrate, but life belongs to energy concentration.
Shrodinger believed that the only reason for the existence of life is to produce more entropy in the universe. Life is like a tornado, inherently ordered but causing immense chaos. As long as life pays the entropy tax, it exists.
5,
Programmers have a Pavlovian response: if you present them with a question, they will start trying to solve it.
--Start the presentation from the second slide
Review of past years
Goodbye passwords(2023 #262)
Life is not short（2022 #212）
Life is like the Pac-Man game（2021 #162）
How to develop leadership skills（2020 #112）
（End）