Strong disagree. Angular is cursed to the bone. It got a bit better recently but its still just making almost everything totally overcomplicated and bloated.
I'd say what you call bloated is in many cases basic functionality that I don't have to go looking for some third party package to fill. There is something to be said for having a straightforward and built-in way to do things, which leads to consistency between Angular projects and makes them easier to understand and onboard to.
IMO, it is only as complicated or simple as you want to make it these days, and claiming otherwise likely is due to focusing on legacy aspects rather than the current state of the framework.
FWIW, I'm not arguing that it's the "best" or that everyone should use it. Or that it doesn't still have flaws. Just that it is still firmly in the top set of 3-5 frameworks that are viable for making complex web apps and it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Unless someone posts a photo of the stolen car with the numberplate still on, how would you identify YOUR car that way? Its not like cars are unique pieces. Same for bikes or anything else...
You don't have to precisely identify it, you only need to narrow it down to a high likelihood of being your vehicle. Then you can verify the VIN in person.
It wouldn't be hard to narrow things down:
Year/make/model/trim/color/region/timeliness will narrow down to a very small if not already unique subset of vehicles. And on top of that vehicles may often have unique stickers, accessories, or scratches which can further strengthen the case. Flock e.g. uses this data in their vehicle identification algo.
I may have misunderstood, admittedly I just scanned it, but if you or law enforcement have to scan the universe of apps/internet to find a picture before this is useful… it’s not useful. Your starting point is a needle in a haystack.
I thought you uploaded a picture you already had, it does the scanning, and a hit might look like “some rando posted a selfie at Zilker Park 20 minutes ago on insta and that car was in the background”.
Again, the example in the article is to find the vehicle being resold online. There are only a few popular websites where people sell vehicles secondhand in any particular area, and you can easily filter to the characteristics of the car you are looking for. To search all of them is a 15 minute exercise.
Although your example may be quite viable in a repossession scenario where the possessor is known but the location is not.
Right, see that is the example they went in depth on. I thought it was helping identify the chopshops and hideouts more directly as they indicated in the bullets.
This part still is the sticking point;
> When browsing Craigslist, I came across a regular car listing that showed a vehicle with buildings visible in the background. The listing claimed the vehicle was located in San Francisco. ...... Superbolt returned precise latitude and longitude coordinates that, when entered into Google Maps, revealed an exact match to the buildings visible in the listing photos.
How often do people find their stolen vehicles posted on CL/marketplace? Do police have resources to constantly browse hoping they see a similar picture of their stolen vehicles? How do they match it to the one they are looking for? Eg. if this was a cop, they may think, this vehicle matches the description of the stolen car. And this AI tells me the picture was taken at these exact coordinates (not super useful as this looks like a public place and I'm sure not where the vehicle is being stored). They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN or otherwise confirm it is the correct stolen vehicle they are looking for, then they get an arrest and recovery.
But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description. They now have to arrange to visit them all until they find the match or exhaust their options. How is this AI adding any value given with & without it the process looks the same; find listing, ask "seller" to meet, meet, evaluate. You don't need this AI to ask the "seller" to meet up and pretend to be an interested buyer.
FWIW, this looks like it could be a white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader (granted, the hatchback is a further narrowing feature, but that's not super common either). No police department I've ever heard of has the resources to check on all these listings. If the thief stole it in SF but listed it for sale in Seattle or LA or anywhere else, how would anyone know? That's the haystack part, it's a big haystack.
Police probably do not care much unless you are in a small town. Insurance has a financial incentive to care.
> They still have to go out, meet the "seller", check the VIN
You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
> But, what if there are a dozen vehicles for sale matching said description.
There might be a few vehicles in an area matching make/model/year. But it is trivial when looking at a photo to filter on further criteria... and once you look at the photo you can observe trim, exterior color, interior color, stickers, inspection sticker, etc, you will have a very high degree of certainty even on a common model.
> white VW Jetta to me. There are 118 in SF bay area right now just on Autotrader
Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Within a whole 500 mi of the bay area there are only 5 white VW Jetta Wagons listed. All you need to know is what year it is, to narrow it down to 2 or 3. If you know the trim, approximate mileage, any visually distinctive feature, etc, you are guaranteed a match. Even if it wasn't a wagon, it is not hard to filter down to a unique vehicle.
> You do not have to meet the seller to check the VIN of a vehicle sitting on the street.
You're assuming the vehicle remains where the photo was taken.
> Well yeah, because you only filtered on 2 of the dozen or so attributes that you might know.
Those were the only attributes that were apparent in the photo. I said I ignored Wagon because that was a cherry picked unique filter. If it wasn't a wagon, your analysis is the same as mine, >100 vehicles in the SF bay area (I only filtered on 100 mile radius). But again, why steal a vehicle and post it for sale in the same city you stole it from? Criminals already move stolen vehicles, this is all but obvious.
Basically, this helps you catch the dumbest of the dumb criminals. Someone that steals a very unique car and posts it for sale in the same area they stole it from and also leaves the car parked in the same place they took the photo. There's also a time element, if they hide the vehicle for a few weeks, then post it for sale it's more likely the initial active investigation has faded and the cops aren't actively hitting refresh on marketplace.
Glad you believe this is useful, I'll continue to disagree - it might have some value but it's usefulness is being exaggerated in the article.
Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle? Are they trying to sell it whole? I can't imagine that is very common, since the buyer won't be able to register it, right? Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
> Why would a thief post a photo of a stolen vehicle?
Casual small time occassional car thieves might do this, receivers of stolen cars as payment for other debts owed by a thief may do this ... but it's somewhat atypical.
> Aren't most stolen vehicles disassembled (chop shops, etc)?
In the organised bigger scale operations vehicles are dealt with for the greatest profit with least risk. A good many are stripped for the parts - the more popular the car, the larger the parts after market.
A suprising number of cars from developed countries are shunted whole into containers and sold elsewhere about the globe. eg:-
“Each year, hundreds of thousands of vehicles are stolen around the world, yet the initial theft is often only the beginning of a vehicle’s journey into the global criminal underworld.
“Stolen vehicles are trafficked across the globe, traded for drugs and other illicit commodities, enriching organized crime groups and even terrorists.
Going back to the the article, you have to find a picture of your exact car online somewhere, then use GeoSpy to tell you it was stolen in the US and was photographed in Columbia, then you go to that place in Columbia to find it's not parked there anymore, so you contact the person who made the post/listing and try to arrange a meeting, then you confirm it's your vehicle, then... what exactly?
When an insured vehicle is stolen, it soon belongs to the insurance company. I think it would be helpful for insurance to know whether a stolen vehicle is across town or in Columbia. If it's nearby they can recover it and the salvage value for it, and if it's in Columbia they have some evidence that their resources are better spent elsewhere.
They will often sell it to someone for super cheap. They don't care about getting fair market value. $1000 for a $10000 van with no title isn't a loss to a thief. It's still $1000. And there are a lot of desperate people who are willing to pay $1000 for any type of transportation, and are willing to drive around until they get caught. They'll just steal some plates and run them with valid tabs. Maybe pass it onto someone else for $1000 later on down the road, and get another from their favorite stolen car supplier.
Really? Not that anyone has any data on any of this but since you're measuring it as "often" I'm going to disagree and say this is a very tiny percentage of stolen vehicles that are being used this way.
If they are, it's probably being bought from a hookup you know and not randomly on marketplace.
I am irritated that "self hosted" seems to mean "in your own house" and everyone just agrees.
To me, self hosted also means I rent a machine with Hetzner and run the server software on it. Its cheap, stable, fast, secure and Hetzner wont screw me over with my data. I have a LOT less headache and I can rent a vserver for a long time until the hardware cost for a server running at home is surpassed.
I can also very simply assign a domain to it
and am pretty sure that software like nextcloud offers oauth access so my friends would NOT be required to sign up for my "weird app". Well, technically they do but oauth automates it.
Why do you claim that Hetzner won’t screw you over with your data?
What you’re doing with Hetzner is just a few less layers of abstraction compared to AWS or Azure. They can still theoretically take down the machine or steal your data, if they wanted to.
I don’t know what the correct definition of self hosted is, but there is a big ideological difference between what you’re doing and self-hosting actual, physical hardware in your home.
Sure, in theory Hetzner could pull the plug or access the data on my VPS. But that’s true of any infrastructure... just like someone could break into my house and steal my self-hosted server.
In fact, I’d argue the physical risk of loss, theft, or data compromise is much higher at home than in a professional datacenter with power redundancy, security controls, and constant uptime monitoring.
It’s a bit like saying, "Don’t trust the bank, they could take your money and freeze your account — keep all your money under the mattress." Technically possible, yes. But come on.
I never said any of those things, you’re literally arguing with made up points I didn’t make?
But my point Hetzner isn’t self-hosted. Similar to how storing money in a bank isn’t self-banking. Self-hosting means you host your content yourself in a server room that you have physical access to. Hetzner isn’t that.
And that’s fine, self-hosting is pretty silly for most use cases nowadays. And all of the positives you mentioned are true. But I hate how we’ve turned “self-hosting” into a political dog-whistle for hosting with companies that seem more trustworthy than the big guys. And there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to trust GCP or Azure - just don’t call it self hosting.
you are not, I consider both self hosting.
I used hetzner for a long time and they were doing a great job. These days I run a server in my basement, because I had the hardware around. Most months of the year it also contributes to heating the house :D
i've been using llm-based tools like copilot and claude pro (though not cc with opus), and while they can be helpful – e.g. for doc lookups, repetitive stuff, or quick reminders – i rarely get value beyond that. i've honestly never had a model surface a bug or edge case i wouldn’t have spotted myself.
i've tried agent-style workflows in copilot and windsurf (on claude 3.5 and 4), and honestly, they often just get stuck or build themselves into a corner. they don’t seem to reason across structure or long-term architecture in any meaningful way. it might look helpful at first, but what comes out tends to be fragile and usually something i’d refactor immediately.
sure, the model writes fast – but that speed doesn't translate into actual productivity for me unless it’s something dead simple. and if i’m spending a lot of time generating boilerplate, i usually take that as a design smell, not a task i want to automate harder.
so i’m honestly wondering: is cc max really that much better? are those productivity claims based on something fundamentally different? or is it more about tool enthusiasm + selective wins?
Sorry but the approach is too naive and the tech isnt there yet.
You can't make up a couple of conversation topics and expect the LLMs to do the rest by just switching languages. People approach the same topics completely different in different languages. The app looks like someone picked a couple of topics and the rest is "just" ChatGPT advanced voice mode.
And the worst thing is that the LLMs in TTS do not sound native and cannot teach you pronounciation and learning to listen and understand (which is the whole point in having spoken conversation).
And the other way around, the STT will not notice pronounciation mistakes made by the student - so the app cannot tell you: oh, its pronounced like this.
I wonder about the mentioned application in mobile devices. with mobile and tablet devices one usually has a very durable glass layer between the screen and the outside world - not sure if sound would ve able topass through that.
Hm, you cannot simulate sunlight at all with an RGB LED ring. You can create something that looks cool for our human eyes but the average plant wouldnt make it long beneath them because its basically always living in the dark; the important wavelengths are missing.
This is also a huge problem for people having a terrarium with geckos or saurians - they see and need much different wavelengths than we humans do.
I am no expert for carnivorous plants - maybe they are fine but seeing that there is no UV emitting part in the lighting setup, there may be an important part of the spectrum missing for the plants.
From skimming Wikipedia it seems like most absorption happens in the blue range and a bit less in red, almost nothing inbetween at green. Most LEDs are blue with a phosphor, so you usually get more blue light than the rest already.
But surely there are LEDs optimised for that task (Cannabis grow lights)
Not that I am planning to travel to the US at any point but the first thing that came to my mind was: why not just sending the phone by parcel, fly without it and pick it up later on? Even tough I find it embarassing that such hacks are necessary in the first place.
International shipments, not to mention transcontinental, are expensive and unreliable enough. Then you have to manage receiving international package at the hotel or in some temporary housing....
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