The counter argument is if you don't incentivize flipping enough, it is the prisoners' dilemma: the option of everyone keeping their mouth shut and potentially going free is too attractive compared to flipping.

Umm, I think you may have been misinformed what the Nash equilibrium is in the prisoners dilemma

In addition to sibling's comments about jamming and self driving safety, there are many driving situations where there is no or poor GPS reception: tunnels, double deck bridges, double deck freeways, underpasses, urban canyons, actual canyons, etc. Also regional problems. The GPS constellation is in a 55° inclination, so if you are north of ~55N, or south of ~55S, you need a clear view of the southern/northern sky, respectfully, for reception, since there will be no overhead satellites.

My guess would be:

1. Car entered ferry, loses GPS

2. Car entered dead reconning mode used for tunnels and such

3. Car left ferry, acquired GPS

Then either:

4a. Location via dead reconning vasty disagreed with GPS because the car doesn't know about the ferry's movements, triggering some kind of failsafe.

Or:

4b. There's just a plain old bug in the condition to switch back to GPS and maybe people haven't noticed because you don't get as badly desynced in a tunnel.

>the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system

Yeah all the pieces are there: accelerometers and gyros for stability control, compass for navigation, and the wheel speed sensors give you exact distance traveled.

My local roro ferry drops you off pretty close to downtown. If you don't get a good fix as you get off the boat before you get into the urban canyon, satnav is pretty hopeless for a few minutes.

Doesn't usually take 5 hours to figure out where it is though. At least not on my vehicles, even the one that's always getting confused.

It probably doesn't do dead reckoning even in tunnels

And maybe the system sucks to get the GPS almanac if badly desynced

TomTom's have for at least 15 years or so. They have accelerometers to measure the motion when cut off from the GPS satellites. I worked there, knew the guy who developed it, and saw him give a presentation about it.

That's cool... so I guess this works something along the ways of "calculate the speed via GPS before entering the tunnel, and then try to update this speed using the data from the accelerometer while in the tunnel"? Because as long a the car is moving at constant speed in a straight line, the accelerometer shouldn't register anything...

Well it registers gravity, so you can detect i.e. driving off a cliff. ;)

What helps is that tunnels don't usually branch, so once you're in it, your path is usually quite predictable.

TomTom maps also have a statistical model of what speed is expected along each stretch of road by hour and weekday/weekend (not 7 individual days, but 2 kinds of days). But I don't know if it uses that to help estimate your expected speed when dead reckoning, it's actually for route planning.

One of my co-workers came up with the great idea of gamifying driving: maintain a real time speed leader board, showing the top ten speeders along any stretch of road! So on every road in the world you could compete with other TomTom users who drove it. Kind of like checking in with 4Square, but more fun and dangerous! TomTom legal did not approve.

I suggested gamifying and monetizing driving with TomTomagotchi, a virtual pet that gets depressed if you don't drive it around enough, begs you to visit interesting landmarks and sponsored points of interest, like driving through McDonalds to feed it, or through the park to let it take a shit, or driving fast enough to make the leaderboard to entertain it. I'm sure Bandai's lawyers wouldn't approve.

But tunnels that go up or downhill (or a mixture) would confuse the accelerometer.. well I guess they'll have the road gradient data.

I drove in tunnel where the asphalt had undulations today, I'd like to see them try to figure that out!

I swapped out the satnav in a 2008 Honda for a modern unit and the car had a “speed pulse” wire. I looked it up and that wire is used for dead reckoning.

Dead reckoning shouldn't be a problem for a built-in nav device that has access to the car's odometer (or at least its speed). But as long as the car itself isn't moving, because it's parked in a ferry's car deck, I reckon (SCNR) it shouldn't do any dead reckoning...

>I'm sad to see it repeated here, and I hope we can avoid propagating it further.

Science educators have been fighting the scientific theory vs vernacular theory fight for decades without much progress, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

I think at some point, the scientific community needs to accept that many of the formal and precise ways they are taught to write in order to avoid ambiguity, have the exact opposite effect on everybody else. Unless we adjust the terminology so that the scientific and casual definitions more closely align, we're just going up have to keep explaining.

>macOS doesn't require this

Technically true but I tried using a mac without creating an Apple ID and gave up. You can't access the store without it so you are locked out of Mac apps that aren't installed by default, and all apps that only distribute through the store now.

You don’t need the App Store to install most apps, and can just download .dmg or even .zip files with them; I feel like only a handful of developers go full-App Store-only (with good reason; it not only imposes extra restrictions on certain functionality but also takes a big cut of your sale).

I've used macbooks for 15 years and have never felt the need to create an Apple ID. Maybe I've just been lucky but I have never even encountered a piece of software that didn't offer a direct download or brew installation.

Xcode.

Development on Apple hardware generally

You only need Apple ID to get Xcode though, everything else is available without

And even if, there are torrents and sites. Same for Steam games. Fuck the cloud.

Perhaps that's not a loss, because why would you want to depend on apps that you essentially need an Apple account to use? I've had great luck with finding apps with Homebrew.

Well I just stopped using a Mac. It's not worth jumping through hoops.

From my experiences with people at Apple, everyone seems so siloed that it doesn't surprise me that they couldn't help him. It doesn't seem like they have the culture where you could just drop by the Apple fraud team and ask for help for a friend.

Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks.

At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.

Apple isn't filing SARs - they want no business in that and have banking partners to do that for them.

AML is a concept not a law itself. Which law is forcing Apple to act like this?

It will be interesting to learn if the hybrids are fertile or not

They seem to think so in this article https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/10/21/blue-jay-green-ja...

They say the exact opposite?

>So, you know, it's theoretically possible, but we haven't seen the evidence of that yet.

They know. That's why it is a brand new throw away account.

I'm inclined to believe it was written in jest. Then again, I shouldn't be too surprised if it wasn't.

The username literally contains “jester”. I’m surprised anyone took it seriously.

I do. Up until 2005ish, Office install CDs and the code would be in the box with the PC. You needed them if you wanted to install optional features (or reinstall). Stores rarely did the full install.

Even after 2005 they still had physical boxes, just not with CDs.

Lying potentially opens up fraud angles if they are soliciting or receiving something of value. Maybe false advertising even they are giving it away for free. A lot of this will depend on who has jurisdiction