AceJohnny2

I want to cheer (again) for my 2020 Ford Escape. Its infotainment design was a significant differentiator that led to my selection after testing a dozen different models across all US manufacturers.

It has Carplay/Android Auto, naturally, but it also has physical buttons for play/pause/previous/next and volume, and physical buttons for A/C control. All buttons have fixed purpose, they don't change depending on whatever mode something is.

It is an ideal amount of buttons compared to, say, the Honda CRV or Toyota RAV4 at the time that had extra buttons around the screen for flexible purposes.

I hear the Escape was actually designed for the European market (as the Kuga), which may explain its design sensibility.

Unfortunately, the Escape has not been a roaring success, and Ford will discontinue it in the US market in favor of the Bronco Sport which has, you guessed it, a huge touchscreen and few physical buttons.

I wonder how they achieve the lighting effect from the banner picture? It doesn't look like the Adafruit panel has backlighting built-in, and there isn't anything added in the project.

I've been hearing that for years, and I'm still waiting. Incidentally, my 2020 Ford Escape has buttons, which was a strong selector. I hear it's because it was designed for the European market (as the Ford Kuga)

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either.

This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the hour helps a lot. But even then, more information doesn't necessarily help!

I once brought my 11-year-old car, a Civic with 150k miles, to multiple garages. I figured I'd play the "second opinion" game to correlate what the garages recommended to decide on what needed to be done...

I got 3 completely unrelated recommendations, including one that I knew was invalid! I felt worse off than when I started!

The solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that.

eh, every 6 months to a year I bring the car in to the dealer to handle the stack of pending recalls, during which I get a rental, courtesy of Ford. It's not much of a deal for me.

Few of the issues I've experienced with the car were clearly tied to quality issues: 1) Battery died a few times, but maybe that was user error 2) squirrels/rats nibbled the engine cable harness, a not-uncommon occurrence in our area. Only 3) auto-unlock on passenger side being unreliable is clearly a quality/design issue.

Honestly, I actually love the Escape. The pedal feel is very responsive in all driving modes, compared in particular to the 2020 Hybrid Rav4, which felt like driving a boat (maybe I didn't find the drive mode?), or the 2020 VW Tiguan which had a shockingly slow automatic transmission for an ostensibly "sporty" vehicle. And I'm not even a car guy. I also love its actual buttons on the dashboard, instead of the idiotic "everything on a huge touchscreen" that too many cars do nowadays.

It's impressive all the recall notices I get on my 2020 Escape Hybrid. At this point I joke with my friends that they're love-letters from Ford.

(most of them are for fairly innocuous stuff...)

obviously, David Macaulay, The Way Things Work

So mainstream, it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

> instead of unobservably better performance

That's... quite the choice of words there

Are referencing the 1998 short story "Taklamakan" by Bruce Sterling?

A common confusion; this interpretation only applies to OVH.

ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/millions-of-websites-o...

I thought it meant "electricity has ceased to be a physical phenomenon in the general vicinity of our servers"

yeah, it's funny how so many think the beginning of the S-curve is an exponential.

Granted, we don't know when the S-curve will inflect, but predicting too great an outcome is just as silly as discounting it altogether.

There is a field of competitive compression algorithms, where time and computation are not factors. People have made compressors that take hours (days?) to compress the test corpus.

A long-running kinda-joke in the field is that the upper-bound of compression is "AI-complete", where instead of compressing, say, the text data of the complete works of Shakespeare, the compressor just encodes "The Complete Works of Shakespeare", and the AI decompressor re-generates the output from that prompt.

With the advent of LLMs, Bellard just made that joke a reality.

Rust doesn't have an ABI [1]. Swift needed one to be a useable application language:

https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/ (written by a core Rust developer)

[1] apart from the basic/universal C one, which prevents exposing any useful Rust semantics over the interface

> "how do you plan on separating data from instructions?"

Use a Harvard Architecture CPU, duh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

(j/k, if it wasn't obvious)

> You’re investing in an actively-managed fund.

I see others are listening to the Money Stuff podcast ;)

This is a decades-old design pattern when CPU >> IO. Emacs has been doing just that since the 80s, when people were complaining about "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping". See "redisplay" [1]

This minimizes screen flash. You can't rely on terminals doing double-buffering.

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/c29071587c64efb30... or a more user-friendly overview, Daniel Colascione's seminal "Buttery Smooth Emacs", snapshotted at e.g. https://gist.github.com/ghosty141/c93f21d6cd476417d4a9814eb7...

Money is fungible. Budgets are not.

California's similar law was struck down by court on the basis that states can't legislate federal agencies.

https://calmatters.org/justice/2026/04/immigration-mask-ban-...

> An 1890 Supreme Court case provides that a state cannot prosecute federal law enforcement officers acting in the course of their duties.

> The law also ran headlong into the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which holds that states may not regulate the operations of the federal government.

> The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.

Stanley Black&Decker?

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

Wrong thread. You probably meant to post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755629

Adding to this: while certs are indeed well-supported by OpenSSH, it's not always the SSH daemon used on alternate or embedded platforms.

For example, OpenWRT used Dropbear [1] instead, which does not support certs. Also, Java programs that implement SSH stuff, like Jenkins, may be doing so using Apache Mina [2] which, though the underlying library supports certs, it is buggy [3] and requires the application to add the UX to also support it.

[1] https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html

[2] https://mina.apache.org/sshd-project/

[3] I've been dealing for years with NullPointerExceptions causing the connection to crash when presented with certain ed25519 certificates.

I downvoted this comment for sounding like a summarizing LLM, not adding anything substantial beyond the title of the post, before realizing you were the poster and author.

> it's basically a cost optimization masquerading as a feature

Cost optimization in the user's favor.

Remember that every time you send a new message to the LLM, you are actually sending the entire conversation again with that added last message to the LLM.

Remember that LLMs are fixed functions, the only variable is the context input (and temperature, sure).

Naively, this would lead to quadratic consumption of your token quota, which would get ridiculously expensive as conversations stretch into current 100k-1M context windows.

To solve this, AI providers cache the context on the GPU, and only charge you for the delta in the conversation/context. But they're not going to keep that GPU cache warm for you forever, so it'll time out after some inactivity.

So the microcompaction-on-idle happens to soften the token consumption blow after you've stepped away for lunch, your context cache has been flushed by the AI provider, and you basically have to spend tokens to restart your conversation from scratch.

They lost me at "our conductors are coax!". USB is designed around differential signaling, which is what twisted pair excels at.

> Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade

That's because some app is spamming window updates.

It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.

> So ICE is taking over from the TSA in airports

It's even more disgusting than that:

"Tom Homan: ICE officers will not assist with airport security scanning amid TSA staffing shortage"

https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5795316-homan-ice-...

> It is really weird not to care about the first impression that your manual makes on a curious reader.

On the contrary, I think this is an all-too-familiar pitfall for the, er... technically minded.

"I've implemented it in the code. My work here is done. The rest is window dressing."

That's worth making a separate post! (and I recommend rendering it to HTML)

But "bare" is part of the value of Cohen's post, I think. When you want to publicize a paradigm shift, it helps to make it in small, digestible chunks.

Eh. It's a matter of visible pain vs invisible pain.

Developers are quite familiar with Merge Conflicts and the confusing UI that git (and SVN before it, in my experience) gives you about them. The "ours vs theirs" nomenclature which doesn't help, etc. This is something that VCSs can improve on, QED this post.

Vs the scenario you're describing (what I call Logical Conflicts), where two changes touching different parts of the code (so it doesn't emerge as a Merge Conflict) but still breaking each other. Like one change adding a function call in one file but another change changing the API in a different file.

These are painful in a different way, and not something that a simple text-based version control (which is all of the big ones) can even see.

Indeed, CRDTs do not help with Logical Conflicts.