mft_

Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.

As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?

Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.

The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.

Same. It rankles when I have to - usually because of some sort of antiquated approach to bureaucracy, like contracts or CDAs that demand a wet signature (despite then accepting an emailed poor quality scan of said wet signature).

Very good point. I wonder whether the communication would work with rows of connected keys, only joined to other rows at one end? You could then just create simple connection blocks for different row offsets.

> which is pretty competitive when you diy

I'm pretty sure my memory is correct, and for a DIY Ryzen 8840/16GB/1TB it was roughly an 80-90% premium, which I'd not describe as competitive.

> But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).

> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.

If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective, but I'm more in the MBAs-are-ruining-the-world camp, and I hate it.

A few points:

- I suspect that private buyers of laptops rarely have strong loyalty to a single brand, so Asus et al can't assume a long chain of purchases over time - they have to continue to compete on price and specs. Framework can probably assume stronger brand loyalty than every other manufacturer out there, based on a) if you've paid their hefty premium, you're really into what they're offering, and b) you've paid the high price of entry for the promise of lower-cost upgrades down the line, which you can only get from Framework. So Framework can probably assume a longer guaranteed income from each customer than any other manufacturer, even if the actual value decreases over time (due to lower cost of upgrades vs. full systems). However, if the upgrades are profitable as individual items, they still win.

- I'd prefer to see Framework sell computers and components at the lowest possible price they can while still being a viable business, with the margin of those items each justifying their existence individually. I appreciate that their economies of scale are different to larger manufacturers and their designs may be more expensive to deliver - this would be covered by a (modest) premium.

- Ultimately, I'd characterise the business model you described as "we'll f*k you on entry, and you might claw back some value over time". I'd rather aim for "we'll sell you a good product for a reasonable price today, and then delight you with the bonus of upgradability later on".

- I wonder whether their issue might actually be scale of manufacturing: that they can't deliver enough systems quickly/reliably enough to compete for a broader market (which would require lower margins to attract more price-sensitive customers) thereby driving them to target a more limited market of nerds who love the repairability concept, and also price higher per system to make the numbers work?

I think the previous poster is wrong. In typical understanding of industry roles, a ‘sales guy’ doesn’t typically work hands-on with product development. Some variations of ‘marketing’ roles do indeed work on developing new products, so this might be less inaccurate.

But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.

The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.

Or… there’s a level of value that people will assign to the repairability offered by Framework, but the current cost is too high?

I like and support what Framework offers. But when I last bought a laptop (a couple of years ago now) the FW13 was almost double the price of a similarly-specc’d and thinner/lighter Asus. (From €1000 to ~€18-1900).

I’d probably pay a ~40% premium for FW, all else being equal, but 80-90% is just too much: it just doesn’t make sense to whatever value-assessment algorithms I’ve developed over time.

Two things can be true simultaneously. As in, those AfD-voters-who-aren’t-racist-or-actual-Nazis have legitimate reasons to be angry at mainstream politicians and want meaningful change, and they’re making a bad choice to support the AfD in their desperation.

The point shouldn’t be to just raise money simply by taxing things that you personally think are ‘bad’. This is the sort of pointless politics that’s being going on for too long.

Instead, the approach should be to diagnose what is wrong with our economies (and maybe our societies) and then use the tools we have, including taxation, to address those issues. This is where people are with (variously) land taxes, or wealth tax, or others.

(Whole societies and economies aren’t struggling because of people gambling, smoking, and drinking.)

Not true. Companies charge the maximum they can rationally charge in each country.

In the US, they can charge whatever they want because the system is broken, and the influence of money on politics means that it doesn’t get fixed.

Maybe there are different types of downside; and different people have different experiences?

For example, if I take some sort of sleep aid (e.g. US OTC antihistamines, Ambien, or low-dose benzos) then after ~2 nights my subsequent ability to fall asleep without help is noticeably impaired. That’s already the start of a physiological change that, if not reversed, would continue to a dependency (albeit not necessarily an ‘addiction’.)

It’s a process of analogue change, not binary, and individuals’ pace of change will vary.

Not available in the German IOS App Store at the moment, sadly. Would love to try it out.

Disagree. Whether it’s Raspbian on a Pi, or Fedora or Mint on a modern laptop, issues still occur, and any minor issue immediately launches you into the world of the terminal, Google, StackOverflow, and Ubuntu forums.

Claude has definitely helped to reduce this negative!

I agree. I’ve been saying for years that marketing teams need to switch to include marketing to LLMs.

I have (currently free but maybe paid in the future) accounts for side projects with businesses that Claude chose for me. (I reviewed the suggestion, but didn’t see a problem or reason to change it.) Why did Claude choose those providers? No idea, but if it’s through subtle marketing to Claude, then well done to them.

German has a word for everything; English has more alternate words for bodily functions than one could ever need :)

In the West, I’d argue (from personal experience) that a high trust society probably correlates more with high level of employment and (maybe as a second order effect) reasonably high income.

Taking Switzerland as an example, it’s possible to have a managed/positive approach to immigration and maintain very high societal standards.

Indeed; my point is that people who spent $40k on an M3 Ultra cluster are mostly already doing this or similar, and will likely be ahead of Apple’s article.

Apple’s article isn’t targeting people who bought multiple M3 Ultras before the RAMpocalypse - those folks can be safely assumed to already be on board with running large models locally.

Agree this is just the result of factory farming.

Calling it “a feature” assumes too much intelligence in the process, and smacks of some sort of dark room, leather armchair, cigar-smoking conspiracy on the part of big vegetable.

:)

He was lightheartedly discussing this on the podcast he shares with Katty Kay the other day.

I suspect a Scaramucci is too well embedded by now, and Ms. Zacharia is otherwise too unknown. His legacy is probably safe!

…which is in the region of €20k on eBay, so the calculus doesn’t really shift…

I think it’s simpler than that - no conspiracy theories needed.

Trump is just vey susceptible to influence, depending on who he’s speaking to and feels positive towards at a given time. Traditional Republicans (i.e. not MAGA) are typically anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine, so if some reason they have his ear, he moves away from Putin and Russia. On the other hand he seems to be very influenced by Putin directly (fear? envy? Putin being a very good manipulator?) and so swings back towards Russia every time they speak.

If Putin had kompromat, it’s unlikely that Trump would ever have done anything to inconvenience Russia (he has, on occasion) and it’s unlikely that Musk would have kept Starlink open for Ukraine’s use for so many years.

This is a really interesting possible difference. Legacy open source seems to be generally trending anti-AI (although I don’t know the exact stance of LibreOffice). These new vibe-coded Adobe/MS copies are obviously AI-friendly.

Time will tell which wins.

I suspect that Tor has also been used a lot for IP obfuscation to support scraping, and what you’re seeing might be an anti-scraping measure.

Mullvad (IME, when I used to use it) was halfway unusable for e.g. Reddit because (I understand) so many of their exit nodes were blocked for similar reasons.

Surely that’s approaching maximum saturation?

Interesting; I’ve literally never had an LED bulb die that can remember. I’ve got a bunch of Ikea Tradfri bulbs that are now ~8y old and used daily. (240v here btw.)

> People decided this is acceptable.

I think this is fluid, and changing.

1) The Democrats of the last decades are just as much the friends of the rich and the corporations as the Republicans. So even if people in the US don't think this is acceptable, there was no meaningful (legal) political route out of it. Except...

2) I believe one of the factors behind the rise of (what is called) populism (both left- and right-wing) is the failure of the mainstream centerist political parties to align with the needs of the people (and especially the poorer side of society) rather than the rich and the corporations. They're presided over ever-growing financial inequality, coupled with ongoing inflation that far outstrips wage growth. The rise of AOC, the grass-roots support for Sanders, and even the rise of Trump (remember the points he campaigned on, rather than his actions when in power) are driven by this.

> CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead...

As I've mentioned on here before, this was the first time I've seen the sparks of what might be a class consciousness in the US, as people who have lost out due to the awful healthcare situation (or have sympathy with those who have) found common ground, irrespective of their underlying political leanings. But it takes a lot more than one example to trigger a revolution.

The US has moved beyond simple capitalism to a new era, which might be called late-stage / end-stage capitalism, or some form of dystopian corporatism.

Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.

In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.

* not vibe-codeable

* unlikely to hit the front of HN

Yes it does. Firefox 155, MacOS 15.6.1