ufmace

I have a feeling it's too little, too late, even if it's completely true and sincere, which I doubt at this point.

I can't help but wonder if they're in the process of losing an entire generation of tech enthusiasts to Linux and maybe MacOS. And the rest of the world tends to slowly follow the tech enthusiasts.

It's more that you don't seem to engage much with the trade-offs of all of the possible options. This debate has been going on for decades and society has swung back and forth multiple times already. "Let's enforce things much more harshly" is not at all a new take. Enforcing things harshly enough to actually cut down on the rates of DWI will most definitely cause serious damage to a bunch of lives, including many poor and minorities, and there isn't going to be some clever way around that.

It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,

In addition to what the sibling said regarding the impracticality of not driving in most of the US, which I completely agree with, I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license". What do you do with the people who drive anyways because not driving is so impractical and get caught?

We already took their license, we can't double-take it to show we really mean it. Fining them seems a bit rough when they need to drive to get to the job to make the money to pay those fines. Or we're right back to jail time and an even higher prison population.

I don't think I'd want to take much from such a statistical result yet. A sample size of 1 accident just isn't enough information to get a real rate from, not that I want to see more collisions with children. Though this is also muddied by the fact that Waymo will most likely adjust their software to make this less likely, and we won't know exactly how or how many miles each version has. I'd also like to see the data for human incidents over just the temperate suburban areas like Waymo operates in.

That's true, but note that getting much more severe on enforcement and punishment for DUI/OWI will result in an even higher prison population, more serious life consequences for poor and minorities, etc, when the US is constantly getting trashed for how bad those things are already.

To be a bit snarkier, and not directed at you, but I wish these supposedly superior Europeans would tell us what they actually want us to do. Should we enforce OWI laws more strictly, or lower the prison population? We can't do both!

> More than 50% of roadway fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. If you want to spend your efforts improving safety _anywhere_ it's right here. Self driving cars do not stand a chance of improving outcomes as much as sensible policy does. Europe leads the US here by a wide margin.

Could you spell out exactly what "sensible" policy changes you were thinking of? Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol is already illegal in every state. Are you advocating for drastically more severe enforcement, regardless of which race the person driving is, or what it does to the national prison population? Or perhaps for "improved transit access", which is a nice idea, but will take many decades to make a real difference?

I haven't seen any web apps that seem to be intentionally unusable, or any belonging to banks, personally at least. I don't think anybody is doing this as a publicly announced policy. But I have seen several websites for major institutions with major features totally unusable on their website, that should be found in a matter of minutes if they had even one QA person actually trying to use the website after updates. It's not announced, but it's hard to imagine it's not intentional.

For my most recent personal example, go onto State Farm's website and try to create an account. Goes to a blank page. It only seems to work right on their mobile app.

I don't think it's the same. On older Apple hardware, it just keeps on running on the older OS version. You don't get some new features or styling of the new OS, but nothing else changes. On Windows, it periodically brings up full-screen notifications that your hardware is obsolete and you need to upgrade, with the only options being to upgrade or "remind me again later".

There's a little bit of considering it already yeah. Plus what the sibling comments say of it being clearly against what Microsoft wants, so no guarantee they won't disable it or make it even harder in the future. And also, the factor of, doing any of these check-disabling hacks also seems to require a full OS reinstall instead of an in-place update. If I need to do a full reinstall anyways, why not do it with an OS I don't need to hack up to get it to install on a system the OS maintainer doesn't want it to be installed on.

Apparently, fundamentally, Microsoft does not want me as a user. Hacking around their checks won't change that. I'd rather comply with their wishes and use an OS that actually wants me as a user.

I'm in the exact same boat. I was a little unhappy with the ads etc in Windows, but perfectly willing to give Windows 11 a try. But Microsoft decreed that my admittedly a bit old but perfectly workable CPU was incompatible, due to not having a feature I wasn't interested in. I'd need to replace most of my existing hardware to switch. So why not try Linux? It certainly seems reasonable when Windows apparently needs more command-line hackery to maybe work for a while than Linux.

So to Fedora I went! So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. All of the software I want to use installed easily and works, via Flatpak. All of my hardware works fine, and there are actually fewer weird hardware quirks than under Windows. I also appreciate that there are options to turn off behaviors I found annoying in Windows.

It's a bit sad to have to switch due to Microsoft trashing their own OS rather than Linux becoming superlatively awesome, but what can you do.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think punishing bad behavior is practical here. It's like a "enumerating badness" problem - there's way more bad actors with nothing to lose and not much practical way to punish them. There's too many of them and they all have no reputation to damage.

Not saying I have a better solution, just that it's a hard problem. Maybe dissuading some good people who have genuine security issues but don't feel like paying just has to be a cost of doing business.

That's just the thing though - it seems like, to get really good code out of an LLM, a lot of the time, you have to describe everything you want done and the full context in such excruciating detail and go through so many rounds of review and correction that it would be faster and easier to just write the code yourself.

What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a reasonable schedule.

Okay, it makes sense that that's what it is. Still, it seems to me like that's more of an optimization technique that's applicable to certain specific scenarios rather than a mindset to view all software development as.

I have actually heard of something like that, as arena allocation, though mostly as something to use in a GCed language to either avoid or reduce the impact of GC cycles, also for certain specific scenarios.

I don't get the "individual" vs "grouped" element thing at all. I guess you could interpret everything as a list, where null is actually empty list, but it seems like that would be a ton of boilerplate and architecture astronomy, not a universally better way of programming. I don't see any decent explanation of what "grouped-element" programming is and why it's universally better and more advanced.

If that was really true, you should be able to point to a subset of code developed with this supposedly better mindset and demonstrate that it's actually better in terms of some objective measure like speed, memory efficiency, features, security vulnerabilities, etc. I don't see anything like that though. What are the odds that it really is a better way of programming versus a theory some guy made up? If you're familiar with the "no silver bullets" thing, a ton of things have been promoted by various people in the industry as a universal solution to general problems of software quality at various times, but vanishingly few of them have ever made a real difference.

It seems to me that advances in memory management have been one of the few advancements promoted over the decades to make programming genuinely better and more reliable. Witness the dominance of garbage-collected languages for virtually everything that could possibly be done with them, and the advantages of moving things that can't use GC to languages with more solid non-GC memory management like Rust, which are becoming more clear. I think that's the best element we can lean on for software quality, not this grouped-element stuff.

Oh, I've run Linux on the desktop before all right, for years. I eventually decided, at the time, that Windows was drastically better at "just working" for desktop applications and it wasn't worth the bother.

Now, though, Microsoft's antics with Windows 11 is starting to make me think that might not be the case anymore.

I disagree with AI being part of the OS. IMO, any desktop OS should have absolutely nothing to do with AI. It's only a platform for managing other applications and resources. Remote AI stuff should be on websites only, available only if I choose to go to them and interact, or in apps specifically designed to be AI, like Claude Code or Antigravity.

All the nonsense in Windows 11 has me thinking about trying Linux desktops again for the first time in decades.

Rust might be worth a look. It gets much closer to the line count and convenience of the dynamic languages like Python than Go, plus a somewhat better type system. Also gets a fully modern tooling and dependency management system. And native code of course.

I disagree with the overall point of the article.

I guess maybe they're worse for professional phone reviewers, who switch phones all the time, but I'm not one. In my experience, I think about two-thirds of the time I've gotten a new phone and wanted to switch to it, the SIM card size had changed, so I needed to get a new one anyways, which could only be done by mail order, so took a few more days. And about half of the time the same SIM card did physically fit, something else went wrong, like the APN names wrong, carrier didn't want to let it activate, RCS failed to work, all of which are virtually impossible to troubleshoot. IMO, the dream of universal SIM card portability has been dead for at least a decade, if not longer, and started long before eSIMs came out.

The eSIM on my current phone Just Worked as far as activating. I haven't tried switching to a new phone with it yet, so I guess I'll have to see how well it works when that happens.

Clearly there are cases when both are better. eSIMs are nice for being able to switch carriers immediately, get set up in a new country you're visiting smoothly, and recover the number from a physically lost phone. Physical SIMs are nice if you want to try out a different phone model, assuming they support the same SIM size and you can find the little tool. And also if your phone is seriously damaged but not physically lost. So not everyone necessarily loves them, but I don't think it's a case of the big bad big tech companies are enshittifying everything.

I wonder if it's the opposite actually. When there is a human running a convenience store type of thing, people don't generally spend time trying to convince them of obviously absurd things, particularly if they work for the same company as you. Nobody wants to risk the employee refusing to sell anything to you because you're a time-wasting jerk or maybe their manager telling them to stop wasting time messing with their co-worker.

Having ridden a few of them in the area, I think they're worth it.

Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.

It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.

And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.

I've come to think that adding halfway-typing to languages designed from the start to be dynamic is mostly not worth the bother. It may help a little bit sometimes, but there's always going to be holes. If you really want strong typing, it's better IMO to bite the bullet and move to a language designed for it. Let Ruby be Ruby, ditto Python, Javascript etc. Pick up some JVM, .NET, Rust, Go, etc if you really want strong types.

It sounds like the kind of job you really want is going to be a bit of a unicorn. That means those kinds of jobs don't get advertised in job boards and have professional recruiters running around looking for candidates that fit. That in turn means that finding such a job is going to be a lot of networking and shoeleather. You'll probably have to go to a bunch of conferences, talk to people, and make contacts, and hope you can discover a place where your unique skills are a greater value to somebody's project than anyone with expertise in only one of those fields could be.

In addition to the other sibling comments, I think there's also a factor of greatly increased computing power. Back in the 90s and earlier, we just didn't have the computing power generally to encrypt everything with super-strong algorithms in realtime. This probably also affects who can practically do development work on state-of-the-art algorithms.

I recall, when it was originally created, SSL was a rarity, a thing only for the your bank account and the payment page for online stores, because nobody could afford the CPU load to encrypt everything all the time. Now, it's no big deal to put streaming video behind TLS just to ensure your ISP can't mess with it.

This isn't about things that happened decades or centuries ago though. It's about how right now, today, the UK is arresting 12,000 people a year, 30 a day, for supposedly "offensive" posts on social media.

https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...

Thanks! This is a much better link than the OP, and better preempts the usual round of "why not my other pet language X instead"? questions. Clearly this choice and strategy has been in the works for a long time and the team has carefully thought out all options.

> Ban all advertisements. (I'm all for it, at this point.)

What would that actually look like though?

Take something that could be considered an ad, but probably most people agree is a good thing. Say you post on here that task X is such a pain in the butt to do all the time as a general gripe, then I say hey, I built a cheap subscription webapp to solve task X easily that you might want to check out. You sign up for it and use it and like it. Seems like everybody wins - you get a problem solved for a small amount of money, I make a little money and get my project used and my work validated etc. But it's still technically an ad.

Lots of stuff like that could be considered an ad. Every "Show HN" could be considered an ad. Suggesting people vote for candidate X or party Y could be considered an ad too - plenty of organizations do pay for actual ads just like that already. Product placements is a type of ad, but it's pretty hard to not do. I don't know how you even make a movie or TV show with people driving cars without showing a particular model of car.

I don't expect that's the kind of ad that everybody is complaining about. Okay, but then how do you legislate the difference? Can you, or anyone, actually write down a definition of the ads you want to ban and the ads you don't? And how will people distort or abuse those definitions? There's billions of dollars in advertising (maybe trillions?), it's not going to all just go away because somebody passed a law. What happens when all of that money gets poured into attempting to abuse such individual personal recommendations? That's already happening on Reddit now, though at small scales for now.

You don't necessarily have to if you're just getting a speeding ticket. But in order to write a speeding ticket, you have to hand over a valid Driver's License so they know who to ticket. Exactly what should they do if the driver refuses to provide their Driver's License?

I don't think this makes a lot of sense because, if the password is quick and easy to type, it can probably be cracked by any such device in the time it takes for a single keystroke. A long and complex password might hold up okay, but for it to actually be secure, you would have to type in the whole password on a phone keyboard every single time you opened the app, which sounds like a terrible experience.

I think, if you were actually willing to do that, it would probably be about as convenient and at least as effective to leave the device powered off and rely on the device full disk encryption and hardware security to protect the data at rest, only powering it on occasionally to check or send messages, then immediately powering back off.