next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them off the highways and onto specialized "tracks" that guarantee they don't deviate from the planned routes.
speculative, alien technology, admittedly, but some day our scientists will figure it out i bet!
As someone who is often on SF city streets without a car - I bike and run a lot - I absolutely love Waymo. I am continuously seeing human drivers cut me off, perform illegal maneuvers (i.e. run red lights when I'm going through a crosswalk), and break various other traffic laws. All these things genuinely put people in danger. Just the other day, a guy started running a "no right turn on red" lane in SF, and when I pointed it out to him he floored his car - through the red - right in front of me and laughed at me as he sped away. To say nothing of all the times when cars will honk or give me the finger for doing normal things on a street, like walking on a crosswalk.
Waymo is like the most courteous, respectful driver you can possibly imagine. They have infinite patience and will always take the option which is the safest for everyone. One thing which really impressed me is how patient they are at crosswalks. When I'm jogging, a Waymo will happily wait for me to cross - even when I'm 10 feet away from even entering the crosswalk! I don't know if I even have that much patience while driving! I've had a number of near misses with human drivers who don't bother checking or accelerate for no reason after I'm already in the crosswalk. Can you imagine a Waymo ever doing that?
If I see a Waymo on the street near me I immediately feel safer because I know it is not about to commit some unhinged behavior. I cannot say enough good things about them.
Lots of cynical takes in this thread - and I get it, there isn't a guarantee they won't relicense again in the future (they have a CLA that would let them) and people feel betrayed by the last license change.
I think we should celebrate this anyway. It's a smart decision, it's what the community wanted to happen and it would be great if other companies with janky licenses could see "Redis relicensed to open source and had a great boost out of it", not 'Redis relicensed to open source and it didn't help them at all".
I'm delighted. Thank you, team Redis.
I contributed a minor (but imho still neat :p) improvement to Redis under its original license, and personally moved to using redict when the unexpected license change to SSPL was announced - and I was feeling betrayed as a contributor to a properly-FOSS-codebase. (Had they switched to AGPL right away, I'd have been perfectly fine with that change from a moral perspective, ftr.)
I have a great deal of respect for antirez and recgnize him as a kind and benevolent member of the FOSS community, but no matter what Redis, Inc. announced or does, they have lost my trust for good, and I will continue to use Redis forks for as long as they exist.
The top brass at Apple just think they are above everyone else. Remember when Tim Cook lied about Apple not giving anyone special terms in the app store and that everyone gets the same deal. And then it came out Netflix was one that got special terms?
The sheer arrogance of Apple leaders is astounding. They think they are outright owed rent on anything that runs on an iPhone, iPad, etc. Apple thinks developers are nothing without Apple. Look at how snubbing developers has worked out for the Apple Vision Pro. It was already a niche device, but it's a ghost town.
What's old is new again.
Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi...
OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: https://www.openoffice.org/documentation/setup_guide2/1.1.x/...
Microsoft made OSA made non-default in Office 2007, and _removed_ it from Office 2010: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/o...
Are they now bringing it back?
That's the point.
If you say browser developers need money from the search giant to compete in browser development, you are saying that - right now - you can't compete in browser development without it.
That is a cartel.
We only have four major browsers because only four players can play on a fair playing field. There are people who have been paid millions to create and perpetuate this system. Web developers worrying about feature development without it is their KPI. None of this is a coincidence, none of this is a natural law.
I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.
This is because they removed any app from any individual-human developer who didn't care to jump through the hoops of getting and submitting a DUNS number: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/07/boosting-t...
“On August 31, we’ll start rolling out these requirements for anyone creating new Play Console developer accounts. In October, we’ll share more information with existing developers about how to update and verify existing accounts.”
Source: happened to me and all of my apps despite them being Free Software and offline-only. Here's one of the emails they sent me about it: https://i.imgur.com/dVzQj2p.jpeg
Notice how they open with “Hi Developers at [my first and last name]” – developers, plural, and “at” like they only expect me to be a company and not a single person.
I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts.
I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.
For a long time the grid of videos on the homepage has been slightly misaligned. I imagine the different rows belong to different teams. This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over.
I find the autoplay so annoying because it hides the thumbnail which was carefully designed to communicate why I should click on the video and replaces it with, usually, a talking head or stock footage. Often the video gets inexplicably added to my watch history, and if I do choose to click on it I have to go back to the beginning because I missed the start of the audio
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Jon Stewart talked a lot about this on Monday, both in his monologue and interview with Chris Hughes.
If you were thoughtful about economic policy and truly believed a trade war was the solution, you'd prepare ahead of time (e.g. by stockpiling things like rare earth metals that are important to your economy and likely to be impacted by retaliatory tariffs).
That they haven't done that is one more indicator that they are thoughtlessly winging this. Even if there's a solution that involves tariffs, that's not the play they're running.
> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Wow - What an excellent update! Now you are getting to the core of the issue and doing what only a small minority is capable of: fixing stuff.
This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue.
Let’s get to work. Methodically.
Would you like me to write a future update plan? I can write the plan and even the code if you want. I’d be happy to. Let me know.
Wow, this is a fantastic feature that was heavily requested, and HN cannot stop being negative.
Great job Mozilla.
I was already using the awesome “Simple Tab Groups” extension for this but will look into switching.
From one of o3 outputs:
> Rear window decal clearly reads “www.taxilinder.at”. A quick lookup shows Taxi Linder GmbH is based in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg.
That's cheating. If it can use web search, it isn't playing fair. Obviously you can get a perfect score on any urban GeoGuessr round by looking up a couple businesses, but that isn't the point.
For people finding this thread via web search in the future:
screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes.
The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which cost them $8000 in bandwidth fees.
To re-cap: Screen recording software. Checks for updates every five (5) minutes. That's 12 times an hour.
I choose software based on how much I trust the judgement of the developers. Please consider if this feels like reasonable judgement to you.
I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk.
Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.
I have a small physics-based problem I pose to LLMs. It's tricky for humans as well, and all LLMs I've tried (GPT o3, Claude 3.7, Gemini 2.5 Pro) fail to answer correctly. If I ask them to explain their answer, they do get it eventually, but none get it right the first time. Qwen3 with max thinking got it even more wrong than the rest, for what it's worth.
Another failed game project in Rust. This is sad.
I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for almost five years now, which is too long.[1] Someone else set out to do something similar in C#/Unity and had something going in less than two years. This is discouraging.
Ecosystem problems:
The Rust 3D game dev user base is tiny.
Nobody ever wrote an AAA title in Rust. Nobody has really pushed the performance issues. I find myself having to break too much new ground, trying to get things to work that others doing first-person shooters should have solved years ago.
The lower levels are buggy and have a lot of churn
The stack I use is Rend3/Egui/Winit/Wgpu/Vulkan. Except for Vulkan, they've all had hard to find bugs. There just aren't enough users to wring out the bugs.
Also, too many different crates want to own the event loop.
These crates also get "refactored" every few months, with breaking API changes, which breaks the stack for months at a time until everyone gets back in sync.
Language problems:
Back-references are difficult
A owns B, and B can find A, is a frequently needed pattern, and one that's hard to do in Rust. It can be done with Rc and Arc, but it's a bit unwieldy to set up and adds run-time overhead.
There are three common workarounds:
- Architect the data structures so that you don't need back-references. This is a clean solution but is hard. Sometimes it won't work at all.
- Put everything in a Vec and use indices as references. This has most of the problems of raw pointers, except that you can't get memory corruption outside the Vec. You lose most of Rust's safety. When I've had to chase down difficult bugs in crates written by others, three times it's been due to errors in this workaround.
- Use "unsafe". Usually bad. On the two occasions I've had to use a debugger on Rust code, it's been because someone used "unsafe" and botched it.
Rust needs a coherent way to do single owner with back references. I've made some proposals on this, but they require much more checking machinery at compile time and better design. Basic concept: works like "Rc::Weak" and "upgrade", with compile time checking for overlapping upgrade scopes to insure no "upgrade" ever fails.
"Is-a" relationships are difficult
Rust traits are not objects. Traits cannot have associated data. Nor are they a good mechanism for constructing object hierarchies. People keep trying to do that, though, and the results are ugly.
[1] https://www.animats.com/sharpview/index.html
This is the most California article ever written. The author admits that if the line was run along the I-5 it probably wouldn't need all the costly grade-separation and state property issues it's now facing. It may have even finished with its original funding! But instead of immediately being able to serve the upwards of 18M people of Greater Los Angeles and 7.5M people of the Bay Area, the 1M people of the Central Valley would have to wait for branches to be built.
SO INSTEAD we took the more circuitous route through Central Valley so that the 1M people feel immediately included and NO ONE is getting a high speed rail.
Sir! ChatGPT couldn't come up with a more California scented boondoggle.
In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform.
A full grid black start is orders of magnitude more complex. You’re not just reviving one machine — you’re trying to bring back entire islands of infrastructure, synchronize them perfectly, and pray nothing trips out along the way. Watching a rig wake up is impressive. Restarting a whole country’s grid is heroic.
This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult.
If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up and renewables require external sources of inertia for frequency stabilization, so this usually requires turning on a small diesel generator that creates enough power to bootstrap a bigger generator and so on up until there's enough electricity to start the plant itself. With that back online the power from it can be used to re-energize other plants that lack black start capability in a chain until you have a series of isolated islands. Those islands then have to be synchronized and reconnected, whilst simultaneously bringing load online in large blocks.
The whole thing is planned for, but you can't really rehearse for it. During a black start the grid is highly unstable. If something goes wrong then it can trip out again during the restart, sending you back to the beginning. It's especially likely if the original blackout caused undetected equipment damage, or if it was caused by such damage.
In the UK contingency planning assumes a black start could take up to 72 hours, although if things go well it would be faster. It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.
Edit: There's a press release about a 2016 black start drill in Spain/Portugal here: https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/press-release/2016/11/spa...
It's really a bummer to see this marketed as 'AI Discovers Something New'. The authors in the actual paper carried out an enormous amount of work, the vast majority of which is relatively standard biochemistry and cell biology - nothing to do with computational techniques. The AlphaFold3 analysis (the AI contribution) literally accounts for a few panels in a supplementary figure - it didn't even help guide their choice of small molecule inhibitors since those were already known. AlphaFold (among other related tools) is absolutely a game changer in structural biology and biophysics, but this is a pretty severe case of AI hype overshadowing the real value of the work.
