Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.
Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, and it's not uncommon for engineers at the 8000+ not-a-software-company I work at to casually have a Linux machine instead of a Mac or PC. It's not 2010, where you had to be willing to navigate UEFI and "will my broadcom wireless work?" to weed out the casuals from the true-believers.
Messing around with chromium versions and netflix's plugin was not fun when you just wanted to watch a show.
It's not polished, any distro.
But Linux server is GOAT.
edit: I have to say that I don't use netflix or play video games.
I'm really sick of this trope. I have been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 15 years. Yes, I still have to fix weird issues on occasion . . . about as frequently as I have to fix weird issues on my wife's Windows machine.
Statscounter shows Linux installs about on par with ChromeOS installs [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide]. Both are beaten out by the "Unknown" category; there are literally more people running we-can't-tell-what OS than a Linux-derivative OS.
I think these days, the roadblock isn't reliability; it's Linux being off-mainstream. Network effect, essentially. Most of the (non-Internet) stuff the average person hears about in tech media and by word-of-mouth is not guaranteed to be available on Linux and is basically always guaranteed to be available on Windows, MacOSX, or both. Linux archs have done a decent job of solving the "Can I see my screen with the latest graphics card" problem but are still behind the curve on the "Can I buy Photoshop off the shelf at Best Buy and run it on my computer" curve.
Or I can use GIMP for free.
You are correct that Linux on the desktop is not mainstream and that is largely down to network effects, but I don't understand the next logical step in the argument. How does that make Linux on the desktop "not ready" or "incomplete?" In my opinion (and I recognise that this is just an opinion), Linux has been a superior experience to Windows for a long time. All common problems have several robust solutions. Uncommon problems often also have a good solution (which isn't guaranteed on Windows either, at least not without spending a lot of money). The idea that Linux isn't "Desktop Ready" is a tired trope. Just because people don't, doesn't mean they can't. Linux doesn't have a marketing department (and I wouldn't want it to).
But again, that's the problem to solve. You can use GIMP for free; most people can't. It's a space-alien UI relative to the Photoshop they know. And while I love GIMP and think it's a fine drop-in replacement for 90% of use-cases, it's still not good enough to fly (not fast enough, not robust enough, not the same size of plugin ecosystem) for the 10% that are using Photoshop in high-volume professional work settings. Businesses love cheap, and if GIMP could be substituted, they'd have already forced substitution on their art-houses.
You can even probably get Photoshop running on your box with the right cocktail of emulators and libraries. Most people can't.
The problem of picking up software from any brick-and-mortar store, taking it home, and running it on my Linux machine has no good solutions. Alternatives that you and I know work just aren't palatable for the average user. The average user still can't.
I'm not sure this is, practically, a solvable problem; I'm just identifying that it is the problem for adoption of Linux on desktop outside of the wonks like us that are willing to learn a lot of computer stuff off the beaten path.
Modern desktop Linux is great, but it's a whole commerce-adoption model away from being part of the beaten path.
And I still find the "Linux on the Desktop" trope to be funny.
Until some really big accident happens in a situation where even a drunk driver wouldn't have messed up that way.
After that self driving will be limited to situations like while you are in a traffic jam or limited to 30km/h and having it's own track or similar.
Outlier incidents shouldn't matter.
This systems expect the user to shim in fastly if something goes wrong, which just can't work reliable given how human brains work.
Furthermore the situations which can make a self driving car crash are not the same which make a human driver crash.
Such crashes can be pretty arbitrary. Random things like advertisement on a bus has the potential to trick of the self driving car. Similar at least some systems are not very good at handling situations where the lanes are unexpected changed e.g. around a construction site. I had been in more than one situation where the lanes markings what completely messed up and only common sense was left to prevent a potential dangerous situation. This systems don't have common sense.
There already was at least on deadly incident where a Tesla crashed for no apparent reason (blaming the dead driver for not taking over fast enough which again isn't realistic at all, through legal maybe valid).
Tesla is supposedly the leader wrt. self driving cars, but people where easily able to trick that car to drive into the lane for the opposite direction and it has since a while one of the worst emergency brake assistants.
The problem boils down to self driving cars not being good at "unusual" situations but situations which are unusual for the self driving car are in practice pretty common given how much people drive cars and they are not necessary recognizable as such by humans.
Another problem is that traffic's in different countries have different rules and dynamics a self driving system working well for idk. the US might not at all be safe to use in idk. insert arbitrary EU country here even if trained for that country.
Humans can normally adapt to a degree in the fly, which makes them not have a crash, or less bad crashes in some situations. But the self driving car has no such common sense and might not even realize it's in a situation it's not trained for.
I see a lot of potential to make traffic more safe.(non stuff driving but assistant systems, self driving in traffic jams, slow self driving buses in car reduced inner cities, on highway self driving truck convoys, etc.).
But at least on the close future I'm not convinced "general purpose"/"everywhere any speed" self driving cars are more safe.
I mean we also shouldn't forget that a lot of deadly accidents happen because of negligence, so while self driving cars still require a driver hand over, they still all happen because the driver is as negligent (or might intentionally not use the self driving feature to get faster to work etc.).
Edit: Swipy keyboard mess ups.
The right metric is simply a much lower accident and fatality rates for self-driving cars.
This flexibility reduces the challenge for self-driving cars since they are far from understanding situations at the level people potentially can, but still results in a safety win.
Using Autopilot is in general much safer even though it does from time to time make fatal mistakes that human would not do. (Like when it fails to recognise a truck and tries to drive through it[1].)
Of course AP is a very different thing to FSD, so this doesn't speak anything about current nor future FSD safety.
[0] Autopilot safety comparison https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jim86m/i_graph...
[1] Accident https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-driver-crash-truck-trai...
That is why Tesla is not hyper focused on one city and is not building a team of exclusively AI experts, rather build a tool that other people can use to configure the specifics.
Tesla already are able to read signs in many languages and know about lots of different country specific rules.
> Tesla is supposedly the leader wrt. self driving cars, but people where easily able to trick that car to drive into the lane for the opposite direction and it has since a while one of the worst emergency brake assistants.
'Tricking' the car is kind of nonsense, you can also trick people into things pretty easily.
I have seen a number of reports where Tesla AHAD got the top marks and I have seen many videos of Teslas breaking when the driver was not paying attention. What are you basing this analysis on?
>“It’s almost getting to a point where I can go from my house to work with no interventions, despite going through construction and widely varying situations,” he said.
>“So this is why I’m very confident about full self-driving functionality being complete by the end of this year. It’s because I’m literally driving it.”
Though reading that it sounds more like the car can drive from A to B on it's own sometimes rather than with any reliability.
I think many users imagine being chauffered around while they read a tablet, potentially not even needing a drivers license.
Meanwhile I think realists and Elon Musk expect a car that is doing most of the menial parts of driving while a licensed human driver is still hands on but not doing much work.
We're close to that realist scenario in many ways for some areas - though I'm sure we'll see a spike in tragedies once it first goes out and people attempt to treat it like scenario one.
Scenario one is a very long ways away from being universal.
The term to use is driverless. Gives the correct idea of what users imagine. All thsi "self-driving" or FSD is just driver assistance given more capability with no regards to safety.
We've had self-driving train and airplane functionality for years. Meanwhile self-driving trains and planes are not closer.
The currency the federal reserve multiplies? That could collapse.
Since 2020, the dollar menu is gone, home and stock prices skyrocketed. In a year I've seen ~30% inflation. There's no reason for the inflation to stop there.
(Note, I have lots of investment, inflation may help me)
For stock info, look it up. Not sure where to get historical real estate prices, I'm just looking for a second property and everything is at least 10% higher than in February as you need to offer more than the selling price in this economy.
Not sure if you are looking for Data or a psychic. I do the former.
Will it happens tomorrow? In 20 years? In 5 months? It's just a feeling you have that isn't backed by data. I can't really ever disprove this because you're not really making any claim.
This is every FED conversation on HN. People totally believe hyperinflation is "just around the corner" but it never happens only standard normal levels of inflation always within FED projections.
What's your website BTW?
Also, why are you discounting the last 100 years of federal reserve policy? We obviously had greater than 10x inflation. Is 30% inflation in 8 months not considered hyperinflation?
My kids bank account is 30% less valuable now. I'm not going to fight over definitions that 30% inflation isn't enough to be considered hyperinflation.
It will be possible to buy large amounts of crude oil without owning USDs by 2026.
Still don't think it will happen.
CPI is not the best measure and isn’t always 100% accurate but it’s not going to be off by double digits.
> The index for food away from home continued to rise, increasing 0.6 percent in September. The index for limited service meals rose 0.9 percent in September, the largest increase in the history of the index, which dates to 1997.
> Despite the September decline, the food at home index increased 4.1 percent over the last 12 months. All six major grocery store food group indexes rose over that span, with increases ranging from 2.6 percent (cereals and bakery products) to 6.3 percent (meats, poultry, fish, and eggs). The index for food away from home rose 3.8 percent over the last year. The index for limited service meals increased 5.5 percent and the index for full service meals rose 2.8 percent over the last 12 months.
Of note:
> The index for used cars and trucks rose 6.7 percent in September, its largest monthly increase since February 1969.
But mechanically, yes. The Fed can't collapse while it's the controlling institution of the dollar. The dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's the denomination unit for paying IMF loans. It's the unit of money other countries shove under a big ol' mattress (with scary-looking guards around it) to backstop a collapse of their national currency. The dollar is so deeply baked into international economics that only global shocks can fundamentally shake its value as a currency.
If that changes, the Fed's power base becomes heavily disrupted, but most of us in the US won't notice because we'll be too busy riding in gangs with our fellow War Boyz hunting down the last reserves of Go Juice for our Death Rigz under a burning sky. ;)