Lio

> are there a lot of passenger cars in Europe that use diesel?

Yes there are. I drive a diesel car. My car is old and very cheap to run as I don't do much driving. It's not clean but it's very efficient. I can pretty easily get between 57-67mpg (Imperial units) and my record on a long, slow drive was 82mpg.

Because of a quirk in the tax rules for year of my car it's taxed on the efficiency rather than the emissions. My car's VED tax is £20 a year. A new car of any type would be > £200 yearly plus a tax on mileage.

It just about makes sense to keep still but I'm giving serious consideration to getting rid of it for a new car.

One thing I can be sure of my next car will a BEV. It's crazy we allow foreign powers to have so much control over our lives like this.

To be brutally honest as an outsider, it looks like Trump just started this war to distract from his part in the Epstein files and we're now carrying the consequences. Madness.

Compared the old 2020 Leaf the current model has around 387 mile range, which I think is enough that I wouldn't worry about range.

They also charge a lot faster now it's using a CCS connector.

There's plenty of other models providing that range too such as Renault Scenic.

I don't think hybrids are worth the extra complexity at all now. All those little moving engine parts are going to wear out sooner or later.

ps Is it bad that I still laugh at calling a place "bumfuck"?

Yes, I wanted to ask what that is too. I don't think we have that term here either and I'm finding that sentence a bit hard to parse.

Without trying to be funny, it reads like a student who's job it is to support another student's emotions. That can't be right though, is it?

Yeah it's a good way of avoiding lowercase hot takes and cry-laugh emoji people.

Well DHH launched Rails and he owns this Rails Word conference so it's not too surprising he gave the opening keynote.

As he's no longer interested in Ruby or Rails, or at least by his own admission he's retired from programming, perhaps he'll do the decent thing and just step aside for more interested speakers to take over.

Aaron is a breath of fresh air, which is amazing considering he's been doing it for so long and so consistently.

Aaron is exactly what you want in a community leader.

He's consistency both technical and funny. Plus he seems like a decent bloke overall (based on meeting him once in passing 15 years ago).

Home taping saves music! :P

This is not that surprising the big Japanese manufacturers have worked with many American and European engineers for some of their most beloved instruments.

E.g. Akai working with Roger Linn on MPC and Chris Huggett on the S1000 sampler.

Or Dave Smith working with Yamaha and Korg on physical modelling and wave sequencing.

You could say he now owns file permissions.

> Enter the 21st Century Luddite, Thomas Reid, from stage left.

How does any of this make him a Luddite?

Luddites weren’t anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers that actually wanted to be involved with it.

They wanted technology to serve them not make their conditions worse as they worked with it.

This guy just doesn’t to sell his farm. That’s not the same at all.

How many keys do you want?

Something like a Yamaha CK61 would give you pretty light weight and compact 61 note battery powered keyboard with, I think, pretty good samples.

I have the bigger CK88 hammer action version and like it a lot.

You think Celtic Brits don't count as white? Have you seen us? We're some of the pastiest looking people you will ever meet. I could get sunburnt opening the fridge.

Oh! No I wasn't, thank you.

The CZ synths were really underrated, I think because the presets IMHO are a bit rubbish.

I still love them though. Phase distortion can make some really great noises with a bit of coaxing.

I have the bigger CZ-5000 with the built in sequencer I bought used in the 90s and still play. I think it was probably used most famously by Drexciya but the Kevin Saunderson "Reece Bass" sound was everywhere in early jungle.

I like this CZP-1 soft synth. It's pretty nice once you flip the flow from left to right to top to bottom.

I was going to make a joke about how it depends on how fast you eat it but you're absolutely right.

Tobacco is incredibly damaging but because it doesn't kill you right away we tolerate it.

There's probably a rather grim metric that defines time to death ratio for addictive substances somewhere in a government report.

I would have been more interested if he'd spoken about improvements actually in the Ruby world.

There fast JITS like YJIT, ZJIT, JRuby and TruffleRuby.

We also have static typing with RBS and an AOT compiler in Spinel and we have embeddable Crystal.

The speed of TruflleRuby or Spinal with RBS isn't that far behind Go.

And here's a Ruby advantage for you, Ruby even with static typing needs fewer tokens from your context window to represent the same solution as verbose Go.

DHH's own pitch for HotWire was that it allowed a native like experience without having to bow to Apple app store review process. Where's that gone?

There's lots of positive things that DHH could have spoken of but didn't.

DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech.

"Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"

You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We listened to him because of Rails not Hey or Basecamp. They were just application of Rails as a technology.

If he no longer has a vision for Rails' niche, what do we need him for? What's his pitch?

He might as well just be a Danish Barry Gibb impersonator that can't sing but instead drones on and on about politics. :P

Well, it's not the distant future we're talking here. This is happening right now.

On street charging is being installed in most countries as we speak.

I don't get why it matters that it's made in China but if you don't like that you could buy a European made Dacia Spring for around US$15,000 on the road.

1 in 3 new cars sold in the UK is electric and that number is growing. Spurred by the growing price of fossil fuels I think it's a safe bet it will be higher next year too.

That sounds like a solvable problem given a short amount of time.

Two things will likely solve it:

1. There's isn't a fixed number of chargers in the world. Eventually the majority of commercial car parking space will have a charging point because they're getting cheaper and it's an easy value add.

2. Charging is getting ever faster and range is growing. 800v platforms are probably the next obvious step but after that something else will come along.

Imagine an EV with 1000 mile range that charges in 5 minutes and costs less than half what the average ICE car does now. It's far fetched but it's not so far fetched.

There are no such improvements on the way for ICE technology.

Electrification is happening right now in the rest of the world and it can't be stopped because it's better technology.

To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.

It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.

I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.

People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.

Yes, I watched it. I'm not saying he got rid of engineers so much as just not hiring new ones.

If he's hiring new people they won't be engineers or the people that used to do engineering.

They'll be people that are better suited to writing English than code.

I hate native apps. There are use cases better suited to native apps but often it's just not what I want.

You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.

You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.

It looks like he spent about 4 minutes out of the 1:03 making that point.

I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.

I don't think he believes in Rails any more.

It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.

To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?

I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers.

Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.

To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.

If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.

If the whole publishing industry can't collect copyright violation fines from Meta what makes you think you can?

Not just their grandparents, the chances are that Meta is processing those videos you take of your kids too even when they say they aren't.

They've played fast and loose with copyrighted material for years, as shown in court records.

They company was founded on the principle of breaking privacy law, as highlighted in Zuckerberg's famous Dumb Fucks conversation.

Meta does what Meta can get away with and you really can't do anything about it without exceptionally deep pockets.

The publishing industry has more money than you do and they failed too.

Is there any financial motivation for OpenAI to stop doing this other than reputational damage? In some ways, it may actually be good for their reputation.

If an individual gets in to a poorly protected system they're still criminally responsible for the damage or disruption caused.

You can't use the excuse of "well they used 'password' as their password[1], they were asking for it".

Until the management of OpenAI is held to the same standard this is only going to get worse.

1. That's not to excuse poor system management. If you leave data exposed then you should be held responsible for that separately.

How much cable are we talking about here and can you go into more detail about where your house is located...?

Joking aside, I'm not sure that metal thefts can totally be blamed on addiction.

I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.

They would do things like hack phone cables from telephone polls, attach them to an SUV and attempt to rip them out of the ground, with varying levels of success.

A week later the same people would break into a works yard in another part of the country after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found in a field somewhere after they'd used petrol to burn the casing off.

I don't think the people involved were doing it for want of housing, healthcare or addiction treatment, as we have all of that in the UK. They just saw it as a source of money.

Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.

It's about 30 years ago that I quit smoking but it was a real bugger at the time.

Here's what helped me the most; every time you try to quit it gets a bit easier next time.

So if you try and fail, try again. Then keep trying after that.

So many people try to quit and get disheartened when they're pulled back.

Instead just think of it as another step along the path. You are training yourself to tolerate the itch and to do without nicotine.