ageitgey

Cars (especially in the US) are an emotional and personal purchase. They are an extension and representation of your personality. It's fashion.

The entire history of the US car business has shown that the path to success is to produce different variants for different customer bases and refresh those variants to drive continual sales.

Some manufacturers take this to Nike-level extremes with rare variants, 1-of-1 models, etc (looking at you, Porsche). Other manufactures take it to the other extreme with base one platform being repurposed for 5+ different customer segments with wildly different body designs - for example the Toyota Tundra, Tacoma, Lexus LX, 4Runner, and Land Cruiser are all the same car with a different shell.

So the conventional wisdom in the industry is that Tesla is committing suicide by producing generic, stale cars without model variants. Tesla seems to have bet that the conventional wisdom is wrong and producing cheap, repeatable cars with less variation is a better business strategy. Time will tell.

This is going to be sick to buy for almost nothing in like a year when it inevitably gets discontinued.

Sweet, an AI spam post about learnings from a outage that is still ongoing.

Sure, people always claim "drivers in MY city..."

But I've lived in both places and London is very different than SF. I'd say the UK has better drivers on average (and much more strict licensing requirements), but driving in London is much more challenging due to the tiny roads you have to navigate. There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.

An I'm not saying London is "the worst" by any means. It's nothing like driving in Vietnam or India. But it is very different to SF.

If they can operate in London, they will have really shown that autonomy is working. London is full of two-way roads that are only one car width wide, roads were you can just get stuck and have to fully back out, vehicles entirely blocking roads requiring complex cooperation between drivers to negotiate, etc. And that's not even considering the complex logic of figuring out where you can stop to let someone out.

I don't disagree with anything you said. I guess there's also factor where the worst of Seattle is right beside a tech conference, but the worst of, say, Baltimore just never gets seen by the wider world.

This is more about two sides yelling past each other and playing team sports instead of being credible parties trying to improve society. And given how weaponized especially the right has become recently, I'm not sure how you can even attempt to make an argument in good faith anymore given how you will be treated, so I'm not pretending like I have the answers to any of this.

Obviously the right is super exaggerating the state of "blue" cities to justify political grandstanding, shows of power, and increased authoritarian control.

But it's also true that a lot of these cities have major, major problems in specific areas and are a sad representation of America in 2025 (the richest country in the history of the world). And these problems are not getting effectively addressed at scale, despite many efforts and resources spent by many different groups. This is why these attacks work - you can say "PORTLAND IS NOT BURNING" (it's not!) but you can't argue with the average tourist that they visit the core tourist parts of these cities, they see horrible things that they've never seen before in their suburban lives. Many areas don't feel safe. That's why these attacks are so effective.

The saddest part is we can't talk about this seriously in the current media. You have to be on a "side". Any attempt to have a real discussion is either ignored or lambasted from one side or the other. Both sides have elements of truth which they can use to push their view.

Cities are dynamic and constantly changing. Different people have different experiences living in different neighborhoods. My experiences might not match yours. But I can say some of the most visibly terrible places for human misery in the Western world that I have seen in the last 10 years have been:

- The obvious places in San Francisco, but also anywhere at any time in the financial district

- Downtown Seattle in various areas (between 4th and Pikes Place, around various 7-11s). You want walk from the water front back to your hotel, take the public elevator, it shows up and opens, and a couple is just fully living in it. What do you do with that?

- Many parts of downtown Los Angeles

- The eastern side of downtown San Diego, around the new library and baseball stadium

- Any MacDonalds in the southern part of downtown Chicago

- The area in and around the Taco Bell on the main tourist strip in Denver

- Many parts of Manhattan

- Almost any form of public transit in any city in the US that has one, from a bus in St. Loius to the BART in SF

You probably don't live in these neighborhoods. You'll think "yeah, don't live in the bad parts - my neighborhood is delighful". But I don't think any rational person can pretend like the policies in any of these cities are working effectively, at scale.

This is exactly why this turn is illegal in nearly every country in the world except the US and Canada. [1]

If you are in the UK, this turn is illegal always and everywhere, so it basically never happens.

I grew up in the US with right turn on red, so I was used to it and accepted it as normal. But after living the UK for 6 years, I'm now physically shocked when visiting the US at how dangerous it is to walk around even very dense urban US areas like Chicago's north loop. Cars are constantly trying to run you over by turning across active crosswalks. It's totally absurd to experience once you've lived somewhere else where that would result in you immediately losing your license. US culture in general has no respect for pedestrians (although of course some individuals do).

This isn't some utopian dream of ultimate walkability achieved through pro-pedestrian urban redesign. This is the most basic laws that govern cities actively making it dangerous to walk around because it saved a bit of gas during the 1970s oil crisis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red

Anthropomorphizing statistical language models doesn't do anyone good.

I owned an ID.3. It was a great car held back by just passable software. But much of the software issue was a non-issue in real life since Android Auto or Carplay would take over the screen. But the failure was big enough for VW that they went into business with Rivian and paid $1B to get their software tech for future vehicles.

The ID.3 was never sold in the US (too "small"), so you wouldn't have seen it in CA.

The ID series is a ground-up electric platform with a lot more space inside. The e-Golf is just a Golf with a (poor) electric engine and battery bolted on.

We are so far past that in mass market fiction. It's folding back in on itself.

Tom Clancy has new books coming out every year and he's been dead for over a decade. They don't hide the "ghostwriter" but they also put Tom Clancy in huge letters at the top even though he had less than nothing to do with it.

https://www.amazon.com/Clancy-Line-Demarcation-Jack-Novel-eb...

I bought some expensive camera gear from Amazon and had a terrible experience. The delivery person obviously stole the gear and kept making fake "delivery attempted" notifications at exactly midnight while I was at home night after night. Amazon eventually refunded me, but they made me wait weeks to get my money back despite years of being a customer and spending many thousands with them and never requesting other refunds.

So now I don't buy expensive camera gear from Amazon anymore. But why do I still shop there?

This week, I ordered an obscure ESP32 system on a chip mounted on a 7" LCD screen for a custom project. I ordered it at 10pm and it was somehow delivered at 8:30am the next morning with "free" prime delivery. The price was cheap. My next best option would be an electronics specialist that would take a week to deliver it. Amazon just has a much better warehouse and delivery network for obscure parts. There's really no one else offering close to what they offer.

> the website UX has become steadily worse

Not disagreeing, but the Amazon web UX has been famously terrible since like 1998. They basically invented the whole trend of building via A/B test result instead of via user-centric design. Nothing on the site has ever made any sense. Every item title is a paragraph description. The categories are basically useless. The filters are a mess of bad and incomplete data to the point of being useless. Many items have 2-3 duplicate listings that somehow have different shipping dates and descriptions, and you never know if you have found the "real" listing. But they sure sell a lot of stuff.

QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible.

There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!

There are two lessons here:

1. When selling software to companies, don't price it like a consumer service.

For a company of any size, paying $10 and paying $100 for a tool require the same amount of work for someone to process and it is essentially the same cost to the company. The money itself is negligible, and a $10 price makes the company assume you either won't stay in business or won't be able to run a secure company. Charge a price that makes them take you seriously.

2. People really, really hate it when you "change the deal."

If you offer a free tier, offer it on a time-limited or user-limited basis up front such that your ideal customer would have to pay to keep using the product. Otherwise, you'll find yourself changing the deal and pulling the rug out from users. Changing the deal ruins your reputation. Charging more upfront can actually give you a reputation for quality.

Progressive politics has a natural 'kitchen sink' risk.

A group proposes to build simple, affordable housing and funds it. Then another group comes along and says that people with affordable housing deserve energy-efficient, low-cost-to-run homes, so the plans get upgraded with better windows and walls, and the cost doubles. Then another group comes along and says that affordable housing should be green with solar panels and battery power. And another group says that all affordable housing should be fully accessible, so the size of all doorways is upgraded. And another group says that affordable housing should be ecologically beneficial, so now the housing requires a green roof and rainwater collection. And so on, until the cost is 5x the original cost and the project never gets built, and a bunch of time is wasted.

This is the risk. Each group along the way had noble motives, but by trying to solve every problem at once, nothing gets done and no one gets helped. By contrast, politics that are instead centered on tearing down systems and rules don't have this, because any random action is a step towards the goal.

I feel like this is happening here to a degree. Instead of producing a functional alternative, this well-intentioned person is picking apart all the problems with the current approach. They may be 100% "correct" in their assessments, but politically, they are letting the air out of their own balloon.

The AI upscaling makes it look like NIN are playing with late-1980s era Rick Astley. Hilarious.

The Iron Horse cafe! Surprisingly good sandwiches back in the day.

I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.

If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

I posted this comment in 2013 [1] and I stand by it 12 years later:

Cucumber tries to solve the problem of turning customer requirements into 'real code'. In exchange for that worthwhile benefit, it asks you to implement the most terrible, reg-ex based spaghetti code imaginable.

The problem is that it doesn't solve the original problem AT ALL. And then you are left with terrible reg-ex driven spaghetti code. Like the Jamie Zawinski saying, "now you have two problems".

The lesson here is that software development processes have to pass the 'human nature' test.

The software industry has largely abandoned waterfall development because it just doesn't work well in practice. It doesn't work because people don't know perfectly what they want before they build it. Agile processes usually are much more efficient because they are more closely aligned to how humans solve problems in the real world.

Cucumber suffers from the same issue of being disconnected with reality. In theory, you can find a customer who can give you perfectly written use cases and you can cut-and-paste those into your cukes. In practice, that never, ever works. So let's all stop wasting our time pretending it was a good idea now that it has been shown to not work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6411787#6412391

I used to use a grammar and punctuation checking browser plugin that worked in any text box. Among all the normal suggestions, it would always insist that instead of using a - dash, that it was proper to use an — emdash. I would accept the suggestion until people on Reddit accused me of being chatgpt because I wrote "too properly" with emdashes. So now you can't do that anymore.

It's a nice idea, but it is still pretty far from even a public v0.1. I think they can get there, but it will be at least a few years.

This feels like the last paper cut for me. It's easy enough to keep using Heroku because it's "easy for the team," even though it is overpriced. But when they can't even acknowledge an incident and there is no way to log in and file a ticket, it feels like they have failed.

I have several services on Heroku, and they are up and down randomly. So it's definitely not just the Heroku admin layer that is down.

Access to check logs or perform other Heroku CLI functions is very intermittent. Some of our services work sometimes. Others don't. When I can occasionally access the logs, it seems like there are issues pinging other services. The apps aren't able to push their logs to DataDog.

It's a mess, and there's not much we can do right now, which is frustrating. And the fact that the Heroku status page itself is broken is embarrassing.

If you want to get hired by a traditional company, you need to get into a stable position with a fixed address. If that's not possible right now, you can try doing project-based work on Upwork or similar services. It's quick to get started. It might be a great way to bring in some money immediately and build up a portfolio without the commitment of a full-time role and with a lot of flexibility. You might be able to do some quick 1-day projects and get some quick success going.

If that isn't possible, do whatever you can to build some stability in your life and then worry about the tech work after that. It's a lot easier to focus on software projects when the core parts of your life are stable. Don't feel bad about not being able to accomplish software projects if you have bigger, more immediate life needs to work on first. Wishing you the best!

Sure, but that's a lot more work than just cloning your fake crypto exchange site tenplate for the 100th time to a new domain. These scammers aren't geniuses. They are all about quick turnarounds.

The numbers are just examples, but you'll get 1-2 real withdraws before you start losing money. The sunk cost and feeling it was legit before is part of the scam to get you to big numbers. You might only get sent a small part of the balance for your fee and then get hit up for more to get the whole balance. All the while, the imaginary total in your account keeps going up, so you keep getting hooked deeper.

And even if you bail after the first withdrawal and actually make a profit, all you've done is stolen money from another victim and may eventually get your bank account flagged for fraud or money laundering.

On reddit, the /r/scams community is a fascinating one to follow to both track what the common scams are right now and to also see just the unending, massive wave of them working over and over.

Based on what is popular right now, it's probably lead generation for one of these scams:

1. I have a bunch of crypto for you sitting in an account. You can even log in to the crypto exchange and see your balance, transfer money, etc! You just have to pay a small fee to extract it. (The whole crypto exchange site is fake, and all the balances are imaginary.)

2. I have a part-time job offer for you where you get paid $2-$5 per post to like Instagram posts for my clients who want publicity. Working from home, you do it for a day or two and really get paid $300! You like easy money and keep doing it. You build up a balance of $5000 for your next payment, but now you need to pay a $150 fee to transfer that money out. (The job was totally fake, there is no ad agency, the first $300 you got was stolen money directly from other victims. People get really hooked because they are already convinced it was real and get taken for 10s of thousands.)

3. Wow, your art/photo/profile pic/etc. is so beautiful, and I want to paint it. Can I pay you a commission to use your work? Here's $2,500! Oops, I sent too much. Can you send me back $500? (The check was fake, and you will lose any money you send when the check bounces.)

The first two are the most popular right now because so many people fall for them and get so deep. Scammers need a constant feed of contacts to pull them off. People answering the phone during the day probably need some easy money. For the scammer, it doesn't matter if you have to robocall 1000 people to find one victim. It's just more free money.

3D printers have made so much progress in the last 1-2 years that rarely are second-hand printers a good deal unless you just get really lucky finding someone unloading a new model they just didn't use. And even then, you probably won't save very much.

If you are on a budget, buy a brand new Bambu A1 Mini for <$250. You'll get industry-leading quality and ease of use and have a great time. Or if you have a little more tolerance for messing around but want the most possible printer for your money, you can get an Elegoo Centauri Carbon for $300 (it's a cheaper knock-off of the higher-end Bambu P1S and X1C models).

The used market is flooded with cheap old 3D printers right now because the new crop of printers is so much better that the old crop of printers are essentially paperweights. Bambu came along and totally disrupted the market. If someone offers you an old Ender 3 even for free, don't take it. It's a waste of time unless you just want to learn 3D printer mechanics instead of actually printing things. It would be like someone giving you a free horse cart because everyone has moved to cars and they don't want to have to figure out how to get rid of it.

I have a friend who has been given 5 (5!) free Ender 3 printers. It's ruining his life, taken over his house, and he spends all his time not printing things. Just spend $250+ and get something modern.

If you are burned out on AI, web, and SaaS, there's never been a better or more exciting time to get into using 3D printing, other types of home manufacturing, and embedded electronics to build real, physical devices.

Hardware is no longer "scary" - it's almost as easy as web dev now. 3D CAD software like Autodesk Fusion is quick and relatively easy to learn. 3D printers have fully transitioned from crazy nerd toys to affordable, reliable, easy-to-use devices for building real products. Laser cutters, CNC machines, etc., have gotten more accessible than ever. Embedded electronics platforms like ESP32s make it cheap and easy to build real products with modern features even if you don't know any electronics.

You can literally go on Amazon, order a fully self-contained ESP32 dev board with an embedded screen, wifi, usb-c, etc, for $15, design and 3D print an enclosure for it, and use ChatGPT to write a skeleton application for it in seconds. Without pulling out a soldering iron, you can have a GUI-driven custom device for tens of dollars. And if you don't have a 3D printer already, you can get a great one now for sub-$300. All in for $350 and a weekend or two of learning, you can be building custom hardware.

If you are feeling tired of programming but have always thought of hardware as something too far outside of your comfort zone or too much work to mess with, it really has changed. It's a lot of fun. Check it out!