Thanks, I actually missed that.
However:
>The sale of hybrid cars and vans would be banned from 2035 under the new plan.
This is still a ridiculously tight timeframe.
648 karma · joined October 17, 2020
However:
>The sale of hybrid cars and vans would be banned from 2035 under the new plan.
This is still a ridiculously tight timeframe.
I'm also not saying it's impossible, it's just something that the govt has to do first for this to even be feasible. It also makes the timeframe very impractical. The govt doesn't appear to ever address this or even begin the work required.
I think that kind of dismissive comment is entirely the problem here. You do realise that the entire electrical substation infrastructure needs substantial upgrading for it to even be possible? And that's not an easy problem? And that every single residential street in all of the UK needs to be dug up and have chargers installed? In 9 years' time (or maybe 19 if we say 10 years lifetime of 2nd hand cars)?
The whole issue is the govt acts as if all they need to do is ban petrol cars + our CO2 issues are solved, and do not address these serious practical issues.
Also on a personal note - this comment came across as somewhat snide and ridiculing, I respectfully refer you to the HN guidelines:
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
By all means, disagree with me but you could have made this comment less unkindly.
See https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and... and his blog in general for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. It's likely we need new AI techniques to have fully autonomous vehicles that function correctly.
Since you've ignored most of what I said there, let me reduce the surface area of the discussion and ask 1 thing:
Let's assume the UK does everything the climate 'activists' request of them, and this results in an economic depression and unprecedented unemployment and poverty - do you think this increases or decreases the likelihood of other countries following suit?
If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd think that'd be in place by now given the time frames?
I think it's hand-wavey to say 'oh you can just charge at low current'. And if you've ever seen a petrol station near a motorway here you'll realise the idea of parking your car for x * 10 mins to charge would simply not work, there'd be multiple mile tailbacks.
Overall the govt treats this issue like it's a smaller problem than it really is.
All the existing street chargers I've seen (there's a couple up the road from me) are like 1 or 2 here + there. Probably no more than 1 per thousand parking spot (might even be being generous there).
You'd have to install these chargers (which appear to require a fair bit of work to install) at every single parking spot in the UK to make it practical. Which is not really practical even if we had the money to do it...
Perhaps increased public transportation is part of the issue but if you consider the scale of the issue and the numbers involved not to mention the fact you're now entirely privileging rich people with off-street parking (class/economic issues there) who CAN get electric cars, and do all of this in 9 years (or maybe 19 let's say if people are buying 2nd hand) while bankrupting every single (non-electric) car-related industry shortly after one of the biggest economic shocks of the modern era AND you still need to provide considerably more infrastructure no matter how you slice the pie it's still equally as huge a logistical challenge.
Firstly - any response to climate change that does not include China and really India and other emerging economies too is more or less useless. Why should we deny such countries the benefits of full industrialisation?
Secondly - while in some respects you are correct, looking at CO2 numbers some kind of drastic action seems to be required, it also leaves unanswered the question of 'at what cost'. During the covid19 situation we've seen the impact of shutting down parts of the economy on GDP. That naturally always translates into deaths, and the kind of economic impact such drastic action would entail would likely run into millions of deaths, many of them far away in poorer nations receiving less govt aid (as with covid!)
I think the whole 'nothing is enough the world will end!!' mentality does nothing but put those who are inclined to care into a state of deep depression and anxiety and those who are inclined to deny climate change into a better position to argue that the other side are being ridiculous. It does NOT help.
The correct approach is a practical middle ground where we try to do what we can.
In any case this govt response does somewhat epitomise the 'climate hysterics' mentality in that it is hugely impractical, ignores many questions of trade-offs and impact as if there were none to be answered and is unilateral enough to be meaningless in the wider global context.
Keep in mind that if one country decides to take drastic action which tanks its economy, do you think other countries are likely to follow suit or rather elect govts that entirely unwind all and any climate action?
The UK is small, cars are squeezed onto tiny roads and most people do on-street parking, i.e. you park where you can. When I last had a car I could only park around the corner from my flat (which was set far back from the road).
Having off-street parking is a luxury here that only a small % of people have, and even then if you have a block of flats it still makes charging from home more or less practically impossible.
Unless the govt intend to install charging points at every car parking spot on every residential road in the entire country in 9 years (!) or whatever the full timeline they have in their minds for everybody to have electric then this is not feasible.
That's not to mention the fact that charging electric cars requires very significant current to do so in a reasonable timeframe. Electrical substations in the UK simply could not cope with anything close to full electric car deployment without the entire electrical network being upgraded.
And this is before we get on to practicality issues around cars breaking down, longer trips or how petrol stations might be used given charge time.
I think there is some kind of shared delusion that this is some easy way of reducing CO2 emissions. It's not easy, and there are very big questions and trade-offs that nobody appears able to address.
Before people suggest 'well people need to use public transport then' - while the UK has better public transport than e.g. much of the US (I went to Austin without a car once, that was tough) - outside of London public transport is extremely expensive, very very unreliable (our trains for example are the most expensive and least reliable in all of Europe), slow and entirely impractical for many areas.
I am not anti-electric car, in fact I wouldn't mind using one (that acceleration, consistent torque, so much more reliable) - it's just there are huge practical issues that the govt seem never to address.
I personally think the appropriate compromise is to move forward with very efficient hybrid vehicles.
>The second is the DOM. It is a horrible collection of hacks that make simple things hard and hard things impossible. I have thought many times “if only was I drawing this control/layout directly, I would’ve finished hours ago.”
As a user of electron apps there are clearly limitations on what the UI can do as a result and the style of rendering it is clearly webish.
Another issue I keep on seeing with web based apps, moreso on android, is they seem utterly incapable of dealing with the slightest network non-connectivity. The UI tends to freeze.
I do take your point entirely on the fact that perhaps java's inherent performance limitations might result in a fairly comparable poor experience however.
To me while it's nice, it's not an impossible achievement and often likely uses somebody else's code to get there :)
I think apple receive far too much praise for things they've done which are often not as amazing as they seem and too little praise for other things (e.g. their great work on the 5nm SoC hw) as well as far too little criticism for biz practices.
Trying to set things a little more on an even keel :)
I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything?
I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things.
So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2.
But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work.
Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
Fire him and get yourself to a doctor and proper therapist pronto. You are worthwhile and your brain is telling you lies, like any proper health condition you need to get some medical help with it, nothing to be ashamed of.
You are worthwhile don't forget it. You can and will get better, go sort out some help and everything in your life will improve.
I think it adds confusion as there are xxxOS projects which are indeed separate OSes and it dilutes the meaning of an 'OS'. Probably the GNU/-prefix crowd find it especially egregious as the work put in to the distribution exists more so around tooling than any kernel-specific aspect.
From the name I expected it to be an interesting new microkernel from OpenSUSE (the concept of which surprised me) so I have direct experience of the confusion this naming convention causes :)
Also all of literature would suggest otherwise. Look at any documentary talking about a man who is considered attractive and see what word they use first. "Tall, dark and handsome" - notice the order. The list goes on and once you start looking for it you'll be surprised. Look at romance - novels - see how many of the men are short.
You could also speak to some women and ask them about it. If you ask enough you'll get at least some honest responses (not disparaging women, equally men may often be deceptive on this kind of question).
I'm also not sure I understand your argument - both men + women contribute to height, male height is only part of the equation (my dad is normal height my mum is very short and I am short for example). Also nutrition has been HUGE in stunting growth, societies with better nutrition have a very big increase in height (which also suggests sexual selection plays a role I'd say).
Height is also in a pretty narrow range anyway, +-2SD.
Finally I'd say that if you were significantly shorter than average and male + had tried your hand with dating you'd have a very raw and immediate series of data points that would be pretty compelling.
This isn't really a controversial point, in the same way men have a preference for a certain hip/waist ratio in women ("why don't all women then have that hip/waist ratio" you might ask following your existing argument...!)
Most of the examples of guys who do well at very short height are either - some MASSIVE compensation in some other way (hugely confident, etc.) with a MASSIVE failure rate, or they are actually in a dating pool with a lower male height.
Obviously exceptions happen (I'm engaged for one!) but the impact it has is massive and I didn't know until my mid 20's, nobody wanted to admit it or talk about it and it would have saved me a lot of pain to know.
As you say, unless you've experienced it for yourself it's hard (but not impossible) to get quite how extreme it is.
I've heard plenty enough from women talking directly about it, from basically all fiction ('tall, dark, handsome' in that order, no romance novel has a short guy, etc.), the fact that height rockets up when nutrition improves - sexual selection likely to be a big factor on that too.
It's nuanced and it's all relative to the average height of the dating population you're in but a few inches can be the difference between some attention and absolutely none.
Yes there other factors but height tends to be a prerequisite before they apply. Odds goes exponentially down based on how far from the mean you are. 5'9" vs. 5'5" is a world of difference.
'Success' is also not Boolean. I know very successful short guys who have had zero success with women.
Talking in blasé terms 'oh it is just one of many factors' is like saying possessing functioning legs is just one of many factors a footballer requires. Or having enough petrol is one of many factors in a car functioning properly. It's true but kind of missing the point.
The really interesting point is why people are so in denial about this fact that is so blatantly obvious.
I suspect it is a mix of those without this issue wanting to think their success was all attributable to their own skills, people not liking the idea that something uncontrollable could screw you so bad, women feeling it is an attack (it isn't at all), those who are shorter but not significantly below the mean having success (though reduced) and thinking it must apply to those shorter than them, etc.
Another interesting thing I have noticed is that short men is one of the few remaining immutable characteristics society allows people to mock openly. "What is she doing with that little squirt" is something I heard from a friend recently without a hint of self-awareness.
But I agree that women are obviously filtering on that.
As an anecdote - one site I was on took a while to publish my height and I started having conversations with women. As soon as it showed one dropped contact and the other said she felt 'no chemistry' after we had basically said hello to each other :)
We men of course have our own biological preferences perhaps equally irrelevant in the modern era, so this isn't a blame thing just an oft denied fact.
Oh and as to Tom Cruise - it is a hilarious kind of example I have heard so many times. The fact that people have to reference those who are monumentally successful in the top .000001% kind of proves the point.
I have had relationships and am engaged to a beautiful woman now so I found a way to work around it but it is near impossible. My short male friends are either single or have made considerable compromises.
It's a factor that is weirdly denied in society too. Nobody wants to hear that an immutable characteristic plays such a role on the male side...
Apple tolerate app store developers as a necessary evil. If they could develop all of their own apps they would.
As with suppliers, as with stores, as with everything they would gladly prefer to do it all themselves and give zero access or share the slightest collaboration with anybody.
They are utterly ruthless in this regard and will continue to be for as long as they exist. This includes doing bad and nasty things as well as those the apologists can more readily rationalise.
I am a little surprised anybody takes risks in this arena. Of course for $$$ apps that trivially fulfil apple's arbitrary rules (for now) the potential payout justifies it but for free/open source apps why risk the pain?
For a company that happily generates colossal margins by using the effectively slave labour of a totalitarian state which puts people in concentration camps and disappears political opponents them being unethical/inconsistent in the app store seems very unsurprising. Even in western countries they happily bankrupt suppliers after poaching all their staff. Yet there appears to be shock when they do things considerably less evil... Strange to me.
I think it's first important to note that Russ Cox himself admitted that the whole go dep vs modules thing was poorly handled which really does back up my point of view - https://twitter.com/_rsc/status/1022588240501661696
> looks like from that thread that the Go team was never on board with certain technical aspects of how dep was implemented.
Note that the package management committee were _regularly_ meeting with Russ about this, e.g. https://twitter.com/_rsc/status/1022588240501661696
They were well apprised of what was going on, I am not sure there was much of an end-run at all - https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893126320771072 - note that Russ was just ignoring the literal package management committee set up to look at this - https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034893509394882562
Look at https://twitter.com/sdboyer/status/1034894397261979649:
'To the extent i was defensive, it was primarily from having to field yet another greenfield idea, after months of silence.'
If the technical lead literally ignores the package management committee set up to look at package management and goes off and does his own thing - what does that say about community engagement?
This is about the largest [officially sanctioned] community engagement on something semi-core to the language and look at what happened.
>I have to admit I'm a bit biased here, I use Go and Go modules, followed closely the discussions at the time, and strongly prefer the trade offs made by the (now official) Go package manager over those made by dep.
I don't even think this is relevant - it's perfectly fine for people to disagree and for Russ to say no, that's his role as BDFL, but to ignore and not engage at all? The committee could have been pushed in the direction Russ preferred rather than going off and doing his own thing. Or perhaps they could have been told 'sorry we have decided to go in another direction so we don't need you any more'.
>They've made almost no changes to the language so far
I was involved in contributing to the compiler in 2011 back when many changes were made both in terms of language, compiler and standard library. When I worked on it the compiler was written in C (!)
So even when that was not true, the attitude was the same (which is what put me off continuing to be involved in the project).
>I believe Russ Cox's check/handle proposal [2] and Robert Griesemer's try proposal [3] (both core team members) were rejected after community feedback.
It's good they listen to community feedback but that's not the same as accepting fundamental or even not that fundamental language or standard library changes.
Other language projects like python for example, have retained a strict attitude to development but had actual community support through small and big changes to both language and library. It is clearly possible to both maintain a strict philosophy AND accept serious patches from the community.
Again I really have no problem with how they approach things but I do have a problem with the dishonesty about that. They should not set up a package management committee then ignore them, or say you'll accept proposals but then only accept core google employee ones.
I think sometimes people will argue back and forth on details but miss the bigger picture - perhaps that's what we're doing here. The culture of a project (not relevant here but also applicable to companies) always percolates down from the top - ruby, python, haskell, for a non language example of course the linux kernel - each have their own culture, attitude and approach that is clearly informed by the founders/core maintainers. The same is clearly true of go.
I look forward to being proven wrong and when a significant standard library or language change occurs (and v2 is where that would have happened clearly) from the community but I don't think it's going to happen.
And again maybe it shouldn't, maybe go is better off run the way it is, but they should be honest - you can't have it both ways, it's one or the other.
>an enormous amount of work that an expert would have to put in for free
Finally - I dislike the gatekeeping idea of an 'expert', especially for a language like go which is so explicitly anti-academic. Surely what should matter is how well argued a proposal is? Unless you mean a go expert but there are plenty in the community who are.
As for enormous amount of work being put in for free, I think many would have loved to have the kudos of being the person who invented generics for go and would have happily done so. The history of open source is replete with people who have done enormous amounts of work for free - gcc for example.
But you could also imagine an employee of some other company being paid to do it, as happens with the linux kernel very often. Again, I really doubt that an 'expert' (however we want to define it) hired by anybody other than google or even as a hobby submitting the exact same proposal would have got the acceptance Ian and Robert have received.
The community will be used as a sounding board no doubt to cover any edge cases they've not thought about but again that's not the same as somebody being able to _submit_ changes like this.
In any case I don't mean to be hostile here - I wish golang every success and it's well deserved, the core team are extremely talented and I hope they go on to greater and greater success.
I'm pretty sure there's been several different proposals for generics. And I seriously doubt anybody external to the go team submitting even an identical draft would be listened to. Lots of discussion documented at https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/ExperienceReports#generics e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vrAy9gMpMoS3uaVphB32uVXX...
Even the tracker issue at https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15292 states 'he intent is not to add generics to Go at this time, but rather to show people what a complete proposal would look like' - does that sound like they're open to an external person proposing it?
I saw it even on a small scale back in 2011, back then I knew the generics thing would be solely implemented by the google guys.
There is clearly a 'not invented here syndrome' going on which is entirely understandable actually for a programming language, I just wish there was more transparency on it.
The second a core language change actually involves a person external to google or the team drop the concept that that could happen I'll withdraw my criticism.
>For people outside if their thinking aligned with core team they will feel welcome and others will feel unwelcome due to high handedness of core team.
No, whether you align or not major contributions are not accepted. See the godep vs. go modules debacle for example.
And again, that's all fine with me, and I can see why they'd operate that way, but they claim not to which is my major beef (and allow people to work very hard at contributing without realising it's not going to get them anywhere).
Most well-known projects operate in the bazaar model and the Go team claim to also but in fact are operating a cathedral.
Either they should say 'nope the BDFL accepts nothing significant except from the go core team' or they should change their ways. You can't have both.
Obviously other languages do manage the balance - eg. python, rust, so it's possible but I totally accept that given go's minimalism and opinionated approach they might not want that. But be honest about it.
And good luck reverting a released kernel buried on a server :) especially once users start relying on e.g. a syscall. You might find that it's not quite as different as you want it to be...