magnuspaaske

Even if you go back to using react it's still useful and fun to read about how people can implement things like virtual doms to get an idea about what's happening under the hood. From there it's easier to figure out if react is the best choice or other choices might be better.

From there one big question is if everything needs to be dynamic or not. You often have menus and navigation that you don't need a framework for and that even something like jQuery is well suited for. On the other hand a framework would probably slow things down for the writing experience in Obsidian, which is the main draw for me to use Obsidian. Once the writing module is written from scratch, it won't seem like such a big lift to also do all the navigation and controls by hand.

That doesn't mean this is the right way for everyone. A lot of times the speed to releasing new features is more important, while the handicraft of the UI/UX is less important and in those cases using a framework is absolutely the right choice.

I think the difference with earlier UI redesigns is that the supposed benefit of liquid glass is the whole opacity thing, where several things are laid on top of each other while trying to show what's underneath. That just creates a much more messy interface, making it harder to see what's going on since they've dropped UI-classics like using contrast to make text readable. That's also why the setting to tune down liquid glass is found in accessibility and not, say, display preferences.

I'm a bit too old to have been privvy to any Win XP design backlash, but I think the more apt comparison is with Windows Vista, where transparency was also a major part of the design philosophy (usability be damned). We have pretty good ideas about what makes a good UI/UX and none of those ideas involve using transparency to make readability worse while also not really making what's under the half-transparent element visible or readable.

There was also an article in Wired about this and I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple. It's annoying to see apps adapt to the new design, making a lot of the navigation in the top and the bottom worse (and great to see a couple of holdouts like Bluesky). A design philosophy where the full width of the screen is used is pretty good, not sure we needed Apple to prove it with a counter example.

Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is where innovation happens!!"

There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).

It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.

The problem with counterfeiting dollars is that it only works until the design is changed and it's hard to transfer your capabilities. On the other hand hacking is convenient since it can be use for political leverage, espionage and similar.

In Denmark the electricity price is calculated per hour for consumers, allowing us to move tumble drying, dishwashing and laundry to times, when it's cheaper to use power (= more renewable energy in the grid). This obviously requires some digital solutions to work and I think it's a great example where digitalization drives value in other sectors (in this case the power sector).

The food is still microwaved on the ICE and presumably in other countries too, but the presentation is fantastic. The experience of eating in a proper restaurant while seeing the landscape roll by is amazing and while not all services need a restaurant or can support one I don't expect restaurants to go away. More automation might mean more people can work on the presentation of the food while the kitchen can take up less space which should overall improve the economics of the onboard eating experience.

I think this is right. I don't have a car but I rent cars periodically and pick based on the UX more than the "tech" features. Most EVs are fast enough and have enough range that it doesn't really make a difference to the driving experience but the UX and all the screens do make a difference.

I like the Audi E-tron because I can mostly ignore or turn off the center screen and have everything important in front of me behind the wheel. The center screen on the Polestar 2 is a bit more pronounced but can be muted when switching to the music screen. Teslas and VW EVs have way to much happening in the center screen so I avoid those. It's sad to see Volvo go down the same path but a correction should be in order.

Anyways, all the tech is commoditised so you need something else to differentiate yourself. For me that's not a big center display to show how "tech forward" you are, as it ends up suggesting you're anything but.

It might have helped that the Nordics were pretty advanced with developing mobile networks and mobile network technology. There was also SonyEricson in the region and it kind of makes sense that companies making network technology would also make handsets in the early innings and only later would people realise those are actually two different skillsets and market and need different companies.

The beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of device and then people would get used to the smart features later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading news on the go were great use cases though

Not really, there's a real cost of ownership for real estate that is more expensive than for owning stock in a company for instance. You still need a place to live and owning can be great for that – as to being a landlord there might still be better ways to make a return.

But the real problem with real estate "investment" is that the return doesn't come from doing something productive but rather is predicated on preventing someone else from doing something productive, namely making more buildings.

The problem with that framing is that those big companies aren't just responding to consumer demand but have also actively lobbied for policies that create said demand. For instance shipping companies pay a much lower corporate tax rate than other companies and car companies have lobbied against everything from efficiency and clear air regulation to creating alternatives to a car-first transportation system. Oil companies are in a league of themselves and we're only starting to see shenanigans they've done to stall dealing with climate change.

That's how most electric cars are set up already

This is the wrong way to think about it since there's little that suggests AV-taxis also need to be larger than the cars already on the road. When I'm renting a car or taking a taxi I know exactly what my needs are and can decide to not pay for luggage space if I don't need that for instance. Further you can just put a smaller battery in AV-taxis since you can optimise the charging schedule. And lastly, when we've gotten rid of air pollution from tailpipe emissions air pollution from tires would be the next problem to fix and it intuitively seems that all electric, digital cars could have their pollution reduced via a software update.

And obviously the technology making these cars possible also make self driving busses possible, which would allow new ways for urban mobility.

This is part of the training where I work. Some places even let people know to be careful when updating Linkedin, exactly because people are stalking it to find new people to lure into some ruse

The problem is that in this case there's an extraordinarily lucrative opportunity for anyone willing to take it, meaning even if most people would see this and think "I don't want to be that person" there'll still be people who will do this line of work, regardless how immoral it might be

Also, the "cheap plastic" thing is clearly said by someone who don't know plastic. NASA included a bunch of pieces on one of their Mars crafts to check the cameras since they knew the parameters of the LEGO pieces losing their color better than the cameras. LEGOs are durable.

Also, even if the unit cost of injection molding plastic might not be super high, the cost of making the molds is. I've heard discarded molds are used in the concrete for new buildings as a way to know where they are and ensure they're not suddenly in the wrong hands (although that might be a rumor)

As with anything else it depends what you optimise for and at the most basic level the car uses the engines to accelerate at all speeds but might need to use break pads at slow speeds.

In Scandinavia the attitude is "there's no bad weather, only bad clothing" and going outside and feeling the seasons change is awesome. I find it kind of funny when people in Florida or California will have all this great weather but then end up spending so much time in indoor climate controlled environments from their house to their car to their office.

The weather in the Northern Europe really doesn't stop you from being outside any more than the weather elsewhere does (counting forest fires and hurricanes as things that'll keep you indoors).

One thing that seems to connect some of these are how they play to being outsiders and for people who otherwise can't get in. The best place to set up a fintech company in Europe is obviously London and if you wanna start up in Munich there's a lot of car industry around to service. But for (fintech) fraud Munich is pretty good, partially because there's less employee overlap with legitimate business for you and the regulators are not really set up to catch you (the way they would be in London). The investors in Theranos were also largely people on the sidelines of VC and the Madoff investors were people who would have a hard time getting into legitimate hedge funds

In many ways a toxic work environment seems great when committing fraud. People don't develop the kind of bonds that it would take for them to otherwise expose the fraud together and you have a lot of opportunities for misdirection

Which ... why do you think we have GDPR? Data privacy to Germans is what the second amendment is to Americans, a defence against tyranny

With electric cars you're mostly looking at a cost curve at this point. The cars have proven they're competitive in a range of market segments and that advantage will be built out in the coming years, either from optimising the current battery tech or inventing new stuff. This is true for most overland transportation as we're also seeing batteries in trucks, trains, busses and trams.

This is not true for planes and helicopters yet. We're still not at the point where the planes carrying the bulk of passengers (100-200 seats, 1000-4000 km) can be electrified, even with no budget constraints. We're starting to see concepts for smaller planes and that's obviously a good start but there's still some ways to go – better batteries could make a big difference here as it might allow electrification of planes that wouldn't previously been possible. After that we obviously still need to get the costs down, but that generally comes with scaling.

I rented an Audi and this was my experience too. It ended up working out really well to use the car navigation system and I still had car play right there for carplay and phone calls. And for navigation stuff you can still load up google or apple maps if you need to double check the route since they sometimes have different traffic information. But most of the time you don't need to

Anyone looking seriously at reducing the emissions from their steaks will over time realise that just eating less beef is easier. There's something kind of amazing about how the cattle industry tries to greenwash itself, since all it really does is remind the rest of us that we can also just live without them.

One of the things that make bike culture stick is that most bikes are just really cheap those places. On one hand this means they're protected relatively less and so would be rather easy to pick up, on the other it means no one bothers organising a theft ring as the returns are too low. Fancy bikes are something completely different and would attract another level of organised crime.

Yes. I read the article and thought, no shit. Given that most people ride cheap bikes it doesn't really make sense to transport them to somewhere else and it might just incur additional operational risk. Much easier to just resell them back into the same city.

Which also explains why the 2K electric bike is taken somewhere else – if you tried to sell it in the same town there's higher chances the owners find out about it (like from a Facebook posting) and involve the police. Understanding that the police don't work super well across district lines seems to have solved this problem for the thieves here (and created problems for everyone else instead).

All the things people dislike about Airbnb comes down to hosts not being able to leverage economics of scale for their rentals in any coherent way. Typically hosts will manage a bunch of places across town and so a late or early checkout could easily see them have to redo their logistics plans for the whole day. On the other hand hotels get more efficient with scale since the reception is there 24/7 anyways and they can just make a not that certain rooms need to be cleaned a bit later and the cleaning staff is never too far away.

The article makes a lot of bold claims of the energy transition happening faster than otherwise and then mostly ignore all the context that kind of goes against the point. The most egregious example of this is saying coal has been in a secular decline for 8 years but somehow a 1.2% increase in coal use last year lead to a record – for most people that would suggest that coal use has plateaued and is not in fact decreasing as the article would otherwise want you to believe.

Elsewhere it mentions 90% of new generating capacity will be renewable over the next years, but that also kind of ignores that there'll still be 10% not renewable capacity coming online and, oh yeah, India might also have new coal plants coming online in the years ahead.

This is pretty important when considering that coal is still the most common source of electricity but also that electricity is only a part of our energy needs – switching to electrified transportation, industry and heating systems will all create more demand for electricity. Seeing as we want to phase out coal we would need renewable energy to account for more than 100% of net new production and we haven't even reached that.

Even with all the speedup in the green transition happening over the past few years it still doesn't happen at close to the speed needed – in fact we're not even close to seeing the end of coal regardless of everything going on.

Seeing as Apple sometimes release patch updates to previous iOS versions (as they've done with iOS 15 just this year) suggests they take security somewhat seriously. Jailbreaking them would have some interesting security implications, especially as it relates to distributing apps via the App Store. The easiest way out of this remains to just buy a new phone and recycle the old one.