:-( I'm sitting here looking at huge wind turbines out my front window and I absolutely LOVE them. I get to live in a solarpunk future where I can get where I need to without a car, my kids run out the door and play without getting run over, and I can see clean energy being made for my home (and that of my neighbours).

I'm sure a lot of the cranky old people near me don't like them, but they hate everything and go out of their way to find things to complain about, to be honest.

Frankly I feel the same as you. I saw my first wind turbine in Newcastle Australia and was completely blown away & wanted to work in wind energy. I've been to Denmark and seen the Vestas V-164 offshore turbine at the on-shore test facility. The rotor area on the V-164 seems as big as a football field - it's the largest rotating object I've ever seen and my mind could barely understand the scale of it. For me, wind turbines are beautiful. I was called crazy a lot in the Netherlands ;-)

Ah, they’re grumpy by nature, I wouldn’t worry about it too much :-)

With the bike lanes, public transport, solar panels, and wind turbines, it even beats that problematic yogurt commercial…

If you look at the config it's based on karma, comments, submission rate, comment rate (optional), and account age (that is, if you trust it actually uses the config how it says)

There are some high karma accounts which make a great contribution, and others which ... don't. I'm doubtful whether karma or account age has a significant signal beyond anti-spam.

But it would be useful to know if I had up/down voted them significantly in the past.

As if to demonstrate my point, two high karma accounts have down voted my suggestion that karma is meaningful. Naturally they are too craven to enter the field.

The only thing karma reliably indicates is participation over time, the signal is too noisy for anything else. If anything high karma should be a red flag. The very best contributors here rarely comment because they have better things to do. It shows an 8/8 score for me and I doubt anyone would consider me a top tier high quality contributor.

A plugin like HN Comments Owl would be more useful IMHO.

Install the plugin and then load up your profile page, or any page with ac omment from you (like this one)

You have an overall 7 out of 8.

I haven’t used chess, but does it have IAPs?

Not directly, but some features require the Apple Games app which I believe requires an account and does have IAPs.

Because at this rate we'll be lucky to get enough funding and cooperation just to prevent Earth from warming by 4+C, and we need all hands on deck for that.

"For something so core to the business, I'm baffled that they let it get to the point where it was costing $300K per year."

You build something that's a dirty hack but it works, then your company grows, and nobody ever gets around to building it.

I was at a place spending over $4 million a year on redshift basically because someone had slapped together some bad (but effective!) queries when the company was new, and then they grew, and so many things had been built on top they were terrified to touch anything underneath.

This was amazingly common in the 2010s during the Big Data craze. I know, because I was the one slapping the bad queries together.

Most startups didn’t care (to a point) because at that point in their lifecycle, the information they needed to get from those queries (and actions they could take based on it, like which customers were likely to convert and worth spending sales time on, etc) was more important than the money spent on the insane redshift clusters.

The mantra was almost always some version of, “just do it now, as fast as possible, and if we’re still alive in a year we’ll optimize then.”

As much as I tend to agree philosophically, could it not result in people making changes that endanger other road users?

No, one can do that anyway. There is basically no real way to stop folks from modifying their cars. It can be made more difficult, sure.

This is about selling tools and access. It's another profit pipeline for car OEMs.

Perhaps it is also about liability. Otherwise, we would have people installing OpenClaw on their Teslas.

Then why wasn't it a problem before? People have always been able to install aftermarket or possibly even hacked together physical parts. If there was liability you'd expect some sort of shield blocking access to, for example, the hydraulic system for the brakes.

As it turns out though blatant irresponsibility is quite rare (depending on your definition anyway) since people have a strong self interest in not endangering their own lives or wallets. It's similar for homeowners - many states explicitly carve out a requirement that insurance companies cover DIY modifications that are within reason and this generally works out since you have a strong vested interest in not destroying your own house regardless of any insurance policy.

People get killed by changes to exhaust, height (lift kits), bumpers (bull bars in particular), etc pretty often, though. And I can imagine software changes (exhaust is part of that actually) could kill people too.

Maybe you think daytime running lights are stupid and want to disable them for instance.

Sure. Point is nothing has really changed. Largely there's no problem and to the extent that bad things happen it isn't something novel that's only just come up. It's not in and of itself an excuse to erode private ownership. If intervention is required then regulation should be passed deliberately by the legislature.

I dunno, I think there's a big difference between making digital modifications to software vs. making physical modifications to hardware.

The risk profile is very different and non-obvious to your average car owner.

It's the difference between trying to repair your leaky dishwasher vs. trying to repair the electrical panel in your basement.

Well both of those examples could potentially electrocute you or start a fire and both can be done by a homeowner if he feels like it.

I don't disagree that it's a bit different in certain ways but I feel like that's drifting off topic. It shouldn't be up to manufactures to determine these things unilaterally but rather the legislature. Particularly any justification to the contrary rings hollow in this case because there's a very strong conflict of interest.

> Then why wasn't it a problem before?

It is. Thousands of people have died because of aftermarket headlights. Harder to assess, but probably much larger, is the number of excess deaths from nitrous oxide etc. emitted by modified cars.

There are about 3000 deaths per year in Sweden attributed to position from cars, and 300 physical accidents. So it is a really big issue, but it is almost impossible to make people understand that their car use and modification mains people.

Modified cars can release 1000x more polution, on streets with 800 daily cars that will have an affect.

You can ban modifying your car to pollute more (which we do) without banning modifying your car.

This isn't complicated FFS.

The difficulty against this in the US is the unfortunate reality that the people coming to these shops to enable their stupid trucks to roll coal are the people who should technically be raiding and shutting down these companies. This can be fixed.

Physically, you can already modify your car to be controlled by a stupid program and that has been possible since at least the 90s. You can do the supposed harm by not being aware of damage to your exhaust system.

The solution to exhaust harms of ICE engines is electric cars, not a reduction in consumer rights.

The EPA heavily regulates any emissions defeat devices. The problem is they spend most of their time going after tuner shops where most cars run on ethanol rather than diesel shops who cater to brain-damaged customers who think rolling coal is "cool"

In Spain (but I think in every EU country) you must go through legal inspection and certification if you do modify your car. And most of the aftermarket mods people install are totally illegal and would not pass that exam. I mean changes like putting a spoiler, lowering the height from ground etc

I don’t think that’s the reason, seeing as a car is already endangering everyone around it by existing. More likely about keeping the tooling to diagnose issues proprietary and expensive.

Obviously, they are both very good reasons. Just because you don't like one of them, doesn't mean the other one doesn't suddenly exist anymore.

You could screenshot this and put it under the definition of “perfect being the enemy of good”

That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.

Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.

Four 9/11s worth of people die every year from drunk driving. If we can't even get that under control, I don't see why being able to modify your own car is a big deal.

We could do both…

Disabling alertness sensors might worsen drunk driving actually.

Isn't this largely a US problem?

Enforcement is abysmal for stupid reasons. Courts are reluctant to remove the ability for people to drive because America purposely made itself dependent on cars, and cops are reluctant to actually arrest a lot of people for drunk driving because they tend to be buddies, or worse. You can find plentiful examples of off duty officers trying to get out of drunk driving simply by being a cop.

This is what you get when you can vote on the sheriff and judges who insist they are "Tough on crime" because they sentence a dude smoking a joint to years in the joint while ignoring real problems like, you know, murder and theft and violence and all the shit their buddies are doing. The "Tough on crime" people are the ones drunk driving often enough.

I think it was pretty clear I was talking about the United States.

It doesn’t have to be a “big deal” for the powers that be to resolve that you shouldn’t have root access to your iPad on wheels, dude.

Presumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.

The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.

There is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."

Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.

It always intuitively felt to me like there was enough space, but I am now getting the sense that my intuition here has been wrong.

Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?

One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.

I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.

This is the small solace I take when it comes to climate change reducing arable land - almost all of our crops are grown to supply a luxury product (meat), so if we need to, presumably we could just eat the grains we grow directly, instead of turning them in to animals first.

I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.

I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?

We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.

But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.

I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.

And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.

I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.

If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.

AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.

FWIW this isn't even remotely close to what I was thinking - I definitely had no notions of AGI or 3d printing involved. You can do a lot with hand tools if you have plenty of time and a forgiving environment (access to water and trees for timber).

Very true, and I worry that as the planet heats many of those billions will die

Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.

Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.

So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.

Sure, but there might not be enough jobs for them to command the economic power that allows something better.

Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.

They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.

So far, as sideloaded APKs on my tablet. Most recently one that makes it easier to learn Dutch and quiz myself based on captions from tv shows

Classic HN comment: ignore the article and respond directly to its title

Well I read the article discussing pypi packages but I think for a lot of people it’s more single use tools. My little apks are ugly and buggy but work for me

This happens every time non-technical users get their hands on technical tools.

Just go look at some HyperCard compilation CD: all stacks were horrible, ugly and buggy, but if the author massaged them the right way, they kind of worked, held by spit and prayers. "How to sit people at my wedding" type of garbage. The only good quality HC stacks were the demo ones that came with the program, made by professional developers and graphic designers working at Apple. In the decade HC was a product, maybe 15 high quality stacks emerged.

Same with the horrible mess that "users" manage to cobble together if you give them access to Office(TM) macros. Users don't seem to know about Normal Forms when they begin to create tables in Access. The horror.

An education in Computer Science is necessary when systems have to interact reliably. One-off "I vibe coded a dashboard for my smart watch" are in the same category as Visual Basic with the server paths hardcoded all over, breaking on empty directories and if two PCs happen to run the same macro, then half of the files in some shared directory get wiped for good. You are welcome.

Well, I've been a software developer for 15 years (and cut my teeth on BASIC well before that...) but sometimes I just need something quick and dirty that works. Most people do, actually. And I no longer give a crap about Beautiful Code when I actually just want "like Anki but it let's me watch tv in between quizzing me and I'll delete it when I'm fluent"

You are welcome.