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FBI concludes Trump's would-be assassin acted alone during rally shooting (vechron.com)
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Do people actually believe that was a real assasination attempt? What a joke lol
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So you believe the shooter aimed at his ear?
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In other words, it was impossible to spin this as a liberal doing it
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The FBI under Kash Patel is not trusted to tell the American people the truth. They have lost all credibility
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Trump orchestrated it and his FBI is now covering it up.
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There is some dark irony in the fact that the guy with last name Patel covers up racist Trump.
Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter (reuters.com)
They were taking up way too much attention and drama. Trump doesn't like that. Also politics got in the way of making any real savings. It's main legacy will be of dismantling much of the progressive infrastructure of the federal government. It's a pity because the deficit is very high. The current rationalisation is that tarriffs and a 2% yearly growth will cut the deficit to zero by the 2030s. That prediction is.... very optimistic.
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TSLA stock looking good again today. That's all I'll say about last June.
These people stole all the DBs and stored them on insecure systems and in the cloud. I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President. A lot of people need to serve long prison sentences and these guys are prime candidates.
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> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President I am not expecting the Democrats, at least as they are now, to pursue justice regarding the schemers and criminals in this administration. They are far more interested in preserving power structures and the tiered justice system than even the easy political win inherent in holding their enemies to account. Expect the rhetoric to rapidly shift to "moving forward" and "Trump was an exception, other Republicans are totally reasonable coworkers."
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> I am expecting all these individuals or connected individuals to immediately be seized and jailed by an Executive Order from the next Democrat President. Democrats broadly lack the spine necessary for this. But regardless, this is also illegal. Despite the actions of the current administration, an EO to snatch people off the street and jail them would violate the 4th amendment.
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Eh, the EO would just have to direct the justice department to look into pursuing criminal charges against the people.
The shitty lesson here is that this crime will never be remembered as a crime, but as a missed opportunity. This will mean it will happen again. The people that perpetrated this will learn they can attempt more of this without consequence, and then slither back to silicon valley and be high-fived by the meritocracy bros. Oh, the irony.
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I reckon liberal democracy on the US was toast when a losing presidential candidate attempted three routes to a coup and wasn’t in jail awaiting trial for any of them a year after it happened. You can’t give authoritarians do-overs. If they don’t do it, the next one, emboldened by the total lack of consequences, will.
DOGE represents all the worst aspects of startup culture. These guys saw all the existing expertise in the federal government as lazy, stupid, old-fashioned, and wasteful, and they thought that they were basically supermen - smarter, harder working, infused with AI superpowers. So they ripped up institutions that have been built at great public cost over generations. These institutions deal with incredibly complex real-world problems. But the DOGE people thought that with AI they could make better decisions in a few seconds than people with decades of experience. The results were pretty much what you would expect. Much of what they trashed was valuable, even lifesaving. (USAID is the prime example). Destroying it saved the US government a relative pittance (the US government spent more money in 2025 than 2024) but the human cost was enormous. Imagine being a young political leader in a developing country. You've grown up thinking favorably about the US because of the positive engagement we've made with your country - not just humanitarian aid, but also elites in your country have gone to school in the US and felt welcomed here. Now, you've just seen that the US will abandon all its promises to you in a heartbeat and leave your country with a humanitarian catastrophe. Why would you ever see the US favorably? Or imagine that you're a small business owner who provided some valuable product or service to the US government. You've made business plans based on the understanding that the US government is a reliable customer. Then an AI told a 23 year old with no experience in your field that your contract was wasteful. The DOGE guys will move on to other cushy startup jobs. They'll make a ton of money in their careers. The rest of us will be left to deal with the fallout.
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This has been everyone else's experience of the Trump regime, as well. Here in Australia we've been "America's Poodle" for generations, enthusiastically joined in on every war and bizarre colonial adventure that the USA has started. And then we get slapped with tariffs and insulted by the President. Our politicians are slowly grappling with the new reality that the USA is not our friend and ally any more. Europe has a similar experience. No longer is the West "shoulder to shoulder" fighting the authoritarian regimes and defending shared values. Suddenly Europe is not an ally, possibly an economic enemy, and is being insulted by the President. The damage that the last 9 months have done to the USA's standing with the rest of the world is unbelievable. As has been said before; Trump may not be a Russian agent, but it's hard to see what a Russian agent would have done differently. And that includes DOGE - ripping up government institutions that have taken decades to build is not a productive measure, it's destructive. It's what the USA's enemies would do to it if they could.
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The halfway competent folks in the US realize that this has happened, and that the repercussions will last for a decade or more. Regaining international trust, and all the privileges that came with it, will not be easy or pleasant. I fear that it may not be possible, if China steps up too quickly. Many people make an analogy to Brexit, where a democracy intentionally commits economic and political suicide. I fear the impact on the US will be far worse than Brexit's impact on the UK.
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Which is why we need to get a list of names of all the DOGE guys. There wasn't many of them.
This was all incredibly illegal and anyone involved in this should see the inside of a cell for a very long time. E: if you disagree with me, you need to familiarize yourself with congressional budget allocation, the impoundment act, and federal data privacy laws. DOGE did not have the unilateral authority to do basically anything it tried to do and we have yet to hold anyone accountable for trying to subvert the will of the people.
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One of the random 19-year-olds they hired (whose nickname is "BigBalls") previously worked selling VPN services to a cybercriminal group ("the Com") whose activities involved extorting children for CSAM and then blackmailing them into committing suicide on livestream. So, there's more to go after if anyone cares to.
That’s effectively the entire executive branch in this administration: take illegal actions until the courts stop us, and then do it some more.
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It’s a reverse FDR with waaaaaay less public support.
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FDR threatened to do this, but in fact Congress gave him everything he wanted. Not even “gave” as in “didn’t stop him” (like the current one). They wrote and passed the policy he requested.
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Yeah, the “crazy-high popularity” thing enables that. Failing to even win a majority of voters… less so. But yeah, FDR did a hell of a lot less actual law-breaking.
Isn't it the ultimate task for any good efficiency routine to delete itself?
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It's just a shame it wasn't the first line of code.
And yet the USG has spent $400B more since DOGE, not $2T less . How's that "efficient"?
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It’ll be very surprising if DOGE per se didn’t cost money, rather than save it, by the time lawsuits and extra costs incurred by their interrupting things that shouldn’t have been interrupted are accounted for.
I knew some people that were initially very optimistic, and I tried to keep an open mind when DOGE got started despite the outlandish claims that they would be able to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, but it's apparent at this point that the project has been an extreme failure. It'll probably take a few years to really sort out their damage and overall impact though. It's also imperative to mention in every DOGE-related discussion and conversation that the funding freeze to USAID is directly responsible for killing thousands of people [0]. Most of the damage done by DOGE can probably be reversed, but the thousands of death as a direct result of actions taken by the richest man in the world should not be forgotten. (Although I'm told there is a bit of uncertainty with any specific figures because the funding disruption also impacted the mechanisms for tracking and reporting deaths.) [0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-shutdown-of-usaid-has-already-killed-hundreds-of-thousands
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I work @ the nih, formerly at the cdc... can I politely ask why they were optimistic? When I first started seeing rumblings about this a year ago, my first thought was "the deficit is entitlement spending; this is a political problem, not a bureaucratic one". Anyways, like you, I genuinely wish the DOGEsters would have asked us what we thought was inefficient about gov work. I have been in many meetings where 90% of it was spent complaining about compliance. I personally hate the USAJOBS system. Like any big company, there's a lot that can be improved. Instead, they went scorched-Earth and assumed we were all deep state leeches. Elon acted like he had just done a leveraged buyout of the US government. For me, he remains the most embarrassing man on Earth.
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Agreed, anyone who just glanced at federal budget would know, it's Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Defense. Touching anything else is just tinkering at edges.
Any “we’re going to fix waste in the government and reduce the deficit” project that doesn’t lead with “… so first we’re going to review the last twenty years of recommendations from the CBO and GAO and start implementing what they say or imply we should do to meet those goals” is almost certainly bullshit. Being optimistic about this one was one of those “having a mind so open your brain falls out” sorts of things.
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Yep. There’s an entire catalog already built of deeply researched inefficiencies in the government. What a shame that DOGE burned a huge portion of this generation’s willingness to take a bold approach to said inefficiencies. Similar efforts will be tainted for years.
No, it wasn't clear. I know several Trump voters who either didn't know Project 2025 existed or believed the lies that it was a liberal hoax. To anyone paying an ounce of attention, yeah it might have been clear.
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I think you're missing the point: it was the purpose all along, they just didn't state that. "Several Trump voters"? And, and not just Trump voters - the most common search phrase on Google on 11/20/2024? "Did Biden drop out?" You have far more faith in an educated electorate than I.
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I know people who didn’t know the government had shut down until more than two weeks into it (and on discovering it were like “oh shit this might affect us!” because their whole lifestyle depends on money from the government). The same people didn’t know the east wing had been torn down until a couple weeks after it happened. In both cases they only found out when my wife told them. They pay attention to lots of “news” but it’s AI videos of mass crimes and viral “look how bad democrats are” garbage. That people are dense motherfuckers (can we stop sugar coating how stupid these people are if they’re surprised about any of these things? I mean dumb as a bag of hammers kinds of dumb, dimmest bulb in a box of broken bulbs, that level of dumb) doesn’t mean this wasn’t clear. It is 100% these morons’ own fault they’re surprised.
I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc. People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.
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I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem. It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem. Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.
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All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.
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> Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. Maybe or maybe not. What I do know is that they are large in number and a political opponent should realize this and strategize accordingly.
Did they revoke credentials on their way out the door, or is there now just a squadron of elon’s minions who have keys to federal gov systems?
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You give them too much credit if you even suspect them of doing the right thing. You can't expect them to just give up an avenue to such an unfair advantage, no matter how illegal it is. Their wealth and power is incompatible with ethics and legality. I mean, what else do you expect from a guy who so insensitivity mocked and laughed on TV at the misery and suffering that he inflicted on the ordinary people? Besides, who is gatekeping their access to the federal systems now? They fired everybody who tried to resist. Let me get into a conspiratorial territory now. I have a feeling that the access to those systems are not limited to just this wannabe-Nazi and his minions. I suspect that some very hostile and clandestine elements like Palantir might have integrated into it. I don't have serious evidences to back up any of these. But a lot of people are discussing this now. These aren't even secret plots. These tech bro billionaires have been publicly expressing their contempt and disdain for ordinary people and democracy for nearly two decades now. They had been publicly endorsing and promiting tech authoritarianism. Much like the Project 2025, they had been outlining their plans too (though less publicized), that they're following to the dot now. Crimes come with a user manual these days, it seems! They salivate over a tech dystopia like in the Dredd comics. What lends credibility to this is their publicly conspicuous cooperation, that's less likely under normal circumstances. All these are why I always say that 'I have nothing to hide' is a terrible argument against personal privacy. Anyways, just assume that your past and future confidential information is entirely compromised by some very nefarious elements that are openly hostile at you.
ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through CG-NAT: Cloudflare (theregister.com)
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The same applies to us rich folk on mobile. Not sure what the point of this article is.
They need to come up with an ip solution that is useful enough that people actually want to upgrade to it. When you compare it to other technologies like https, tls1.3, unicode, 5g cellular, wifi 6, wifi 5 or bluetooth versions, etc. It’s clear that ipv6 adoption is not what it should be if they launched a protocol with clearer benefits to the end user.
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It's the Internet protocol. End users are not supposed to interact with it directly. What exactly would replace IPv6? It's just an implementation detail, but an important one if you want to make the rest of the stack suck less.
> Because CGNAT is more prominent, and more heavily used, in Africa and Asia […] Isn’t essentially the entire US on CG-NAT for IPv4 on mobile data? I’ve also had DOCSIS connections, i.e., fixed lines, with only CG-NAT in Europe years ago.
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For those of us who don't have many options other than satellite internet, it generally uses CG-NAT, specifically Starlink.
I wonder if that's not very visible in Cloudflare's data because those mobile devices will likely use IPv6 to connect to Cloudflare-hosted sites.
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That’s what I was thinking. Anyone coming from Cloudflare will end up getting there via IPv6.
X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run (hindustantimes.com)
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This is happening all over US social media, even here. If you ever wonder why US hatred has permeated modern culture, this is why.
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Related: X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417 Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211
Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1 and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
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See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974383
This reminds me of WeChat doing similar things a few years ago: Tencent's WeChat to reveal user locations on public account posts. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tencents-wechat-reveal-user-locations-platform-posts-2022-04-29/
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Wechat does not reveal "user location", it only applies to "public account". It's not what you'd imagine for an "account", it's more like an "news feed" where org can publish articles. However if you comment on those articles, your provincial location would be attached. the Cyber Admin of CCP mandates every app to reveal the provincial location for author and commenter.
That is a doctored image according to both DHS and X's head of product. What kind of information bubble are you in?
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Looks like you’re right: https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
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I would suspect they are deducing country of origin via ad targeting, which is far more precise than just geolocating IP addresses.
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Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
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You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
Residential VPNs are already so cheap.
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Exactly how anyone still scraping Twitter does it. Dirt cheap. Same with accounts to use to get around api limits.
You can use X through your web browser, avoiding the app store.
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You can but a lot of people use their phone and the official apps. It also shows if you primarily use a browser. :)
For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.
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Many of those people have moved to Bluesky. Which has its own issues.
Have you met most 20 something girls? They’ll be on insta because it has even better colors, but some do hang out on X. Also, strippers do actually like dudes sometimes. Not me, of course, but a buddy of mine almost married one. Until she almost killed him trying to stab him in the crotch because she thought he was going to cheat on her.
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Do you realise how patronising it is to say that girls like Instagram because it has better colours? I'm kind of shocked to see this take on HN.
> What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion? They’re grifters; their interest in American politics is commercial. Indians were targeting Trump supporters with fake news for ad revenue as early as 2015; this is a continuation of that model.
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It was so successful that they took over the FBI.
It would be silly if the Russians weren't stirring shit up in the enemy camp. That's what the Russians do. It's too difficult to improve their own country, their own lives, and their own prospects, so they focus on the next-best strategy for the acquisition of power, which is dragging everybody else down to their level.
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It wouldn't be difficult to improve Russia. Just the kelptocracy makes it impossible. "Why go to the moon when we have craters (potholes) here in samara" -some kid on tiktok.
I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)
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I'll try with a Simpsons analogy: > Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose > Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake. Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.
I'm not author of parent. My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth. If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception. I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
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The number of otherwise intelligent folks I follow on twitter who occasionally brag or make note of their follower count without realizing 80%+ are bots is way too high. I think that's by design though. Tolerate bots to get high-value users to participate more after they think real people are actually listening to them.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect after nearly 2 centuries (phys.org)
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> To quantify this influence, the team applied their model to Terbium Gallium Garnet (TGG), a crystal widely used to measure the Faraday effect. They found that the magnetic field of light accounts for about 17% of the observed rotation at visible wavelengths and up to 70% in the infrared range. Nearly 20% seems already significant, but 70%?! that's massive.
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We intuitively think in particles and see a world of billiard balls colliding with one another. But actually everything is merely waves and fields. There's going to be a time where humans finally reconcile the quantum with the newtonian -- and I can't wait for that day
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> But actually everything is merely waves and fields. The two-slit experiment says otherwise.
A desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development (github.com/coder)
I'm using conductor.build and running both Claude Code and Codex. It's taken 95% of my workflow and I'm loving it (I'm not affiliated with them at all, genuinely enjoying it and hoping it succeed)
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Same here. Codex support is a recent addition however, and it’s not clear if MCP servers and other rules apply to Codex. Also it would be nice to be able to just have a session working on the main branch as concurrent work in worktrees can get messy
Something I never see mention is that all agents / CLI tools seem to modify local files. Which makes editing current files, working with the git, asking to only modify some parts of the files etc. cumbersome, as the agent is constantly reading and writing to files that we are also accessing. This is usually solved by using git worktree but this solution requires 1 new folder name and branch for each new agent, and each folder will have its own unique name and others issues. While it can be super powerful, I wish there was a quicker "in memory" agent solution where each agent keeps in its own RAM the list of files modifications ("patch") it recommends to apply to solve current issue. Then we could apply that patch depending on what we're doing, if we have others patches to apply before etc. Also even if agents can work in parallel, sometimes we only have 1 of them in front of us and if we already know what's the next thing we're gonna ask, we'll still wait for the previous task to be completed before sending the new prompt. I'm not sure how to improve this async problem, I guess I could launch multiple agents in parallel but I wouldn't get sharing of the chat history between the different agents, and when I work I usually work on related issues that depend on each others, thus I do need some kind of global or shared context between agents analyzing codebases and creating patches. Anyone has ideas over how to improve those AI coding agents workflows ? Maybe latest versions of GitButler https://gitbutler.com/ but I'm not sure, and it does use git worktree behind the hood
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Given that all of these agents are written in javascript I have always wondered why they cannot simply use https://isomorphic-git.org/ and do everything in memory.
Docker is very heavy and more for Linux, I'm on macOS and Windows for desktop software development and can't put my software to test inside Docker. But yeah I could have sandboxes inside macOS and inside Windows (virtualization, VMs, WSL etc.), I'd still need one main orchestrating agent + GUI to rule them all
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Not 100% sure it will solve your complaints about Docker, but https://OrbStack.com makes working w/ docker, docker-compose, linux vms, and k8s so much better.
Iowa City made its buses free. traffic cleared, and so did the air (nytimes.com)
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The article is dishonest. A better title would be: "Making transit free in Iowa City did not significantly increase the ridership (just 18% over the 2019 level), while imposing more taxes on everyone". They claim to have removed 5200 cars, out of area of 500000 people ("Iowa City-Cedar Rapids statistical region"). The increase is pitiful, from 6.7% of people using transit to 7.2% with the rest being car commutes. Neither has it "cleared the traffic". Iowa City is also a well-run city, with just a 17-minute average commute time, indicating that it has no congestion to speak of.
This is one of those NYTimes "solutions journalism" pieces meant to celebrate the program rather than truly analyze it. You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. The minute you push on one, second-order effects pop up somewhere else. It is a classic wicked problem: solving it literally changes the problem. Big-city transit has an equilibrium point, and it is incredibly stable. Every serious transit city in the world ends up in the same place: charge fares, subsidize low-income riders, and fund the system with taxes. That equilibrium is stable for a reason. Every major city that tries free transit at scale will eventually snap back to it, because it is the only configuration that does not implode under feedback loops. It keeps demand reasonable, service reliable, and the politics tolerable.
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It didn't work out well when the NYC MTA tried fare free rides. https://www.mta.info/document/147096 Dwell time and customer journey time decreased. The bus speeds were lower on the fare free routes. If public transport provides value to people, they should pay for some of it. 30 day unlimited ride pass in only $132.
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I mostly agree. > You can pick free, or scalable, or financially sustainable (and without sustainability, a political shift will kill it), but you cannot have all three at once. Real polities are of finite size, so you don't need (infinitely) scalable. Here in Singapore we could sustainably afford to make public transport free, if we wanted to. However I agree with you that charging for public transport is the right thing to do. (And to charge users of government provided services in general for everything, and to give poor people money.) If nothing else, you at least want to charge for congestion at peak hours, so that there's always an epsilon of capacity left even at rush hour, so any single person who wants to board the train at prevailing prices can do so.
San Francisco's Muni (light rail + bus) system has a budget of about $1.2B and its ticket revenues are about $200M. That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. Surely a city with a budget of $15B can find $200M (about 1.5% of budget) to make up for the shortfall? It would directly help the taxpayers of the City. But obviously nobody wants that (sarcasm)! Example: the City has been trying to get rid of the RVs parked illegally on the streets, dumping their effluents and engine oil all over the City streets. To get these RVs off the streets, the City is spending $36M+ (and counting). So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.
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The net revenue would be lower than $200M. There are substantial costs associated with ticket revenue collection, from the % payment gateways charge, the maintenance and replacement cost the devices and turnstiles hardware, all the software and people who have to manage and enforce the system. The issue with SF (unlike Iowa city) is that free for all everybody is going to be harder sell to voters when there is large amount of out of city traffic -travelers and greater Bay Area residents who do not pay city taxes. What is more realistic is extend subsidies to all residents of the city beyond the current programs for youth/seniors/homeless/low income etc.
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> That means, 5/6th of the budget is subsidized by the taxpayers of SF. There is no reason why Muni can't be free. You'd still want to charge for congestion. Ie when a particular bus (or rather bus route) is reliably full at a particular time of the day, gradually raise prices until it's just below capacity. Basically, you want to transport the maximum number of passengers while making it so that any single person who wants to get on the bus (at prevailing prices) still can. Instead of a bespoke dynamic system that adjust prices dynamically, you might want to keep it simple and just have a simple peak / off-peak distinction.
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Oh, hear me out, add more buses so that those people don’t have to get into a car and create traffic.
Without nominal costs, buses turn into mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. It’s the same story as what happens with libraries.
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I take the bus a lot in DC. People get on without paying all the time. If someone just wants to sit on the bus, the fee is not what's stopping them.
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You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place. And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
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I see a lot of homeless people on the 14 and they’re just chilling going from place to place. 38 however can have some very mentally ill people on it. My friend saw this guy on the 38 who was yelling about how much he hates the Japanese. Funny enough that guy got off at Japantown. Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
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> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society. I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s. That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now.
You think it's presence of a fare that prevents homeless people from getting on a bus?? Even the light rail has ways to get on without paying, and the homeless know them.
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You can have enforcers kicking people out?
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I’ve only seen them do this once in my 18 months living in the city.
Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody? I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free. Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
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Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things). It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
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It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem. You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely. Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
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I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters. This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
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> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody? Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in? (I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
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Just New York City. The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute. There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay. And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going. So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
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What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment. Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
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I can't tell if you're feigning not realizing the thread about San Francisco under a post referencing "Iowa City" is probably referring to the US. Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
Iowa city is a gem of a college town. Beautiful, vibrant and really nice people. Maybe this program wouldn't work everywhere. Makes sense it would work there.
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Corvallis, Oregon is another college town where buses are free within the city and also to some other cities including Eugene and McMinnville.
What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too. Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
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> What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too. Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other). Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.
Isn't most public transit already subsidized?
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Yes. 1 cent per passenger mile. Transit gets $2.39 per passenger mile. https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22027 Also look up the Farebox Recovery Ratio. There are values for many US cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_States
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Yes, but with fewer dollars than roads.
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Not nearly as much as cars and highways are subsidized. Strong Towns talks quite a bit about how especially suburban roads are not financially sustainable.
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Very much so. When I was younger I assumed fares were for the cost of the public transport, but after following some local budgeting discussions I was stunned by how little the fares covered operating costs. Small amounts of cost sharing are a useful technique for incentivizing people to make wise decisions in general, so there’s some value in having token small fares. It’s the same difference that shows up when you list something for $10 in your local classifieds as opposed to listing it as FREE. Most people who use classifieds learn early on that listing things for free is just asking for people to waste your time, but listing for any price at all seems to make people care a little more and put some thought into their decisions. I’ve often given things away for free after listing them for small amounts in classifieds because it filters for people who are less likely to waste your time.
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Fares income isn't insubstantial -- just as an example I'm familiar with, King County Metro (Seattle area) was ~33% funded by fares before Covid (which destroyed both ridership and percent non-stealing riders). It is material; not "token."
Perhaps, but with more transit options that means fewer people on the road which is good for those who have 2+ children to lug around. On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer.
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> On a side note we should drop the public bit of this because it implies a bus is “publicly funded” but highways aren’t. Both are subsidized by the taxpayer. Arguably, neither of them should be. Give poor people money, instead of giving free highway access (and bus transit) to rich and poor alike. Rich people don't need our help, and poor people would rather have the money to spend as they wish instead of other people deciding for them what alms they should consume. Individual cars have worse externalities than busses, so that means we should tax them more than busses. Though I suspect once drivers of cars and busses are paying non-subsidised prices for road access and fuel, busses will naturally look better in comparison, no extra tax differential needed.
Actually, it was, given that many right wingers who benefit from a sense of unease from existing in society boosted the video to make it seem like more than an a random act of crime, done by a schizophrenic man who wasn't treated properly. > [The suspect's] mother told ABC News that [the suspect] was diagnosed with schizophrenia [...] and displayed violent behavior at home. His mother said that she had sought involuntary commitment, but that it was denied. > Elon Musk criticized judges and district attorneys for allowing "criminals to roam free". > U.S. President Donald Trump called the attacker a "madman" and "lunatic", and said that "when you have horrible killings, you have to take horrible actions. And the actions that we take are nothing", before blaming local officials in places like Chicago for failing to stop crime and denounced cashless bail. > On the same day, the White House released a statement criticizing "North Carolina's Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges" for "prioritizing woke agendas that fail to protect their citizens". > On September 9, the White House released a video in which Trump said that Zarutska was "slaughtered by a deranged monster". > On September 24, U.S. Vice President JD Vance discussed the killing in a visit to Concord, North Carolina, blaming it on "soft-on-crime policies" and stating he was "open" to deploying the North Carolina National Guard to Charlotte if requested by Governor Stein and Mayor Lyles. > The U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary held a field hearing in Charlotte on September 29 on safety in public transit systems and the treatment of repeat offenders. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska#Reactions
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No, no, you're not getting it. People boosted it, OK yeah it was pretty heinous and horrifying and it was obviously going to get clicks. But the content is radicalising in a vacuum. It didn't need any boosting to land its message.
Whenever I hear about this criticism of free public transit I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" and is instead "why don't these homeless people have some place to live that isn't a bus?"
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> I always wonder why the question isn't "how do we keep homeless people from living on our busses" Similar questions get asked often enough. The problem is that there aren't any easy answers or solutions. Cities have tried different things but none that appear to work for medium to large sized cities. If you see a city employ a workable solution that can used as a model and be deployed everywhere, that would be awesome.
It does seem that it should be possible to offer "free buses" without having to also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses". As an example, I can go to a local store and experience free parking or go to my nearby town and park for free downtown. I can't, however, park and sleep overnight in my car in that shopping centre or in that town. Why can't buses be regulated the same way?
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Because you can’t make a subjective judgement with regard to the worthiness of a particular passenger of a public resource. A car on private property eventually becomes trespassing.
In Brisbane, Australia they run a 6-month trial to make all public transport trips to be 50c (that includes buses, metro, ferries). It was so successful and widely loved that it was a no-brainier for it to be extended indefinitely
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Kansas City added a single light rail line through downtown and made it, initially, free. It has been so wildly popular, bringing happy Kansas Citians to the restaurants and clubs downtown that the business owners begged KC to keep it free. Still free and I believe they are extending it. I would love to see K.C. bring back some of the jazz nightlife that once charged downtown. (Though it might have been the availability of liquor there during Prohibition too.)
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All I see in this thread are people saying it won't work and then people giving examples of it actually working quite well. The scientific method is telling us something here...
I’ve lived in civilized places, but uncivilized is probably more common: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
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It's shockingly easy to scare some people away from public transit. Same city, private transport: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-13/carjacking-pursuit Personally, I would rather be on a bus with someone high on drugs than be carjacked at gunpoint.
It's self funding in places like Japan and Hong Kong, but these places also engage in value capture. Train services in these places are basically real estate companies with trains attached to them. They diversified by making train stations shopping malls. In any case, cities can engage in value capture for public transportation. Just direct some of the property taxes collected directed to public transit. Even better would be some sort of LVT, ideally but not necessary 100% of the economic rent from land. In any case, public transit should also engage in value capture on their own property. If they own a train station, they should consider building on top or adjacent to it spaces that they can then rent out to tenants. It's not only efficient but also serve the public and the local economy and making public transit more economical to run due to higher ridership.
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Japan uses employer subsidy to break even. It a below the line tax in the same way health insurance is in the US.
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What do you mean by employer subsidy here? Are you referring to the system where employers reimburse the costs of transit fees for commutes? Many companies in Tokyo prevent their employees from commuting by car (legally commute is covered by workers comp insurance, and many companies do not elect the more expensive car coverage option) - so even in the absence of workers paying for the commute, public transit (or bike/walk) would be the only realistic option.
Several core problems with Rust (bykozy.me)
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I'm annoyed that this submissions title was changed. This was first submitted with the original title and then got flagged. It looks like it's been changed. A quick search of HN shows a bunch of articles, "X is a disappointment" which weren't flagged. Do folks have such thin skin about this topic that expressing disappointment is deserves flags?
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> Arc<Mutex<Box<T>>> is complex This is not the language problem, but its simply the nature of the problem no? It is like saying, full adders are complex, can't we design something simpler? No, full adders are the way they are because addition in binary is complicated. What you are saying is that this problem is not your kind of problem, which is fine. Not everyone needs to face the complexity of optimizing full adders. And so we created abstractions. The question is, how good is that abstraction? C++ is like using FP math to do binary addition.
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> It’s probably the strongest point of my whining: Rust is memory safe and unreliable. The price of memory safety was reliability in addition to the developer’s sanity — that’s why I’m telling the language designers went overboard. This complaint is nonsensical. If your Rust program panics, it’s because things are fucked up and it’s not possible to safely continue. The alternative is to continue unsafely , which will fuck things up even more. The Linux kernel does the same thing. If it encounters an error, it panics.
Hard disagree. For my reality of developing for smaller projects than Android, I will absolutely weight Android team's opinion less than the opinion of smaller projects. Trying to mimic FAANG engineering practices is a fools endeavour that ranges between naiveness at best and CV padding at worst.
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FAANG engineeers can't code for shit, but the one thing they did get right was when they jumped on the Rust bandwagon
>Yeah until that memory safety issue causes memory corruption in a completely different area of code and suddenly you're wasting time debugging difficult-to-diagnose crashes once they do start to surface. Some very solid argument here. However, as already implied in my article, you can get most of the guarantees without losing your sanity. Memory-safety-related problems are important, but they are not the sole source of bugs in applications — as developers of Zed found out. >Doing this the "correct" way in other languages has similar impact? So I'm not sure why Rust forcing you to do the correct thing which causes perf issues is uniquely a Rust issue. Doing this the "just get it done" way in other languages will likely come back to bite you eventually even if it does unblock you temporarily. It might be counterintuitive, but garbage collectors in multithreaded code can be very efficient. I mean you just spawn lots of objects with random references in between and then eventually GC untangles the mess — it's zero overhead until the GC cycle. Escape analysis and semantic-reach containers can reduce GC work a lot (so you don't have the classical JVM GC problems). More specialized things like RCU and general quescence-state reclamation can be totally pause-less.
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>However, as already implied in my article, you can get most of the guarantees without losing your sanity. Yeah sure, but what compares that gives you similar perf, safety, and language features to Rust? I'll use "safety" in a loose term to say "you really infrequently encounter odd memory safety issues". Go for example still has the occasional memory corruption issues with maps in particular although these don't show up too often and the race detector exists. C# is probably the closest I can think of for AOT? I don't really know what the deployment story for a .NET application looks like these days though. Go has some language design things that turn people off. >but they are not the sole source of bugs in applications — as developers of Zed found out. You called out Zed in the blog post as well but I've not seen the Zed devs expressing regret of using Rust. Is this just an assumption on your part? As someone who's written many UI applications with egui and one with GPUI, I've felt some minor pain points but nothing show-stopping. I used to write a lot of C#. I used to write a lot of Go. I now write none of either and basically exclusively write Rust these days and a bit of C/C++ at work. The only time I've really felt the pain of `Rc<RefCell<...>>` gross types was recently when trying to port a game engine's data loader to Rust. It makes heavy use of OOP patterns and trying to emulate that in Rust is asking for a bad time, but I did it out of just out of trying to one-shot the migration and keep logic similar. Not fun, but I knew what I was getting myself into.
> The cloudflare bug was not caused by rust Yeah. Rust’s Option::None as like null in C++. Unwrapping an option is like checking if something is null and crashing. This "crash from an unwrap" is just a null pointer exception / segfault in any other language. The same bug would be trivial to write in any other language, and with more or less the exact same result. Its just - weirdly news because it was rust code. What? > Honestly, it reads like a lot of critiques of Rust: people haven't spent enough time with it, and are not over the learning curve yet. Exactly. I’ve spent years with rust and my complaints are very different. Well, I still wish it compiled faster but all the other stuff is noobie problems. As someone with more experience, my frustration points are things like how async blocks do compiler magic you can’t write yourself. I hate unnameable types. I think Pin is confusing and weird. And the syntax for interacting with raw pointers is unnecessarily inconvenient and ugly. Yes, rust makes programs with a lot of shared mutable state awkward to write. So don’t program like that. In general, if you write code in language X as if it were a bad version of language Y, you're going to have a bad time. The right question here is if the "rust way" of thinking about your code results in a beautiful program. You can't answer that if you go in with too many preconceptions of how programs should be designed.
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The Cloudflare bug was unwrapping a Result::Err not an Option::None. Both Option and Result can be unwrapped and - to some extent not coincidentally - both can also be subject to the Try operator (?) which is arguably more correct here than unwrap because this can fail and perhaps the caller will have some plan to recover. My list of peeves would be very different from yours. I would like to prohibit move of the dodgier as casts (requiring that you write out the conversion call you actually meant explicitly and then handling any edge cases) for example. What sort of "interacting with raw pointers" are you thinking of that's too inconvenient and ugly for your liking?
> Rust cannot recover. catch_unwind exists for a reason. > e.g. when you have an exception in a destructor then it's a guaranteed `std::terminate`. You can throw in a destructor [1]. You just need to mark that destructor noexcept(false). You do get a guaranteed std::terminate if an exception escapes a destructor while unwinding is already underway , though. > Do note that C did not have such a flaw built into language assert() says hi? > I mean specially designed embedded C code can survive total RAM erasure and still perform some meaningful work (with CPU registers and ROM intact). Why doesn't a similar argument apply to "specially designed" Rust? > Or compare it to BEAM that can have processes crash all day long and still continue to work. Again, nothing stops you from writing Rust that does the same. [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html [1]: https://cpp.godbolt.org/z/ao4cf3zrr
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>You can throw in a destructor [1]. You just need to mark that destructor noexcept(false). You do get a guaranteed std::terminate if an exception escapes a destructor while unwinding is already underway, though. Come on, please tell me you don't do this in your code. Formally you are correct, but there are many things in C++ that should have better not existed. >Why doesn't a similar argument apply to "specially designed" Rust? Because it would lose most of the Rust properties by that time. C code with fixed memory layout, on the other hand, is ideomatic and was widely employed in the past. It's still being employed in embedded. I'm not saying that you are wrong though, there might be people optimizing Rust for this very purpose, but I'm not aware of such an effort. >catch_unwind exists for a reason. >>Or compare it to BEAM that can have processes crash all day long and still continue to work. >Again, nothing stops you from writing Rust that does the same. Who's gonna GC the poisoned garbage left in undefined state after the crash? I'm not saying it's impossible — I honestly have no idea whether safe recover is possible in Rust, but from what I know it's rather in middle of "not possible" and "not viable".
as noted someone else, it is lock contention that doesn't scale, not mutable shared state. lock-free data structures, patterns like RCU ... in many cases these will scale entirely appropriately to the case at hand. A lot of situations that require high-scale mutable shared state have an inherent asymmetry to the data usage (e.g. one consumer, many writers; many consumers; one writer) that nearly always allow a better pattern than "wrap it in a mutex".
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No, it's the mutable shared state that is the problem. Lock contention is just downstream of the same problems as any other mutable shared state. > patterns like RCU RCU isn't mutable shared state! It's sharing immutable state! That's the whole paradigm.
> telling a victim “but the memory was not corrupted in the crash” is a weak consolation. We actually had a recent Cloudflare outage caused by a crash on unwrap() function. It’s probably the strongest point of my whining: Rust is memory safe and unreliable. The price of memory safety was reliability This is incorrect in a way that honestly feels insulting. It's not the language's fault that you called the `crash()` function—every language has a way to terminate execution, and for good reason. Crashing isn't even necessarily incorrect behaviour; that's how you pass the error up to the infrastructure layer for handling. The problem here existed at a system design level, not a language level. For the author to paraphrase this (bad) critique like this: > You cannot get 99.999% reliability with Rust — it crashes all the time. is outright dishonest and insulting to me as a reader.
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First, he didn't call the "crash()" function, he called the "unwrap()" function. The fact that they decided to call the crash function "unwrap()" is not the OP's fault, it's the language authors' fault. Second, you totally missed the OP's point about reliability. If one has to choose between UB and an immediate halt, those are pretty sucky options. And the OP is 100% right about Rust crashing all the time. Nothing insulting about that, just a fact.
Why did they name the crash() function "unwrap()" ? Feels weird to me ...
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> Why did they name the crash() function "unwrap()" ? Because unwrap() is not guaranteed to cause a crash? panic!() is there if you actually want to guarantee a panic.
I think we’ve officially reached the inflection point where the Rust haters have become more annoying than the Rust evangelists. Maybe in a couple years we will finally be able to stop writing blog post about it.
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We are nowhere near that inflection point!
>I've done significant C++ and Rust and Rust compiles WAY faster than C++ for day-to-day incremental compilation. C++ suffers from the header inclusion problem and modules may as well not exist because you can't practically use them. It really depends on what you are compiling. I did lots of C/C++ that compiled 50k lines of code in 10 seconds FROM SCRATCH — I doubt you can do it in Rust. To be fair, headers in that project were somewhat optimized for compilation speed (not "hardcore", but "somewhat"). People forgot how fast C/C++ compilation can be without 10 Boost includes in each module. >This is intentionally over complicated, there is no reason for the Box to be there. Arc<RwLock<Option<T>>> — sounds good now? Don't get me wrong — C++ can be just as horrible, but Rust made it a rule, you can only write your program like this. >What does this even mean? I've already answered above, but I can repeat: there are runtime models that allow crash and recover, there are models that crash and limp. In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash.
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> It really depends on what you are compiling. I did lots of C/C++ that compiled 50k lines of code in 10 seconds FROM SCRATCH — I doubt you can do it in Rust. To be fair, headers in that project were somewhat optimized for compilation speed (not "hardcore", but "somewhat"). People forgot how fast C/C++ compilation can be without 10 Boost includes in each module. Incremental compiles in Rust are very fast because it has an actual module system instead of textual include. I don't care much how long from scratch compiles take, but even there my experience is Rust is faster than C++. > Arc<RwLock<Option<T>>> — sounds good now? Don't get me wrong — C++ can be just as horrible, but Rust made it a rule, you can only write your program like this. I'm not sure what non-garbage collected language would be better here. C++ would be about the same. C would be far far worse as it has no templates. Garbage collection would allow you to omit the Arc, and a language like Java where nearly _everything_ is optional would allow you to omit the Option, but I don't think many people would make this trade. > I've already answered above, but I can repeat: there are runtime models that allow crash and recover, there are models that crash and limp. In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash. You haven't defined what "crash" means. Rust uses a Result types for error flow and you have just as much control over recovery as any other language. If you are talking about panic, well yeah, that's like calling abort() in C, except it allows more fine grained error recovery with catch_unwind instead of a global SIGABRT handler or w/e for your OS.
µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D (microcad.xyz)
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I've been using zoo and its KCL language with some success for boundary-representation CAD writing. If I understood correctly, µcad serves the same purpose. Comparing code samples between both of them, I personally enjoy KCL's pipelined approach more. My main beef with zoo is the fact that they are promoting vendor lock-in by forcing users to use their cloud-hosted geometry kernel with absolutely no local alternative. It's not clear to me how µcad solves this problem. [1] Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/lego [2] Lego brick in µcad: https://microcad.xyz/index.php/2025/11/12/lego-bricks/ [3] Gear in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/spur-gear [4] Gear in µcad: https://microcad.xyz/index.php/2025/11/12/gears/
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Interesting project, I will look into it. This site sucks. Why does it use php, and why is every link a query? Just make it a static page.
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Yeah, my guess is the team vibe-coded it because wow is does it have poor performance /is difficult to use. A few links didn’t even work for me…
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The server appears to be down right now too :/
That immediacy is mostly thanks to OpenCSG which is essentially a magic trick to quickly fake 3d rendering of booleans between 3d objects using stencil buffer of gpu. http://opencsg.org/ In other words it renders the cylinders cubes spheres etc and their unions differences etc, to a 2d screen without actually calculating the intersection of those meshes / solids in 3d space. This is the special thing about OpenSCAD design is they figured out how to build an abstract syntax tree that could either be sent to OpenCSG, CGAL (old engine), Manifold (new engine), or even the bare bones 'ThrownTogether' renderer (ancient engine on machines with no gpu that just draws 'negatives' as green blobs iirc). It should be theoretically possible for any CAD program to do this. its just a lot of work.
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wow, this is really neat. I always noticed how, when panning around with ortho view, it didn't need to re-render
So what is the big advantage of this over OpenSCAD?
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I found this: https://docs.microcad.xyz/language/book/intro/preface.html >While OpenSCAD is easy to learn and has a syntax reminiscent of C, we felt the language could be improved in several ways: > - more specialization for creating graphics, > - better support for modular programming, > - strict typing and unit handling, > - a syntax closer to Rust than to C, > - a solid library system, > - plugin support for other programming languages, > - and a more powerful visualization concept.
1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18 (blog.zorin.com)
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Sign of the times. It’s just some gift wrapped Ubuntu.
I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years now, and now that I'm about to upgrade my 13 y.o. laptop, there's a dilemma for me between choosing some top(ish)-spec x86_64 laptop or macbook pro M4. The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future. I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?
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Be careful, your laptop battery life might drop off a cliff. A lot of laptop manufacturers have tightly coupled power integrations with Windows.
I’m looking for a replacement OS for my mother in law whose computer is aging out of Windows 10 support. I’m glad to see slick distributions like this trying to fill that gap. That said her requirements are _so_ simple that Debian with Chromium would probably satisfy 100% of her requirements which are ‘download documents from gmail and print them’.
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I bought my mom a MacBook Air and put Brave on it. Brave, more than anything, fixed all of her problems (the shitty state of the web). I could have just as easily given her a good Linux laptop, I think.
Very sleek marketing, but why did they rebrand (the fantastic) KDE Connect to "Zorin Connect"[1]? From the mere <30 commits, I see no reason for the fork, only confused users. If it was tightly integrated into the OS I could sort of understand not mentioning its name, like you don't want "Foobar Control Panel" and "FizzBuzz Start Menu". But KDE Connect is a standalone app you can install even on Windows. And this is not just hiding the name, it's replacing it! So, why the "rebrand"[2]? It feels like an attempt at stealing credit. [1] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android and https://github.com/ZorinOS/gnome-shell-extension-zorin-connect [2] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/issues/19
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Love the most commit titled 'Release 1.33.4' that's actually just changing a log export file from `kdeconnect-log.txt` to `zorin-connect-log.txt` : https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/commit/de6dc413684d7a1fed81700a1b7c0423cf3697cb
Apple created a boot loader that allows the device owner to install and run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux without degrading the system's security when you run MacOS. Applying security per partition instead of per device gives users more control, and you no longer have to worry about Microsoft having control of the machine's signing keys.
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I'm not versed into that part. Does it bring significant improvements (more secure or flexible ?) over UEFI secure boot ?
Going to paste a recent rant of mine about windows ux. The thread sank so i don't think anyone saw it and i don't want to write a new comment discussing things i hate about windows. >It's worth pointing out what a hideous cludge lots of Win10 ui is. I remember some ui expert complaining how there are half a dozen (maybe more, i don't remember) completely different ui interfaces. The most prominent ones of course is that horrible rectangle thing that's meant to be the start menu. Windows 11 didn't do a worse job, that would be almost impossible, but it's not much better. Then there was openly breaking functionality and discoverability by having a settings app as well as the old control panel, which is an absolute abomination. The manager app probably looked old fashioned on Windows xp. > All of that was ok, because Win10 looks and feels quite nice overall and was a significant upgrade compared to 7. Win11 has none of that saving grace. They needed to fix the many disasters of Win10, not introduce new ones. I will add that the single feature i hate the most about Win10 when it dropped the previous useful start menu and adopting the horrible rectangle thing. The main function of it changed from helping you navigate windows to serving up ads for M$ products. No, i'm not interested in Xbox, if i want to buy your office suite i will. Don't show me a non functioning tile to remind me i don't have it.
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The start menu is one of the first things I used to fix on a brand-new Win10 install: start removing all those useless/annoying tiles until I have nothing left but a list of programs. (On Win11, the first thing I fix is to move the toolbar back to left-justified instead of centered; then I fix the start menu tiles). But I do wish graphics designers would learn to leave well enough alone. People don't want their UI to change on them every 5-10 years. They want to learn one UI and stick with it. The Windows 7 UI was just about perfect; if they had kept that UI while changing internals not visible to the user, they would have had far faster adoption of Windows 10. As it is, I know many people who stuck to Windows 7 for as long as possible until the free-upgrade period was about to run out. EDIT: I'm not saying there weren't things about the Win7 UI that couldn't be improved. The new Terminal app is immensely better than Conhost. IMMENSELY. But that's an incremental change, not a UI replacement.
This was ~2 years ago, but it didn't work on my side. Closing the lid would put the laptop to sleep then quickly wake it up, fan spinning at full speed even if unplugged. I think I used their diagnosing tool and one cause was some non-microsoft (installed by a driver I think, laptop as almost new) scheduled task, so not fully their fault, but forcing this kind of much weaker/unstable sleep without backup when S3 worked well is a bit crazy to me. (by the way the laptop was a Framework 13 AMD, curious if others experienced the same. Maybe they fixed it now)
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The Framework 16 had an issue where the closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard, waking up the computer. Ten days ago (Nov 14th), Framework released a BIOS update for the 16 that would turn off the keyboard (and numeric pad) when the lid was closed. I installed that update immediately , and for the first time, when I pulled my laptop out of my backpack after leaving the office and going home (or the reverse), it was still suspended. Had nothing to do with Windows drivers (I run Linux on this laptop), was purely a physical issue. I haven't checked if the Framework 13 got BIOS updates at the same time. But you could check if the keyboard is causing the wakeup (the Framework 13 has the same keyboard as the 16, but its smaller screen means less flexing in a backpack so it might not be suffering the same issue) by opening a Notepad window before putting the computer to sleep and closing the lid. If you find that random characters have been typed into Notepad while it's sleeping, then the issue was the same that the 16 was experiencing: the keyboard needs to be disabled while the lid is closed. If you don't see random typing with the lid closed, then it's a different issue.
Isn't he that egotistic attention whore who periodically gets ripped to shreds around here?
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No, you're mistaking him for another fellow. He's the guy who anonymously slanders people online and doesn't add anything of value.
A big concern I have for the industry is what happens as people who truly understand how this stuff works age out. Unfortunately we seem to have stopped replacing them. Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with. So you’re not getting as many people with this knowledge. Just as significant I think is the prevalence of lucrative work higher up the stack. Why learn deep system internals when slinging JS and wiring together APIs pays as much or more.
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Reminds me of Jon Blow’s talk on preventing the collapse of civilization: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
That has not been the case for quite a long time now. Lots of distros still have websites that look like a wiki, see Arch. But in their case the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis ever existed for what it covers. If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.
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I think the medium is the message here. When I see Arch's home page, I know it will be a hobby OS where there's countless hours of fun in terminal land editing config files. That's how I know it's not for me.
It helps that it is built on the same Open Source software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station. per https://zorin.com/os/
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Yes ubuntu,
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So, Debian.
The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms. I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS. Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO. Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
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I’ll echo the other commenters who are praising Gnome. It is pretty keyboard-centric. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite nice. I’ve moved on to Niri, and can’t imagine going back to a floating window manager, but between Windows, macOS, and Gnome, I prefer Gnome hands down.
Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays (emilysneddon.com)
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Thoroughly dank. Very well done and interesting write up.
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Are the light rail displays ever sold anywhere?
Wow, the props to the author for digging deep ! > Looking inside of the display, I found labels identifying the make and model. The signs were designed and manufactured by Trans-Lite, Inc., a company based in Milford, Connecticut that specialised in transport signage from 1959 until its acquisition by the Nordic firm Teknoware in 2012. After lots of amateur detective work, and with the help from an anonymous Reddit user in a Connecticut community group, I was connected with Gary Wallberg, Senior Engineer at Trans-Lite and the person responsible for the design of these very signs back in 1999. Few years back, we had a work thread about this exact Muni Metro font and the designers brought up segmented types. We never got as far as the author in finding the source, but did bring up other systems with similar typefaces. NYC has their own called R142A: https://www.nyctransitforums.com/topic/55346-r142a-mosaic-lcd-question/ And here's one inspired by Spain's transit system: https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/
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R142A is simply the name of a type of subway car. The NYCT identifies the car by contract number which is increasing (bigger number means more recent). The latest is R211 in three variants (R211T, R211S, R211A).
I've always found that cringe to be a strange shibboleth. AFAICT everyone has to summarize with the bay area instead, which I find even more comic having grown up on a coast, aka a bay area.
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My theory for why "San Fran" is looked down upon is that the person saying it is perceived as making a claim to status: 'I am so cool and hip that I am on familiar terms with "San Fran".' But shortening San Francisco to San Fran is both very obvious, and betrays a cheap attempt at sophistication that the soul of SF rejects. SF feels like a transitory city as multiple successive waves of people drift in and out. That also contribute to why a shibboleth like this gets a lot of airtime. The episode probably recurs weekly in bars all over the city as someone who's just moved here calls it "San Fran", only to be corrected by someone who's been here for just a little longer.
Well, this is THE Bay Area, where we live in THE city, drive on THE 101, and eat in THE Chinatown.... wait... Funny enough, though, it wasn't until I moved here 15+ years ago that it struck me how odd it is to call it "the Bay Area" and expect people to know what that means. Nonetheless, sportscasters do it. Musicians do it. All other bay areas are just areas around bays...
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> drive on THE 101 excuuuuuuse you? It's "drive on 101" in NorCal :P
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Eddie Izzard was joking in 1998 about the "The" and the prohibited names for The City ( https://youtu.be/QRB_GhLXCds?si=R4kYkodzvYDxe33H&t=276 ), so it's probably been like this for many decades thence!
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