LarryDarrell

They were so busy trying to create modern that they forgot what made things classic.

"This isn't technology related." says the HN poster as he's lined up against a wall.

I'm saying our tenuous attempts towards reestablishing the most basic of anti-trust was dead regardless of who won the election[1].

I think this decision would have been the same regardless of who won. As for the next few years... Harris was clearly signalling that her FTC would be a return to rubber stamping mergers and acting only against the most egregious corporate actions, and even then only when the penalties wouldn't be substantial. I doubt very much that her appointment to FTC Chair would be much different than the current Andrew Ferguson.

Nothing I've written endorses Trump or his actions. But we have to be a little bit more realistic about the interests that Harris was aiming to represent.

We can say that Harris would have been better than Trump in the aggregate, while also prioritizing the interests of Business over those of Consumers. Both these things can be true.

[1]https://jacobin.com/2024/12/harris-khan-antitrust-west-elect...

The writing was on the wall when Kamala Harris wouldn't commit to keeping Lina Khan at the FTC. We had some soft Anti-Trust action for the first time in decades, and the Trusts responded. If we get the chance to try again, we should be more clear eyed about what we are up against.

I've de-Googled my life as best I can, but I know how little it actually matters. Now that Google is clearly on the path of closing up Android, I hope the Linux phone effort gets reinvigorated.

Windows users have no negotiating power. Windows will continued to be monetized in user-hostile ways. Call it enshittification, call it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, call it what ever you want. It won't reach a breaking point. It'll just get worse and worse, steadily and slowly.

I'm trapped because I'm a C#/WPF developer. But, the day after I retire will see a reformat and installation of Debian.

The only thing I'll miss is Directory Opus.

Unlocked. It was a 2023 model I bought in 2024. There are some screaming good deals if you don't mind buying one model older at the right time. I cannot stress enough how much I don't care about OS updates as long as my apps continue to work (not many, mostly from F-Droid).

I recently bought my wife a Pixel 8 ($500) and myself a Moto G Stylus ($175). The Pixel has a better camera, but that seems to be about it.

Something I like about my Moto is that it has a sdcard slot. That means I can sync up my entire music library (~600GB). That means I only need a small phone service plan ($15/mo). It also means I get to listen to all the Wilco I want while riding my bike down by the river where there's shoddy reception. There's also a headphone jack, which still comes in handy.

My lament is that as phones get more expensive, they seem to get less useful/interesting.

This is truly the Century of American Hubris. From financial deregulation to spreading democracy in the middle east to carbon fiber submarines, we seem determined to ignore complexity, refuse to acknowledge our biases, and throw out every Lesson-Learned from the last 150 years.

We're going to gut the Federal systems like a Tea Party fever dream. And the re-learning of what we truly need is going to be very painful.

>"A technology that cuts down on boring tasks is fine; one that threatens your sense of identity is not."

The shareholder class sees no distinction between the two. This is a good reminder not to make your labor your identity and that technology implemented in the workplace is not for the benefit of the worker, but for the benefit of the owners. It doesn't matter if I toil with 1990's technology or 2020's technology, I call it quits at 5pm regardless.

In my personal life I get to choose (for the most part) the amount of technology that I interface with. The only computer in my car controls the spark plugs and fuel injectors. My bicycle shifts with friction. My stove/range only has valves and igniters. My TV is a monitor hooked up to a small PC. I'm not against technology, but I am ruthless in determining the exact amount that makes me happy.

I've been using Post-Its along the bottom of my monitor for 25 years. Works fairly well as they are always right there in front of your face, and if one loses it's stick, well, you know that's the one to focus on or move it to long-term.

This of course only works at a desk. I've never done work on a laptop so my system is very YMMV.

I have a 38" curved wide screen with 1600 vertical pixels. It represents the peak of all the monitors I have bought over the last 25 years.

Me in the year 2000 with a 1024x768 17" CRT would be flabbergasted at the amount of wasted/underutilized space that exists today.

Vertical space is precious, and it's why I paid more to have those 1600 pixels. And then Microsoft decides to not only enlarge the taskbar, but to not provide an option to turn it back to normal. I have to resort to hacks to wrangle MS Windows (primarily a Desktop OS the last time I looked) back down to size and reclaim my vertical space.

My neighborhood and for miles around me is lower to middle-middle class. All people that wouldn't be able to afford to 1) move and leave their equity behind 2) afford the rents in the denser part of town.

You are painting with too broad of strokes.

At some point one has to consider costs, scale and political expediency.

WFH and H-WFH would be broadly popular among the electorate and could probably take off with just some changes to the tax code.

Presuming everyone does want to live in a dense area (I do not), building housing and infrastructure is expensive and at the end of the day it has to be profitable to build. We don't really have the framework to zone municipalities at the Federal level. So now you are talking about leaving it to the individual states... and I think you can see where that goes.

Given all that, yes, fewer miles driven in aggregate is a good and easy win for the environment. Less gasoline consumed, fewer tires and brake pads consumed, less work clothes bought, less meals purchased at lunch, etc.

Perhaps tires can be made less toxic, but over all, we need to prioritize driving less.

WFH means I put barely 3000 miles per year on my car. It's absurd we are not aggressively promoting WFH or hybrid WFH at the national level. It's the easiest win for the environment and it's right there for the taking.

I agree completely that wealth plays a critical role, if not the most critical role, in all of this. Especially at the higher end with Balaji and all the other would be tech John Galts.

I have just observed that the threshold is low enough that many middle-class engineers achieve it (I've always lived in low cost of living areas where engineers get to live pretty comfortable lives relative to their surroundings. But that's just my one data point). Their folly tends to be more banal, like ordering Ivermectin from Mexican pharmacies or endlessly talking about nuclear power in a near utopian fashion. Admittedly, pretty harmless stuff compared to the article.

From the article:

"described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,”

I think this article is the most on-topic there could be.

The users here that want Tech News and Tech News only are doing themselves, and the community a disservice.

I don't disagree. My two examples were people who not only did not collaborate, but actively resented the knowledge offered from experts different fields.

I do think that past successful collaboration can lead to a bias though. As a programmer I've solved problems for a variety of disparate industries and fields. I know just enough to know I'm vastly ignorant of those fields save for a little part that I helped solve problems for. But I've seen colleagues go the opposite route.

I call it "Engineer Brain" after watching a talented relative descend into madness trying learn virology during the pandemic. It was further crystalized after the Titan submersible incident and reading about the terminal hubris of Stockton Rush.

We spend our lives specializing into ever smaller subdomains of already small domains. A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.

It's important to maintain a deep humbleness and acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge. Don't disregard experts in other fields because they are saying things that conflict with your biases. Learn to identify your biases and think about how they may limit you from gaining understanding. It's much more fun to go through life with the attitude of not knowing everything and listening to people who know what they know.

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" was never going to be compatible with our economic system.

Thus, our new slogan. "Buy Green!"

To a certain extent, yes. I'm mostly daydreaming about if you magically remade my little Volvo with modern materials and one of those low-displacement turbo engines they put in cars today. It would be 500 pounds lighter with 3 times as much horsepower.

But... that car would be a dud today. It's too simple and lacks features (like power seats).

We've been regulating the wrong things when it comes to vehicles. Instead of being obsessed with MPG, we should have been obsessed with weight and size.

There's no reason for a sedan to be heavier than 3000 lbs. There's no reason 1/2 ton pickups should be bigger than a 1994 Ford F150.

Once a car is light and small(ish) the good MPG will follow. My 1988 Volvo 240 got 30mpg on a recent road trip and that's with it needing a tune up.

I only ride my bike on protected bike lanes now. It's inconvenient and limiting, but there's no way I can expect to share the road with these behemoths.

They skipped right over getting a dumbphone or a crippled Android device.

I drive a 30 year old car through the southwest US. I'm resourceful, but I'm not careless. I'll continue to carry a phone in case of breakdowns.

A few years ago my checking account was drained while I was on vacation. It was pretty nice having a phone with a cell number that matched what was registered with my bank.

...

Delete social media off your phone. A smartphone without social media is a tool. A smartphone with social media is a prison.

This is very much true in NM where I live. Agriculture accounts for 79% of yearly water use. We're known for our chile (63,000 tons) but that's dwarfed by alfalfa (784,000 tons).

I'm not sure what the answer is. The farmers have their own water rights, and as a group are pretty well politically connected.

We could try Eminent Domain or unilaterally breaking those old water contracts... but that's guaranteed to make the Supreme Court. Given the current make up of the SC, I don't see any decision coming that might curtail property rights. I'm guessing it'll be perpetual subsidies for letting land go fallow.

Make sure to take the Rail Runner down to Albuquerque. Our buses are free, and we have new Rapid Transit buses that go down the length of Central Ave.

Those late 80s and 90s Cherokees lasted a long time, I still see them around town. Most of the survivors have that great inline 6 that was a carryover from the AMC days.

The 80s were a weird decade. GM didn't want to give up vacuum lines, Ford had electronic fuel injection and little else, and Chrysler had those K-Cars that broke a lot, but they were at least cheap to fix.

Toyotas, Hondas and Volvos of that era lasted a long time, and it would have been simple to predict had you bothered to look. Simplicity + Robustness = Longevity. Because of that equation, the domestic long running vehicles are all pickup trucks.

The last era where we had any semblance of simplicity and reliability was probably the 2000s right up to the recession. Those cars and trucks were just the perfected versions of their 90s version. (Except Chrysler, it's best to avoid all era of Chrysler and I say this as former K-Car and Ram owner.)

Post recession we added turbos to everything. Then came CVTs and variable timing and a slew of new engines. And then came the slow and steady computerization and electric motor actuators for everything. The length of wiring harnesses exploded. Why does my car seat now weigh 300 pounds and have 1200 position settings and climate control, etc. etc.

Simplicity + Robustness = Longevity is true for any era.

This is a great question and I actually go back and forth on it myself. I do tend to be harsher to consumers, because that's who I'm around. My friends who work directly at the auto makers or their suppliers like to blame "MBA's". But find me an engineer that doesn't blame it all on MBAs.

I have a friend who has been a Automotive Engineer for 20 years and we have this conversation all the time. If I were to distill all our conversations down to one take away it would be this: There was a paradigm shift sometime shortly after the Great Recession. Before then, vehicles operated and degraded in expected and manageable ways.

I'm in the vintage camp at the moment. I just replaced the Chrysler ignition system that was in my old 80s Volvo for a Bosch one that came in a later model. That and replacing the timing belt took all of one weekend and $500 (I splurged on some new parts that I didn't technically need to). The next week I drove it cross country and had a blast, somehow having the time of my life despite not having the last 35 years of features that many people can't live without.

I understand. There are many consumers like you.

We are simply speaking different languages because we value different things based on what we want from a vehicle.

My perspective is one from someone that does their own car maintenance/repair and has only owned used cars. When I look at a new car or truck today, I'm looking at components that are most affected by entropy. Of the features you listed, how many are likely to still work in 2033? 2043? Will any of them create a no-start condition or poor running condition if they fail? Is there a way to bypass the automatic lights with a manual switch if some part of the automatic light system becomes unobtainable at any price? Having any part of the engine ignition process connected to a DRM'ed internet connected remote start system seems insane to me, considering how many cars have problems with non-internet connected remote start systems.

I fully admit that my perspective is the minority, and it's rare to have someone agree with me on HN. However, I do find many comrades at the junkyards.

The 2022 Chevy Silverado I rented died at 488 miles on the odometer. The roadside assistance mechanic said the transmission "lost data connection to the engine". Later, a tow truck had to drag it onto it's flatbed as the rear wheels were locked up.

Also, apparently the tailgate is electric now. And for some reason it stopped working when the transmission died. Also also, there is no way to turn the truck off? When it entered the error-state, the dash stayed on and the cabin motor stayed blowing, but the "Start" button wouldn't turn anything off.

I know I'm an odd case, my newest car is from 1997... but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are. I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water?

So when I hear that GM is going to build their own CarPlay or whatever I can't help but laugh. They can't even build a good fleet pickup truck.