rndmize

This is excellent work. I like everything about this project - user assembly and repair (repair is much easier not only if the item is designed to be repaired, but if the user assembles it in the first place); flat pack for efficient shipping/storage; the overall focus on reuse and waste reduction. Perhaps, with more projects like this for a wider range of items, it'll be possible to pull manufacturers to a more right-to-repair, cradle-to-grave kind of world.

There's really nothing surprising about this - I remember similar articles at the start of the first Trump administration about how one of the nuclear weapon departments (might have been the same one) had its top people retiring, and multiple Republican senators had to make noise before Trump got around to appointing a replacement. In the same vein, Rick Perry ran on the idea of getting rid of the Department of Energy during the campaign and was picked by Trump to be its secretary. It was explained to Perry at some point that the DOE is not, in fact, just about energy; that someone has to manage, manufacture, design and test the nuclear weapons we have; and that the national labs might be fairly important components of our scientific and technological advantages as a nation. I don't expect any better this time around.

About six months ago I bought an Anker set - a portable battery pack and some folding panels. A buddy of mine got basically the same thing, but Ecoflow. He lives in a condo, has a balcony, and can hang his panels there to charge the pack; my options are a little more constrained (3 story house with a couple hundred sq ft concrete "yard", with light blocked most hours of the day by the next house.)

I haven't gotten much use out of my set, but his plan was to run his desktop off it, which sounded very doable. All in all probably not quite the same as Germany (I guess their kits don't need a battery or plug into the wall or something).

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/07/something-clearly-...

This says CA averages spending 42k per year per homeless person, going off the 2022-2021 state budget.

https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...

This says SF is looking to spend 70k per homeless person per year in the next few years (in addition to state spending?). I've seen other pieces that mention SF spending anywhere from 250 mil to over a billion per year on homelessness. I have multiple friends that make less than 70k per year, in CA, and somehow make do. Lack of money doesn't seem to be the issue here.

These clips feels like watching someone dream in real time. Particularly the door ones, where the environment changes in wild fashion, or the middle NPC one, where you see a character walk into shadow and mostly disappear and a different character walks out.

He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.

Huh? I don't see how MS has any blame in any of this. Client chooses not to upgrade systems. Client chooses to use crowdstrike as a vendor. Client chooses not to accept free support. At what point was MS supposed to do something here? There are loads of things to complain about or take issue with when it comes to MS, but I don't see how this is one of them.

Similar story here. 13700KF, no OC, had the machine put together 18 months ago at a respectable shop (Central Computers for those in the bay). I had regular stability issues and blue screens to the point I took it back to the shop after three months - they couldn't find anything wrong. Took it in again at nine months with increasing frustration - nothing. Probably should have taken it again three months ago when I was playing the new Helldivers and that would crash the machine every other time I joined a game, but by that point I was pretty exhausted by the whole thing (and the game had other, unrelated bugs that had me looking elsewhere).

Odds are good I won't be bothering with Intel hardware or recommending it to others for the next decade or more - this has been a flatly terrible experience (and I'll note the irony of finally deciding to spend on a "dream build" and this being the result).

I think there's another point to be made here that isn't often discussed. Even in a system where people that work hardest/smartest directly translates to the most successful - doesn't mean you have a good system.

Consider an environment where a million engineers are all working on their own startups. 99% of them fail and reward the work put into them with nothing. Some subset of the remainder makes barely enough to survive; a smaller subset makes enough to have a successful business; a smaller subset makes millions, and a smaller subset makes the vast majority of the money available. If the effort put into the thing follows a mostly linear line, but the reward is exponential, is this really a good system? Do the people at the top of this structure deserve the wealth they gain, even if they genuinely the best at what they do?

More and more systems today are winner-take-all. Entertainment is notorious for a tiny number of multi-millionaire artists/actors/comedians/etc., while the vast majority of people that try to make it end up with a succession of part-time jobs that never ends. Even if there's no nepotism or corruption, is a system where the people at the top get everything and the bottom gets nothing a good one?

There's something disturbing about PG's take to me - as if only the most successful are deserving, or worthy - that this warped reward structure isn't inherently unjust. It feels like the kind of justifications nobility and royalty relied on, but for modern times - "I worked hard, I found the market, I did everything right, so naturally I deserve more wealth than a human can use in a thousand lifetimes."

So to be honest, I find almost every single one of PG's points worthless. I don't care how easy it is to start a startup if the chance of real money from it is one in a million. I don't care about how much faster growth is when its billions of dollars for a few dozen people. I don't care if the new wealth is genuinely new instead of inherited, if all we get from it is yet another tiny group of obscenely wealthy people - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And I especially dislike the idea that the "far left" should be happy that "labor has won". Having a system that picks a few hundred of the "most worthy" each year and adds them to the capital class is by no means what I could consider labor winning.

Try this: https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Bicycle-Repair...

Shortages of buildings are not the only reason that property prices can be high.

It pretty much is - everything else is window dressing. Pretty much every single city in China is 3-10x more dense than any area in the US, so lack of land is a reason I find continually uncompelling. Our lack of density, zoning practices, NIMBY attitudes and car dependency all contribute to this, with the result being a lack of construction.

Tokyo has been and continues to be affordable for anyone who wants to live there by building: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

Here's a grad student on tiktok who does good, well-sourced analysis on this front (he has an entire playlist on the issue of vacancy rates given how frequently it comes up): https://www.tiktok.com/@divasunglasses?lang=en

Article on zoning law changes in CA and how municipalities have put out estimates for how much they should build and then consistently, for decades, not even come close to meeting them: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/ca-cities-to-lose-all-zo...

There's endless amounts of info on this front - look up strongtowns, YIMBY, parking minimums and associated issues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8), japanese vs. american zoning policy (https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...)...

No, lack of building _is_ the main problem. It doesn't matter if the demand for homes is "artificial" or not - the easiest solution is to build more.

Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

This is something I've wondered, and I'm of the opinion there's two reasons that are rarely discussed. One is the great recession/sub-prime crisis, which, at least in the US, caused a collapse in housing construction - I'm not sure how much this is true for other countries. The other is the coming of age of millennials, leading to a "bump" of people in their 20-30s trying to get their first home - I'd expect this to apply to most of the countries listed.

If you're incapable of trusting some sort of authority on this, why are you here? Go host your own community. Everyone else in the world is willing to make some sort of sacrifice on this front so their community is, in fact, a community, and not a pile of trash.

As for trust - I'm not really sure what trust has to do with it. I evaluate communities based on their content, and what I don't see is often just as important as what I do. If I like it, I'll stick around - if I don't, or if it changes, I'll leave. The community is operated by the people in charge of it, it's theirs by default. Do you visit people's houses and refuse to take your shoes off because they're the "authority"? Seems like an odd thing to get hung up over.

Honestly, I just don't get this view - moderation provides clear, obvious value. You know what, we can have an experiment. I'll provide a list of things that are handled by moderation, and you pick which ones you think should be moderated.

  * Spam
  * CSAM
  * Gore
  * Porn
  * Doxxing
  * Threats
  * Libel
  * Personal attacks
  * Racism/other 'isms'
  * Flamebait/ragebait
  * Advertisements
  * Insults
  * Duplicates
  * Off-topic
  * Low-effort commentary
  * Swearing
  * Tone/sarcasm
  * Memes
  * Concern trolling/sealioning/etc.

I feel this was largely predictable, and for one reason I almost never see mentioned - the millennial generation just being larger than the one before or after. Millennials are noted as being the largest generation since the boomers, and their coming of age as far as prime home-buying time coincided with the collapse of housing construction post-2008.

There's other things at fault, of course - zoning, economy, interest rates, etc. etc., but the current stress on the housing market lines up pretty nicely 80s-born millennials (particularly those that graduated into the great recession) finally hitting their stride and having the wealth to move out/stop renting/have kids, after most of a decade of that being suppressed.

I'd expect this to continue being a problem for the rest of the decade and peter off in the 30s - it feels like governments are taking action (years late as usual, but better than not); movements like YIMBY have matured, boomers are hitting the age where they start to pass, and housing construction has ramped up slowly in the last 8-10 years, and millennials will have mostly bought by then, with gen Z being the new, smaller crop of buyers by that point.

Climate town just did a piece on natural gas leaks and how its a much more serious problem that previously considered - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw - certainly soured me a bit on natural gas in general, at least until there's better regulation in place.

The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!

We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.

There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.

Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.

I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.

Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.

There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.

And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.

(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)

I disagree. Farming has been the default job in human society for thousands of years - and still is, even today. There's nothing special about farmers, they aren't geniuses, the work is not that difficult - it requires effort, care and perseverance.

And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.

Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.

This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.

Perhaps the sentiment is just that, built out over decades of anti-government media, and doesn't accurately reflect reality.

statistically the people who buy Teslas produce more global emissions than others [...] and the class of people who can easily afford Teslas engage in a lot of environmentally damaging activities like excess consumerism, lots of traveling, etc.

This line of argument has nothing to do with Tesla or EVs. If you aim to make the case that the wealthy produce more emissions, that seems fairly clear, whether EVs exist or not.

It's one of the reasons why despite the boom in EV adoption, global emissions are also skyrocketing with them. So EVs alone won't save this planet. In fact, according to that book, if we were to replace all ICE cars on the road with EVs, the manufacturing, materials and the mining necessarily to extract all the materials necessary for that to happen, would cause such an increase in emissions that would be catastrophicall to the planet.

So the solution is actually less cars for earth, not more cars except Teslas instead of ICEs. It was an interesting analysys that I need to find.

Obviously, things would be better if people just stopped buying cars. Obviously, things would be better if everyone had good public transport available and dense development and didn't need cars. Obviously, things would be better if just less people existed and didn't need to be transported. None of this contributes in useful fashion to the here and now. I can go to my city development planning meetings and argue against car-oriented development and seas of parking until I'm blue in the face (and I do), but cities take generations to change. Cars, on the other hand, can be largely cycled out within a generation and a half. And like it or not, cars aren't going anywhere.

Surely you aren't misinterpreting what I said as "electric cars literally didn't exist" instead of "electric cars existed in inconsequential numbers"? That would be a tad disingenuous.

I'm growing somewhat tired of the endless shade thrown at Elon across the internet. People believe Elon when he promises something absurd because he's done it before.

Twenty years ago there were no electric cars. Fifteen years ago the idea of a mass-market electric vehicle was considered a joke. Ten years ago people talked about the chicken-and-egg problem of cars and chargers and how you can't have one without the other, and no one was building chargers. Today, Tesla has some of the best selling vehicles worldwide, as an EV only company; other companies are adopting their standard on charging; the idea of them building a charger network, originally seen as completely ridiculous, has ended up as the premier way to charge your vehicle and is being opened to other companies' cars. I'd be tempted to guess that they've had a larger impact on reducing emissions than any other single company on the planet.

Twenty years ago, private spaceflight was considered impossible; this was the domain of governments alone, and the various x-prizes and the like had done nothing to change this matter. Fifteen years ago, reusable rockets was considered impossible (NASA and their contractors can't even do it, how could anyone else?) Ten years ago, SpaceX cut the costs of delivering stuff to space by what, 10x? 20x? Now they're casually demolishing all players in the satellite-ISP space single-handedly, and are looking at reducing delivery costs another 5-10x; the EU's current rockets and space orgs are collapsing under the weight of their lack of competitiveness.

I don't have to agree with the man's recent decisions around Twitter or politics to credit his past accomplishments, many of which were promised years before they became reality, and it boggles me to see all the people that are incapable of doing so.

This is pretty much correct, though I feel there's some finer points depending on the number of options (5? 10? 50?) and the expected number of values chosen (2? 4? 10?).

Checkboxes are a good choice for a small number of options: https://m3.material.io/components/chips/overview . I'd say past a dozen options though this starts to become unwieldy.

Tag-style multiselects are fairly common (see https://react-select.com/home for an example). These are good where the number of values a user is expected to have selected is small (less than five imo) but the number of options is large enough to make checkboxes impractical. If you're expecting a higher number of things to be selected, you could have the option list stay open after an option is clicked, so they user doesn't have to reopen it each time they want to add an option (and, in fact, the "Animation" example does precisely that).

Two column designs ( https://crlcu.github.io/multiselect/examples/search.html ) have mostly fallen out of favor, though I feel they still have their uses for larger lists with large numbers of selected values.

I get the idea - using the build-in capabilities of html is nice, clean, and simple. But that wasn't viable ten years ago, and it isn't today - and I don't particularly feel that htmx etc. is a better solution than something heavier like react.

My go-to questions with anything like this are: how do things look if I want a dropdown? Multiselect? Datepicker? If we use <input type="date" /> do we get a datepicker across browsers? (Looks like yes.) Is the look/feel/controls consistent across browsers? (No.) Can we style them to get there? (Also no.)

Multiselects are similar - shift/control-clicking to get multiple things is a flat no-go from a UX perspective - but at my last check, this is still how the default elements work, and it can't be changed. Similarly, the look/feel of multiselects (and even selects!) is terrible and largely cannot be changed.

There's a reason third-party components for this kind of thing get built for any new framework. The built-in stuff just doesn't get it done. It's the same reason 90% of my projects still have lodash as a dependency, even though the list of built-in stuff on MDN's Array page grows year by year. It's better than it was 10 years ago for sure - but its still not there.

Jesus man, you sound like an experimenter in a scifi horror story.

This is a leap. If they publicly espouse some sort of policy and don't adhere to it, it makes them look hypocritical - but I don't see how this limits their editorial freedoms. They can change the policy, or actually adhere to it.

Maybe the reporting law doesn't itself prohibit a company from acting against its published terms, but it sure creates a database that could easily be weaponized against them by a future law or unchecked executive order.

I mean, I guess? I feel like the same could be said for laws that require worker injury reporting. If at some point in the future it's decided that there should be some regulation around moderation policies (and this seems increasingly inevitable) it would be useful to have some actual data to work off.

I favor something like this, if less strong. It should be required that a product that reaches end-of-life as defined by the manufacturer should have all documentation and source code released and open sourced; prior to end-of-life (and perhaps for one year after), they're required to provide security updates. The manufacturer is then free to decide the point at which closed source is no longer worth the maintenance cost.

A few additional thoughts:

- Perhaps hardware design/specs should be released as well?

- A government body should probably host this information after EOL.

Not really. Censorship on a legal/state-wide level is different from a single community having constraints or standards - nothing prevents certain types of discussion that aren't allowed here from happening somewhere else.

Also, taking casual shots at HN rules or moderation isn't so much contrarian or anti-censorship as being disrespectful of the community and its expectations - downvotes shouldn't be surprising in such a case.

This is something I've been curious/interested in for a long time, so its good to see that somewhere out there (random Pacific islands aside), there's communities making it work.

Some rough numbers I did a month or two ago - Tesla offers a megapack that has 3.9 MWh at a cost of $2.4m. "In 2021, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. home was 10,632 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Or about 886 kWh per month." That's about 30 kWh per day; my community has 45 houses, so use of 1.35 MWh in total, so a megapack will provide power for 3 days for the community at a cost of ~50k per house. Probably not worth it and I'd expect 3 days to be overkill. But a community that was double our size will have a cost of about 25k per unit for 1.5 days of power - which doesn't sound too bad to me.

Another thing I've found interesting is Anker seems to be getting into the home power business - https://www.anker.com/anker-solix/home-energy-solutions?ref=... - which I'm hopeful about, since it doesn't seem like anyone except Tesla has been able to make something that feels simple/easy/attractive. Every time I've look at Powerwall alternatives I'm been unimpressed by the offerings; maybe Anker can deliver.