vanilla_nut

Way back when I used Spotify, I felt they should go this way instead of dabbling with (fake) podcasts, pivot-to-video, audiobooks, and slop music. All of that stuff is a distraction from my core subscription model: listening to music from artists that I love, and finding new artists to love! Much better to lean into something complementary to that core model.

To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.

Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.

Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.

All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.

Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!

This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.

We really need the Interborough Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express) 50 years ago.

Source? This seems extremely unlikely to me, running a camera all the time consumes a fair bit of energy and they don't take long to turn on. Unless that's because they're always on?

Regardless, that's a pretty strong claim. I'd love to learn more if you have a link that can back you up!

A lot of companies pay and treat tech writers like shit.

If you're a decent tech writer who can write well, grok engineer speak, collaborate well with engineers during crunch time before a release, and apply your technical knowledge to build and maintain documentation infrastructure... well, you'll get comped slightly beneath the level of a developer with similar experience.

For folks like me who enjoy the writing side of things, it's worth it. But there are very few people who truly appreciate both the writing and the development side of the role. You honestly need both.

Most companies pay poorly, and wind up hiring non-technical folks who can barely manage a CMS. Those people can be helpful in a larger org, but at the end of the day, most technical orgs need a truly technical writer who can talk with the engineers directly and mess around with the product pre-release.

I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:

* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile

* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date

* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in

* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)

* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour

* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it

Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.

Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.

I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)

TL;DR it looks like the M4 Mac Mini redesign is _not_ soldered onto the logic board. So instead of paying 6x street prices of similar SSDs, you can just upgrade it yourself with an SSD of your choice!

This is absolutely huge news. I wonder if Apple will do something similar for the Studio, Pro, or -- dare I hope? -- even the Macbook Pros in the future? I can't imagine allowing this 'trapdoor' of money savings is a huge problem for profits since most businesses would never bother messing around with warranties for a spec upgrade. But this is absolutely MASSIVE for consumers. Just put in a little extra work and you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars compared to Apple's upgrade pricing, for a good enough end result.

Not to mention the fact that this must also save _Apple itself_ an insane amount of money for repairs! Instead of throwing away the entire logic board, the CPU, the soldered-on RAM, and the soldered-on SSD whenever any of those components fail, you can just replace the malfunctioning part. Who'd have thunk (other than, y'know, every single computer company from 1980-2015)?

I would also of course love to see this upgradeability return to RAM. I'm curious if anyone more knowledgable than myself might know if the SoC/Apple Silicon Unified Memory system makes that more difficult, or if we've just accepted it because Apple Says So.

And while I'm on the subject of non-upgradeable RAM: does anyone know why no SBCs, from Raspberry Pi to Orange Pearl Jam Cake to Milk, allow for upgradeable RAM? Surely it's possible in the SBC form factor?

Kagi Maps, based on Mapbox and OpenStreetMaps.

Extremely exciting. Google Maps has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, finally passing the threshold of enshittification by instructing me to turn "at the <fast food seafood restaurant>" instead of just telling me the road name late last year. Search for points of interest has gotten awful, just as bad as Google Search, the Play Store, and the App Store with sponsored content taking over all usable space for basic searches (seriously, I do not want you to prioritise <fast food donut restaurant> when I search for "diner" or "coffee shop").

If Kagi can prioritise useful search results, trade ads for a monthly subscription, and contribute meaningful data back into OpenStreetMaps as a backend, I would subscribe in an instant. Currently DuckDuckGo is enough to meet my web search needs, but I desperately need a good alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately Osmand is just not a great interface for most of my needs, and has no Android Auto support, either.

Only time I've ever had an issue is when I manually disconnected power from a Pi 4 when I overreacted to a network outage. I was dumb and thought my Pi's DNS was screwing things up for the whole network, but it turns out that it was just Spectrum screwing things up for the entire region. Fortunately there was only one minor corrupted file, it didn't bork the SD card, and I was able to repair the setup manually.

I've never had any problem as long as I've stuck with the `sudo shutdown` command, which powers down in a controlled manner so writes don't get interrupted. But I've also never had an issue after a power outage, so I think somehow power outage shutdowns are more graceful than just yanking the power cable out.

If you're really concerned, you can always configure your Pi to use a read-only root filesystem. Combine that with a USB SSD to store your _actual_ data and you should be OK indefinitely. Or just boot from that USB SSD -- just remember to configure fstab correctly for your intended behaviour! You might be surprised to discover that fstab can delay a boot indefinitely if mounting expectations do not match reality.

I don't think London has made quite the strides in bikeability that Paris has since 2020, but when I visited Hackney last year I was astonished to see more bikes during rush hour than cars. Walking down a road to a coffee shop, I actually had to wait a few seconds to cross at the intersection between two bike highways.

Hundreds of people riding bikes to work. And as quiet as the wilderness behind my house in the rural USA. I could hear the wind in the trees, and that was it. Maybe a little drivetrain noise from a poorly maintained bike here or there.

I desperately want to live in a city that quiet. Back when I lived in NYC practically every environment was an assault on the ears.

Works well until you end up with temperatures too hot to wear pants. Or you exercise someplace with ticks and get too sweaty for pants.

Hell, I live as far north as you can go in New England, and I've found ticks on my feet after grilling dinner in my backyard. At some point I just do not care to don my anti-tick hazmat suit every time I do anything outside.

Why do housing prices go up? Partially inflation. But mostly because purchasing a house and renting it out is massively profitable, state subsidized, and a safe way to invest a store of wealth. Owners of capital seek out niches with good risk:value ratios. Look at housing prices over the last 5 years: even if your investment home sat empty, it's probably gone up 70% or more in price. Rent is just profit on top of those (also state-subsidized, way more than any other asset class!) asset gains. Mortgages that are all-but-guaranteed by the state allow even the least-qualified investors to massively leverage themselves into multiple million dollar properties.

The housing market is broken because moneymakers would rather maximize profits and render everyone else homeless than participate in a functional society. Consider a world where investors own 80% of housing in the USA: would they rent it all out? Or would the small number of corporations collaborate to keep _most_ units off the market, massively spiking the cost of housing and increasing the value of their portfolios? Our healthcare market suggests that when it comes to necessities, people are willing to pay literally any price. And our society has become more and more unequal in the past couple of decades, with the top 1% controlling as much capital as the bottom 50%. Logic dictates that the small number of that 1%, or perhaps the top 10%, if forced to pay insane rents for housing, will provide more profit than setting rent prices that everyone can afford.

I don't think we should vilify the average homeowner who doesn't want to end up underwater on their mortgage. We should vilify the government that has allowed market forces to increasingly distort the residential real estate market, to the point where we're starting to squeeze essential jobs like teacher, firefighter, waitress, and nurse out of the market entirely. Both for rentals and purchases.

Right now it doesn't matter if we double the US housing supply in the next year: it'll still get bought up by investors with far deeper pockets than the average family, because those investors have a strong incentive to prop up the real estate bubble -- they've got more skin in the game than anyone else. And they're less discerning, waiving inspections and paying 10% over asking in cash because if the house turns out to be a lemon they'll just absorb it into margins. Or write it off as a business expense -- depreciation!

The US housing market needs a massive overhaul to disincentivize residential property ownership for anything other than owner-dwellings, co-ops, and small, local landlords (to provide flexible rental options for those who move around too much to justify one-time buying costs). Much like a monopoly or oligopoly in the any other industry, large market forces in the housing industry have deeper pockets, more lawyers, more lobbyists, and more time than any small-time player. And those large market forces have a tendency to squeeze everyone else out.

Housing should, first and foremost, put a roof over the head of every person in the country before anyone profits at all. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either directly or indirectly profiting from homelessness.

I find that 4 to 7 day forecasts tend to be 80% accurate. So probably a little bit better than they were when I was a kid.

Unfortunately, the most important part of any forecast IMO is intensity. I don't care if we're going to get snow flurries all day, but if we're going to get a foot of snow, I would like to know -- and not just when the winter storm warning goes into effect!

Similarly, I don't care if we're going to get scattered showers all day. But if we're going to get a downpour in the afternoon, I'd like to know so I can avoid getting caught in a flash flood on a trail or on the road.

Same thing applies with temperature: if it's going to be cold all day, good to know. But if a rainstorm is going to remain active during a deep freeze and create a layer of ice on every exposed surface, I need to be prepared for walking, biking, or driving.

Fortunately there's a somewhat local weather station near me that provides an RSS feed of longform weather forecasts. But I notice that more and more people wind up surprised by slightly-abnormal weather events as they rely more and more on smartphone weather apps. Weather apps that utterly lack the nuance that a paragraph of text can provide.

Sorry, but my Article and Walmart.com accounts do not need 2FA. I'm fine with OTP, but most places use SMS 2FA, which exposes a unique identifier for myself and -- due to SIM swapping, which is a risk on literally every major carrier due to horrible customer service operations -- often makes it easier for a malicious actor to hijack my account.

You're generally correct, though: GOOD 2FA is not overrated and I would welcome it on any account. But it's obnoxious that almost every account I have uses SMS as a singular point of failure. I'd welcome a move back to email 2FA with a backup email for account recovery.

I wish more OSes would work with independent photographers to compile a set of beautiful wallpapers. It used to feel easy to find good wallpaper online, but nowadays, especially with macOS's hiDPI settings and my personal desire for #000 true black wallpapers to hide notches and camera holes, it can feel very difficult. Search engines don't yield good results for 4k or 5k images, and a lot of the hi-res wallpaper subreddits have disappeared since their API debacle.

I source solid wallpapers from a couple of OSes for use in macOS:

* https://stories.gregannandale.com/raspberry-pi-desktop-image...

* Ubuntu has some default hits (and misses): https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/every-ubuntu-default-wallpaper

* Ubuntu hosts a wallpaper competition (most years) for photographers all over the world: https://ubuntu.com/blog/winners-of-the-21-10-wallpaper-compe...

* and here's a somewhat-outdated repo of wallpapers from a bunch of Linux distros: https://github.com/LinuxKits/Distro-wallpapers -- I'm especially fond of the Elementary OS images.

In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press.

Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.

Two ways:

- a Yubikey - a sparingly used email account with no 2FA, just a very long password

2FA through the sort-of-secret email account lets me get back into Bitwarden (and thus everything else) even if my house burns down and I lose access to all of my yubikeys. And auth on a device that doesn't easily support yubikeys, like older iPhones.

2FA is very useful, but highly overrated. If you have a sufficiently long and complex memorized password (and the email platform actually lets you create one that's properly long, 40+ characters), it's unlikely that you'll have any problems unless you accidentally share the password somewhere.

Of course I feel like all my my precautions are moot when my bank and CC company force SMS 2FA. But I haven't found any with superior security schemes anwyway.

Worse, ultrawideband/mmwave 5G and 8k TVs can be a nuisance. I've seen 5G phones repeatedly get "stuck" on a weak or nonexistent mmwave signal while traveling, and it can take quite some time before the phone decides to fall back to a different tower. 8k TVs are cool until you realize that a lot of your cables won't even output 4k signal to them, if the manufacturer didn't implement a decent fallback.

I'm not sure if wifi 7 has similar hangups, but considering the fact that my 10 year old Airport router still does everything I need at home, with an integrated backup for my Macs, it's a hard sell. I still get reduced bufferbloat on the Airport Extreme compared to most commercial routers -- I'm guessing that even when you just use one, modern mesh network configs have some nasty overhead.

Hyperion was a big surprise for me this year as well. I expected it to be good, but the way the first book unfolds a larger universe is incredible. I'm not sure I've read science fiction that feels quite so... planned, and intentional? Especially the way it incorporates Keats' poetry.

Thanks for tipping me off about the Annotated American Gods! I read it ages ago, and I've been yearning to get back into Gaiman lately. This sounds like a good way to do it.

A good reminder that I need to finish my Malazan readthrough! The universe is incredibly deep, the characters are incredibly rich, but I do wish Erikson would let us get a little bit comfier in the shoes of each character for longer stretches of time. I sailed through House of Chains so quickly because I didn't have perspective whiplash, but I find it difficult to keep all of the characters in my head during some sections -- battles in particular are a real challenge for me in the Malazan series.

Highly recommend the series, but a warning: if you find yourself bouncing off book one, don't bother with the rest of the series. I find that the later books are slightly better written and slightly better structured, but the core writing style issues are still there (notably, perspective whiplash and a magic system that is so complex that it sometimes feels like deux ex machina).

An interesting read. Do most engineers really prioritise money this much when accepting an offer? I understand that it feels good to be paid well, and you might as well negotiate, but when most tech jobs pay so much better than other work it seems insane to me to deal with amoral products, uninteresting work, and stressful interactions with shitty management practices just because they threw a big number at you.

The work environment at Snap doesn't even sound that bad, sadly.

* A weirdly culty first day? Plenty of tech companies do weird stuff like that, especially startup-adjacent recent IPOs.

* Incompetent bosses with confusing org charts and poor management skills? Not exactly uncommon in tech!

* Shitty vesting schedules (10/20/30/40 at Snap) -- see Amazon and quite a few other top tech employers.

* Tons of time wasted in sprint planning "marathons" and sprint reviews? Honestly, the 5 hours of planning time per sprint isn't even the worst I've personally experienced. Tends to show up when you have crappy managers with too many direct reports and a tendency towards micromanagement.

* Managers and HR "forgetting" spoken-word arrangements for remote work and vacations -- again, par for the course. A valuable lesson here that you ought to get this stuff in writing, insist on it in email form at the very least, perhaps CC'd to your manager's manager, before you can consider it real. Though I'm not sure how many companies, pre-covid, would honestly allow an software dev to work remotely for a "few weeks" both in the summer and around the holidays when they don't support remote work primarily.

I'm glad Marko got to spend some time with his father before he passed away, so at least there's a happy ending here. Just goes to show that even a crappy work situation can still teach you valuable lessons, and that you really really need to do your due diligence to identify these cultural issues before you sign an offer!

PE has nothing to do with it; they are just looking for returns.

If PE comprises 44% of purchased homes, they're increasing demand, and therefore prices. So they have plenty to do with the current housing market.

Don't let idealism and perfection be the enemy of good: PE is currently distorting the housing market. The government should take steps to prevent PE ownership of housing, either through taxation or blanket bans, because civilisation imperils itself if most people can't afford housing.

I'm sure other measures should be taken to prevent housing from ballooning in cost between generations, too -- we probably want to stabilise it to something resembling inflation (but probably not necessarily locked to that measure?). That's for economists to figure out.

All I know is that housing has skyrocketed in price in the last few years to the point where many will never be able to buy, and more and more are priced out of even renting. Kicking PE out of the market may be a bandaid on a bullethole, but it's better than doing nothing.

Average revenue per user is $70/year in the EU and $230 in the US. But how much of that is profit? How to costs compare between serving a user ads and serving an ad-free user?

Server costs for images, text, and the occasional video can't be that high per user at Facebook's scale of billions.

But costs for the Rube Goldberg machine of ad hosting, recommendations, bidding, and serving? There's a whole lot of backend infra and middleware behind that. We should assume, at the very least, that ad-free users are cheaper for Facebook (unless they go through all of the backend recommendation processes for all users but simply hide ads from ad-free users). I assume that with some optimization ad-free users ought to be significantly cheaper to serve.

Enshittification has really ruined the promise of every new technology. Sure, I believe there's _potential_ for something cool in AI. But all of that potential is overridden by the rent-seeking profit interests of companies that want to carve out a monopoly position in a space and extract the maximum value forever.

Imagine that you want to plan a trip. A travel bot will identify hotels that fit your budget. An agent will know what time of year you’ll be traveling and, based on its knowledge about whether you always try a new destination or like to return to the same place repeatedly, it will be able to suggest locations. When asked, it will recommend things to do based on your interests and propensity for adventure, and it will book reservations at the types of restaurants you would enjoy.

So sort of like AirBnB, but for the entire process of booking a vacation? Sounds neat at first, though I'm skeptical that an AI will ever match my ability to choose destinations, events, and travel plans that encompass all of my minute preferences (many of which have taken me years to discover about myself). I'm sure that this "agent" won't start recommending shitty and overpriced vacations when it achieves critical market share and the time comes to turn the profit screws!

This gets much, much, much, much scarier in the next section:

The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.

Just what I want: our private healthcare industry defining how I should seek medical attention using a faceless algorithm. Nurses and doctors, naturally, have empathy for other human beings and occasionally work in the grey boundaries of the system to help people. But that costs profit. Fortunately, the AI will optimize that empathy away!

AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get.

Do mental health experts truly believe that an AI agent can replace an actual therapist? What a scary, dystopian world, where Bill Gates can afford daily therapy sessions with a human but the lowly Microsoft code monkeys will only be able to speak to a machine...

The rest of the post is an absolute horror show of the kind of out-of-touch nonsense I've come to expect from billionaires like Gates:

liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job

Paperwork, sure. What are these "other tasks", though? Lesson planning? I'm pretty sure optimizing away a small portion of busywork is not the most pressing issue in the teaching world. And naturally this task's dark side is a massive yearly cost extracted from our school system, and oodles of collected personal data about every child, starting in pre-K. Think of the efficiency when we can start advertising to these kids based on what subjects they know best!

If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes.

The next level of "fellow kids".

If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like.

If AI can do all of that, what's the human business owner even doing?

If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you.

Isn't the whole point of that kind of statement that a human being thought of another human being and reached out? But I guess Gates just sees the opportunity to take a cut of flower orders. At least most of your friends won't be able to afford surgery when their insurance AI agents use watch data to deny them healthcare.

Spotify has an AI-powered DJ that not only plays songs based on your preferences but talks to you and can even call you by name.

Wow, AI that _knows my name_? We're really living in the future.

If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.

At what point does a human being manage to outsource hobbies to AI? Because if a friend came to me asking about cameras today, but didn't want to do any of the research or learn anything about the space at all to inform a decision, I would simply respond "don't buy a camera, you won't have any clue how to use it".

To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want.

Interesting. Didn't Gates open this blog post claiming that we wouldn't use apps at all any more? Why would I use an AI agent to create an app in a post-app world?

Although some agents will be free to use (and supported by ads), I think you’ll pay for most of them, which means companies will have an incentive to make agents work on your behalf and not an advertiser’s.

If there's one thing smart TVs, Spotify, iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows have taught me, it's that paying does not matter. If a company can make more money by collecting data and inserting ads, they will. You'd think Gates would know that when Windows literally advertises right on the desktop.

Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now we've come to Gates' main point: he apparently wants to live in communist china, where a single entity owns literally everything. At the rate of monopolisation we've seen in the USA, at least I can believe this prediction.

Accessibility -- native keyboard shortcuts often work better in native apps, and a lot of Electron apps aren't navigable at all without a mouse or with a screen reader.

Lower memory usage than a chromium instance.

Visual consistency.

And, subjectively, the knowledge that the app developer has put more than the minimum effort into the product. I'm not saying that great Electron apps don't exist -- in fact, my current favorite Jellyfin player is one -- but on average, even the best Electron app is worse than a middle-of-the-road native app.

Feedback so far:

* either don't require the `http://` or `https://` prefix for the server URL, or add a note informing users that they need to add it themselves. Technical users can usually figure it out, but others will get angry or lost.

* your icon is slightly larger than literally every other icon in my Dock, and it's mildly jarring

* I have an extensive music library that loads quickly and properly in https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin, my current Jellyfin music player of choice, but nothing loads on the home screen and I see no error at all

I'll definitely keep an eye out for updates, I'd love a good Jellyfin native client for macOS. Consider open sourcing it (or pieces of it), I'd be more than happy to contribute! Good luck!

TIL about 3)! That's fantastic to hear. Password managers sort of do this already, though.

So if you're a competent password manager user, only 1) matters. Passkeys really do seem like a bigger deal to your average user, since 2) and 3) implicitly incorporate password best practices.

My understanding is that it's coming at the end of October. So it should be out soon.

I've also been waiting with bated breath; I simply won't adopt passkeys until I can use a cross platform tool that doesn't try to lock me into a single vendor's hardware or software. But once that's available, I'd be very happy to switch certain accounts to passkeys. It doesn't matter all that much to me since I use unique, long passphrases generated by bitwarden for every account + OTP when I can, but I would slightly prefer a passkey to a password since it's one less thing an auth provider can screw up.

A well reasoned article. Though I think Eben (aka Bike Snob NYC) has a tendency to jump straight into his core arguments without necessarily getting all his readers on the same page (hence the heat in this thread!)

I've done a lot of bike building, repair, maintenance, and comparisons, particularly in the last few years.

Up until 2000 or so, disc brakes did not exist for bicycles in a meaningful way. They were very popular on motorcycles, trains, and automobiles, largely because they provide stopping power for longer than the previous popular technology, drum brakes. And because they are arguably more maintainable than drum brakes, which are allegedly a pain in the ass to work on. Automobiles mostly moved to discs by the 50s or so; trains moved even earlier.

Bikes, on the other hand, had two (or three) competing brake systems prior to the 2000s. The most popular by far worldwide is rim brakes, the familiar clamping system that rubs pads on the rim of the wheel. These work great, are easy to maintain, and easy to fix when something goes wrong. Their biggest downside is wet, and even moreso muddy conditions, which can significantly reduce braking power when crap gets between the pad and the rim. And older cantilever brakes are really really tricky to set up, especially if you don't do it much. The 90s saw a significant improvement here with the development of Shimano's V-brake, which simplified rim brake tweaking to the point where basically anyone could do it.

V-brakes are essentially "good enough for anyone". But racers drive the bicycle part industry. Competition leads to the constant drive for new parts; companies sponsor top racers to get their parts on display at racing events; non-pro racers across the USA spend millions of dollars per year chasing incremental gains with these upgrades.

So racers moved to disc brakes. They were initially really heavy (they require attachment points and pad hardware that's much more substantial than the rim brake equivalents), really expensive, and not much of an improvement over rim brakes. Eventually folks figured out that hydraulic brakes (which use tubes filled with mineral oil instead of cables for actuation) could provide extra stopping power with less effort. And so all racing bikes adopted hydraulic disc brakes in the early 2010s.

Unfortunately, everything in the bike industry chases racing fads. There are only a couple of major parts manufacturers (shimano and SRAM) that make complete sets of brakes, drivetrains, and levers. This is changing with the recent growing popularity of brands like microShift, but most frame manufacturers have existing relationships with shimano and SRAM -- picture something like the Qualcomm domination in the smartphone SoC industry. And since those two big brands build racing and racing-inspired equipment, that's what we all get.

Most commuters do not need hydraulic disc brakes. They are an expensive luxury; there's no denying the stopping power is superior, but you don't need it if you're riding at 10-20mph across town to get to your job or pick up some groceries. As other commenters have pointed out, you're also fucked if something happens to one of your brake lines (aka oil filled tubes) because it's nearly impossible to fix on the road. That's a big downside!

Anyway, sorry for the rant -- the discussion here just really ground my gears because it's so similar to the flaws I see with our community when folks talk about technology or even finance: people don't acknowledge that there's context (and personal preference) involved with picking the right tool for the job.

Disc brakes are kind of like Kubernetes: great for heavy workloads, occasionally a pain, but overkill for the lighter workloads unless you enjoy geeking out (that's the personal preference bit). Rim brakes are more like running something on a Raspberry Pi: dumb for heavy workloads, but often a good price:performance ratio for lighter workloads.

I wish folks in our community would have a little more empathy and mutual understanding instead of constantly insisting that they're correct. I feel like HN used to be better about this, but I think this behaviour has crept in more and more since Reddit self-immolated.

I own a Subaru Crosstrek from this same era, it definitely has the Starlink bits in the cockpit ceiling.

There must be more to this story. I've parked that car in an underground parking garage with absolutely no signal on any carrier for at least 2 weeks straight (likely more) with no issue. I've parked it for days at trailheads and wild camping spots around the High Rockies where there's also no signal.

I 100% believe that the Starlink module is poorly programmed, reliant on false assumptions of 3G always existing, and capable of draining the battery. But I would really love to know why that's never happened to me.