Funny that GP whas one of the comments that made immediate intuitive sense to me. By the simple principle of demand / supply ~ price, price controls (in a time of high prices, which is because of scarcity), should inhibit creation of more supply. Leaving prices to their natural forces should allow creation of more supply, which, regardless of the price level, should relax the market and lead to lower prices.
While price controls might keep the supply affordable to a larger share of the population, that doesn't help the fact that there isn't enough supply, so instead of money, other mechanisms influence who gets to buy the goods. This could be: Who is most willing to invest an unhealthy amount of time and energy, who is eligible to maybe acquire state funding, or simply who is the lucky one. Is any of this better than letting money decide? I tend to think no and think it would be better to have a functioning market with reasonable prices.
The fundamental issue that it's a hard problem (no matter if on X11/Wayland/Windows/Mac), which can only be solved by the apps and toolkits themselves.
It's only a hard problem if you want to make it one. Mac and Wayland have a pretty elegant and simple solution that does not complicate things. There is nothing wrong at rendering at higher DPI and scaling down. But that's not the problem with X11, the problems there are deeper as explained in the comment I referenced.
There's nothing wrong with OS level down-scaling? Can you show examples screenshots and videos of this? I will assume that
- it will require a lot more memory for cached textures etc. since these are created in a virtualized pixel space
- it will look more blurry and wrong, most importantly the text will be less than crisp.
Apart from that, in many situations you have to scale _up_. Try any older random Windows application (that hasn't declared "DpiAwareness"), even older Windows system dialogs, on a HiDpi monitor (say 27" 4K which is about ~163dpi). They get up-scaled by the system and they look _bad_.
"Technically correct" about fundamental limitations of reality but you still hate the truth and it's X11's fault?
I'm not even trying to defend X11, I don't have much love for it. I've done some Xlib programming in the past and I've hated it. I've never used Wayland, and I'm mostly on Windows these days.
But, I don't see how one could make a point that X11 is bad because of poor DPI support.
Some of the problems are indeed due to the sheer difficulty to implement proper high DPI/mixed DPI support, but some mentioned in the GP are definitely inflicted by the X11 protocol:
>Spanning two monitors results in terrible scaling problems.
>Apps that do account for it at start up won't account for it during reposition, so they look fine if they open on the right monitor and terrible if moved to the other.
Especially the second point. Applications on Wayland simply get told what scale they should draw on. No need to determine whether they are on the right monitor or the other monitor, yada yada. For those problems, how can you say X11 is not bad, when clearly other protocols have shown the problem is solvable?
> Positioning a window across different displays only scales it correctly on one.
Apart from automatic OS-level scaling applied as a post-processing step, which is almost guaranteed to look bad, this one is basically impossible to fix (from a technical standpoint). If you need to move "smoothly" between monitors, get identical monitors.
You can do that if you move between apartments (and can afford to pay the service), but not if you're getting a few things spontaneously.
> Some places just aren't densely populated enough to ever make public transport work well. Many places are though, even quite small cities, and then it's freedom to not have a car.
That's why it's never either-or but typically both. Most people need, and have, access to a car in one way or another. That doesn't mean they don't use the public transport, bicycle, or walk by foot when they can.
I don't enjoy stating the obvious, but driving cars is still relatively safe and trains are not a replacement.
Where I live (south germany), for many trips that we can agree are kind of necessary (e.g. daily commute to work), trains can take 4-5x more time. There are other places where it's probably much worse.
There are other reasons why trains are not a replacement, for example cargo. Are you taking home your new cupboard, sofa, or fridge, on a train?
The key thing is, in urban areas you can get by without a car. The big cities obviously - I lived in Munich for well over a decade without a car or a driver's license, and the only point in time where I was happy that my wife has a license was when we had to put our cats to rest - hauling an alive cat in public transport is okay, but hauling a dead cat in public transport, no damn way.
But also the less urban areas... Landshut? Everything well accessible with a bike, get a trailer and you can move around pretty much everything including a Bierbank and a whole ass grill setup - just a day or two ago, someone legitimately posted a photo of themselves, a cargo bike and a full size fridge. During the day, public transit with buses covers even the tiny villages around Landshut, despite the LAVV actually being ranked among the worst public transit systems in Germany.
> Are you taking home your new cupboard, sofa, or fridge, on a train?
For these cases get them delivered and hauled by professionals. That's how my wife and I dealt with our new sofas, IKEA charged something around 100€, or Saturn 40€ for our new dryer - a bargain, compared to having to haul that shit on our own.
I live in a city of 250.000 inhabitants that is very bicycle friendly and I estimate has an OK public transport. We recently moved (from <40m2 to >80m2) and in the last weeks we got: fridge, washing machine, dinner table, couch, bed, huuuge cupboards and wardrobe closets, chairs, and many smaller items. And I got myself a rig for sim-racing.
I got all of that used either from friends and family, or from kleinanzeigen.de (that's like Craigslist I think). We saved thousands of euros by getting used quality things, instead of new, possibly poor quality, IKEA items. And we did good for sustainability.. But that was only possible by doing spontaneous 5-20km car rides. For the sim-racing rig, driving a bit farther was necessary.
I also went to the hardware store, which is inconvenient to reach by public transport, more than a couple of times.
I don't see how I would have been able to be spontaneous and cheap like that, without a car, or even with a car that wasn't my own.
If you don't have a car, you're going to have a different life. You will make different compromises. You're not going to live in certain places. You're not going to take certain jobs. You might not visit some of your friends and family as often. You might buy new things just because they will be delivered straight to your home (having someone else drive the car).
Of course your life won't end, you might even enjoy it. But you're not _replacing_ the car by a train in many cases. You're just not doing things that you would otherwise do, and some of these will be done, possibly _need_ to be done, by other people instead.
I still take the bike or train when I can, and I like to walk to places within walking distance -- even 30-60 minutes if I have the time. Admittedly, sometimes I take the car instead of public transport only because it's a little bit cheaper or a little more convenient.
I do use city-wide public transport once in a while, but I don't own a monthly public transport ticket because it probably wouldn't pay off since I have a bicycle and a car. A single-trip public transport ticket for 10 minutes is around 3 Euros. If I need to get somewhere quickly (and back) and take the dog (which isn't free), that's closer to 10 Euros. IMO public transport shouldn't advantage the daily users as much in terms of cost (say 60 Euros/month even for people who may use it > 50 times a month), because it prevents adoption.
> But that was only possible by doing spontaneous 5-20km car rides. For the sim-racing rig, driving a bit farther was necessary.
Yeah, but you don't need your own car for such things. In Landshut for example, there's a car sharing association, and if we would need to go on such a ride we could just rent a car from them, there's always at least five of them available. And on top of that: a move is like what, a once in a decade event?
A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.
The hardcore "car brains" are the worst - so many people who own a car spec it to the demands of their once-a-year vacation trip (and massively overpay as a result) when a cheap Dacia Spring (~17k new) would be more than enough for their daily demands and they could just go and rent a large car for the vacation trip.
> In Landshut for example, there's a car sharing association,
Driving like at least 20 times alone would have cost me what, maybe 1000 bucks? Ignoring all the other trouble that makes it less spontaneous.
Also, those cars specifically aren't the right size to transport furniture in the first place. I also can't wear them down like my own car.
> a move is like what, a once in a decade event?
Depends, but there are other situations where you want to move things.
> A car is hundreds of euros a month (the cost of the car itself / depreciation, maintenance, fuel, replacement parts, insurance, rent for a garage plus of course the fuel). It's an incredible waste of money to own a car if all you're realistically using it is once a year for a trip to Italy and once a year to haul some furniture.
Our car is a relatively cheap one, probably 150-200 euros a month all in (about 50 Euros/month for fuel, 50 Euros/month insurance and taxes, about 3500 Euros for buying and maintenance in 3.5 years, you can expect the average cost of ownership here to go down if we hold it for another couple years). Apart from commute (2x/week), we use it 1-2x per week on average. Plus, we can use it for holidays and other trips.
For the basic person-transport needs we could probably use Car Sharing cars if we need it less than 5 times per month (we need it more), but it would be less ergonomic.
That sounds really weird. Why are you keen to hold a human accountable? In my book it's an improvement that autonomous driving is significantly lowering the fatality rate (and we can expect it to decrease further), while simultaneously lowering the direct accountability of single humans. I wouldn't wish anyone the misfortune of being involved in a fatality. The less involvement the better.
Because there are companies like Tesla that keep putting up cars with inadequate technology (cameras instead of LIDAR/radar) or testing on the road and people die as a result of this penny pinching, but no one at Tesla got punished in any way or form for this decision.
On top of that we got the way over the top marketing claims, which routinely leads to one scenario: Tesla drivers engaging the autopilot and playing games on their phones, followed by the autopilot either unable to detect a dangerous situation or disengage once the crash becomes inevitable so it doesn't get counted as an Autopilot incident [1].
At this point, it is willful negligence but we don't have a way to hold Tesla accountable. That is why I want to see high-ranking executives, up to and including its CEO, be held on trial for manslaughter at least.
And hell even here in Europe, Tesla's garbage on wheels causes issues. Both in Germany [2] and Sweden [3] we have had drivers fall asleep for minutes while Autopilot was engaged. This kind of crap was promised to not happen, but apparently someone at Tesla fucked that up. I'm amazed that Autopilot has held up and prevented either driver from actually crashing into something, but the failure of engaging safety mode and come to a safe stop if the driver becomes inattentive for whatever reason is inacceptable, period.
And it's not just Tesla that fails to deal with the damages their shit technology causes. Remember Waymo's honking incidents that went on for weeks [4]? At a minimum, this shit should have led to a) immediate cessation of operation, b) damages being paid to the neighbors who got hit by this noise and c) to a fully transparent audit which uncovers why that happened and what steps were made to prevent a reoccurence.
I'm sick and tired of multi-billion dollar megacorporations using the general populace as a free testbed for their crap instead of doing the proper thing that everyone else does - test on closed-off roads and dedicated test tracks.
My point is, no matter if it is effective or not, I don't want multi-billion dollar companies to use society as a free-to-kill testing ground for their garbage on wheels.
As said: when a human kills or maims someone with a car, that human gets consequences to feel. When a corporation does the same, they have to pay pittances and that's it. This cannot stand any longer.
Are you accusing those companies of practicing free-to-kill when the numbers, based on everything we have on the table, say the opposite, i.e. the technologies are saving lives?
Would you simultaneously prefer being able to accuse someone who is involved in a car fatality of being a murderer for being basically stupid and careless (like almost everyone is once in a while) and unlucky at the same time, when different technology (autonomous driving) likely would have prevented the accident in the first place?
That's about the kind of claim you would expect from someone openly claiming connections with Antifa.
Intentions (especially those projected by some onto others) don't matter much -- it's the result, the numbers (here, fatalities) that make all the difference.
> Are you accusing those companies of practicing free-to-kill when the numbers, based on everything we have on the table, say the opposite, i.e. the technologies are saving lives?
You did notice that I singled out Tesla and Waymo here, correct? BMW for example does stuff the right way - they opened a dedicated test track in 2023 [1] instead of developing on the open road, Volkswagen does their testing with a human safety driver behind the wheel [2], and Mercedes had their Level 3 system actually certified and audited, a worldwide first by the way [3].
I don't have anything against autonomous vehicles, in fact I believe they are a vital solution to providing individual mobility in rural areas that can't ever be economically served by public transport.
All I want is that companies don't outsource costs to society at large. Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen do this, Waymo and Tesla don't. They just do whatever they want, zero considerations and zero effort, while our industry does things by the book and has more expenses as a result.
> That's about the kind of claim you would expect from someone openly claiming connections with Antifa.
That's a low blow, you know it, and you also know it's against HN rules.
> You did notice that I singled out Tesla and Waymo here, correct?
Yes I did notice, and do the numbers and results that we are talking about not apply to them? Do you have more ammunition to continue to use the term free-to-kill, or want to consider if the use of the term may be a bit ideology laden?
> Yes I did notice, and do the numbers and results that we are talking about not apply to them?
They do but still I'm not willing to give these two multi-billion dollar megacorps a hall pass for penny pinching with deadly results when our car industry shows that better ways of doing things exist.
Not everything needs to be done by the typical Silicon Valley strategy of "move fast, break things" - especially not when the things being broken are literal human lives.
Quite frankly, I'm not an expert in the technologies or what numbers have been published -- but 50 fatalities which was brought up above is nothing compared to the lives saved by a safer technology. It may even be nothing compared to the lives saved by making the cars just a bit cheaper or making them arrive at the market just a bit earlier, or may be nothing compared to the fatalities that happened when people were rushing to the car store, or... you get the point.
Calling Teslas garbage on wheels doesn't help either, when the accident and defect statistics seem to indicate otherwise. Not a Tesla fanboy by the way, but the discussion around Tesla seems to me to be unfair especially in certain circles.
> Calling Teslas garbage on wheels doesn't help either, when the accident and defect statistics seem to indicate otherwise.
Uh, Tesla routinely has people wait for months for spare parts [1]. Bad logistics, okay, excusable for a company just a year or two in business, but Tesla is in for well over a decade now. That's also a contributor in why Tesla vehicles cost significantly more to insure [2], with reports of carriers refusing Tesla vehicles at all cropping up even a year ago [3], and all models being listed as "difficult to insure" in NYC [4]. In Germany, the situation appears to be similar, with serious premiums compared to other cars [5]. And that's all before thinking about the current wave of politically motivated vandalism - say some idiot bashes in a window, good luck getting a replacement in time, not to mention the insurance premium hike that's inevitable after filing a claim.
As for defects, well, the build quality of the Cybertruck is so much a meme at this point that I won't waste time researching on it. Steel sheets literally falling off the vehicle. The bloody thing turning rusty from ordinary rain. No matter what, that's inacceptable.
> Not a Tesla fanboy by the way, but the discussion around Tesla seems to me to be unfair especially in certain circles.
It's not like the criticism isn't well founded in facts. The decision of forgoing LIDAR (by Musk himself, who called LIDAR a "crutch" [6]) has been debated for years, the constant overpromises and underdeliveries led to a multitude of legal issues and SEC trouble, so did the various other issues surrounding lemon laws, general build quality and spare parts availability that I've linked before. And there's a shocking report of someone claiming to be a Tesla IT insider from 2018 that details very shoddy IT practices [7].
And that's before getting to the Cybertruck which is such a dangerous design that it's deemed unsafe to drive on European roads (with the "workarounds" some people found [8] being under serious questioning) or the completely deranged actions of its leader of the last month.
It's a general issue with typed languages. Types are either too fine-grained or too coarse. Some more sophisticated languages can infer a whole lot but static type checking is still confusing and slows down builds. I tend to not worry much about them anymore -- about C language level types (maybe a bit more) is helpful and important for performance, but beyond that (e.g. types get dynamically instanciated from templates by the compiler) returns are diminishing quickly for many tasks.
The biggest robustness gains often come from making the right architectural decisions. That also applies to error handling as you described.
After starting my career in dynamically-typed systems for about the first 15 years, I'm pretty solidly in the camp of statically-typed systems.
However, I think it's really easy for a statically-typed-systems user to get a bit too enamored with static types even so, and start trying to stuff too much stuff in there. Anyone who thinks that the job of static types is to make all conceivable errors impossible is invited to go learn Haskell and then spend some time trying to write a non-trivial program, like, say, a GUI that also interacts with the network somehow, using an effects system to its maximum capability to perfectly carefully constrain every single function.
It is academically impure to do things like the author mentions and have a search object that will fail if you call a certain method without having constructed it a certain way. No question. And no question, this impurity can result in bugs in real code in the real world.
On the other hand, if one takes the time to create the absolutely perfect crate for Rust that absolutely perfectly expresses all possible combinations of options and methods that such a package could have, you could conceivably end up with a package with literally 10 times or more the number of types, that requires more steps to create a search than the simpler one, that is in fact so complicated that it turns the simple task of "please look for string x in string y" into something that a new programmer can't even understand anymore, and even a senior programmer might have to fight through some docs and ultimately just copy/paste an example and hope for the best...
... and the designer must ask the question, is that actually better? In practice, and not in theory?
Bugs are not created equal.
The academic worldview implicitly accepts the premise that an infinite amount of work is worth doing to eliminate the smallest possibility of the smallest bug with the smallest consequences.
A coder who lives in the real world needs to examine that premise carefully and decide if it matches their current situation, and if as is quite likely it does not, take appropriate actions. Static type systems offer a fantastic cost/benefit tradeoff in many real-world situations, but there is a point of diminishing returns.
If we have, why doesn't the market do its thing and bring back prices to a level affordable to the majority of citizens?