I'd rather have that issue than seeing "AI" plastered all over the place. I'm of the opinion AI should be reserved for artificial general intelligence. These things aren't intelligent yet. They're just em-bloat-ified traditional machine learning techniques. Not that they're useless. I just hate the terminology.
If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is.
We lost this fight at least by 1994 when Sun acquired “Thinking Machines,” which to its credit was bankrupting itself by making highly parallel supercomputers, at least. Now of course there is a new AI company of the same name. If the wrestling world echoes the computing world, one can only wonder what in 5-10 years will be the equivalent of Undertaker throwing Mankind off of Hell In A Cell to plummet 16 feet down through an announcer’s table...
I absolutely love Emacs, but I can't understand why people want it to be their window manager, of all things. Emacs can be many things, but high performance it is not. And WMs definitely are a high performance area.
They’re really not. Stability matters, but a wm has very little to do with actual rendering, it’s more placement, title bar and decorations, emacs as slow as it can be would be perfectly fine unless you have some crazy extensions on top, hence running two instances.
Is Wayland really that bad though? I switched from Awesome to Hyprland, and the gaming support (VRR, HDR), among other things is much more straightforward. For normal desktop usage, I haven't seen much of a difference. Certainly not a negative one.
Wayland completely punted on the remote display capabilities of X11. There has been no effort to replicate this functionality. If you switch to Wayland, you can no longer run GUI apps through SSH.
Same here. Any replacement I moved to needed to have content centering, where the margin around the cells is equal in both dimensions when the cells don't fit perfectly into the window. Kinda crazy that it's not a feature in a lot of terminals I checked over the years. I wouldn't even consider myself OCD, but it drove me nuts until I found a terminal that let me do it.
I wish for both to succeed. I'm more of a Nim guy, but it's nice that there is a modernized C-like alternative to C gaining traction.
My biggest complaint about both is the lack of built-in run-time polymorphism. Rust gets you comptime and runtime polymorphism in one complete package. Nim makes use of shallow inheritance, which I find hacky, because it only lets you go one level deep. And Zig's stdlib makes it the norm to construct vtables manually, which is absolutely grotesque in my opinion. Why are we manually creating vtables in a "modern" language in 2025?
I feel qualified to offer a guess as to why: in Zig (and Odin) reuse is mainly done through what basically is templates. This reduces the need for vtables only when true ”plugin” type of objects are the only solution. For Zig and Odin, the only stdlib usages are for allocators and streams. These few usecases are way too few to motivate a full fledged interface feature, and consequently it’s not added.
So it’s both a lack of usecases, as well as a desire to prefer templates over interfaces for reuse, typically due to performance concerns.
I live in Canada, which is similar to the US in this regard, and I can't believe how enslaved we are to the private automobile.
If you want the freedom to move across vast amounts of open nature, then yeah the private automobile is a good approximation for freedom of mobility. But designing urban areas that necessitate the use of a private vehicle (or even mass transit) for such essentials as groceries or education is enslavement. I don't buy the density argument either. Places that historically had the density to support alternative modes of transportation, densities that are lower than they are today, are only marginally accessible to alternative forms of transportation today. Then there is modern development, where the density is decreased due to infrastructure requirements.
To me, "urban planning" has a lot to answer for. They seem to have the foresight of a moth. However, they are probably constrained by politics which is similar.
Can you reasonably get by without a car? For most Americans the answer is no. Therefore, yes you are enslaved. You don't have the freedom to choose how you get to work, you have to spend money on a car.
Do you understand what enslavement is? Because it’s not “i can’t reasonably get by,” it’s “I am not recognized as human, I am legally property and have no rights.”
Heard an anecdote about a German engineer who was in California (I think San Francisco, but if it was Los Angeles then the distances involved would be even larger) for meetings with American colleagues, and thought he would drive up to Oregon for a day trip. His American colleagues asked him to take another look at the scale on the bottom right of the map, and calculate the driving time. Once he ran the numbers, he realized that his map-reading instincts, trained in Germany, were leading him astray: the scale of maps he was used to had him thinking it was a 2- or 3-hour drive from San Francisco to Oregon. But in fact it's a 6-hour drive just to get to the Oregon border from SF, and if you want to head deeper into the interior then it's probably 9 to 10 hours depending on where you're going.
So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is. It stretches across an entire continent in the E-W direction, and N-S (its shortest border) still takes nearly a full day. (San Diego to Seattle is about 20 hours, and that's not even the full N-S breadth of the country since you can drive another 2.5 hours north of Seattle before reaching the Canadian border). In fact, I can find a route that goes nearly straight N-S the whole way, and takes 25 hours to drive, from McAllen, TX to Pembina, ND: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BpvjrzJvvdjD9vdi9
Train travel is sometimes feasible in America (I am planning Christmas travel with my family, and we are planning to take a train from Illinois to Ohio rather than fly, because the small Illinois town we'll be in has a train station but no airport; counting travel time to get to the airport, the train will be nearly as fast as flying but a lot cheaper). But there are vast stretches of the country where trains just do not make economic sense, and those whose only experience is in Europe usually don't quite realize that until they travel over here. For most people, they might have an intellectual grasp of the vastness of the United States, but it takes experiencing it before you really get it deep down. Hence why the very smart German engineer still misread the map: his instincts weren't quite lined up with the reality of America yet, and so he forgot to check the scale of the map.
> there are vast stretches of the country where trains just do not make economic sense
There are plenty of city pairs where high speed trains do make economic sense and America still doesn't have them. [1] is a video "56 high speed rail links we should've built already" by CityNerd. And that's aside from providing services for the greater good instead of for profit - subsidizing public transport to make a city center more walkable and more profitable and safer and cleaner can be a worthwhile thing. The US government spends a lot subsidizing air travel.
> So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is
China had some 26,000 miles of high speed rail two years ago, almost 30,000 miles now connecting 550 cities, and adding another couple of thousand miles by 2030. A hundred plus years ago America had train networks coast to coast. Now all Americans have is excuses why the thing you used to have and tore up is impossible, infeasible, unafordable, unthinkable. You have reusable space rockets that can land on a pillar of fire. If y'all had put as much effort into it as you have into special pleading about why it's impossible, you could have had it years ago.
Personally, I'd blame California for American voters' distaste for subsidizing high-speed rail. They look at the massive budget (and time) overruns of California's celebrated high-speed rail, and say "I don't want that waste of money happening in MY state, funded with MY state taxes" and then vote against any proposed projects.
This is, of course, a massively broad generalization, and there will be plenty of voters who don't fit that generalization. But the average American voter, as best I can tell, recoils from the words "high-speed rail" like Dracula would recoil from garlic. And I do believe that California's infamous failure (multiple failures, even) to build the high-speed rail they have been working on for years has a lot to do with that "high-speed rail is a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer dollars" knee-jerk reaction that so many voters have.
Focusing on remote spots is largely a different topic. If the majority of driving was to remote spots then we'd have 90% less driving and cars wouldn't be a problem.
Honestly people really just dont understand how far apart things are. And yeah the good remote spots are a 4 hour drive from the city (and you aren’t even half way across the state at that point).
The forests and wilderness of the PNW are much, much, much, much more remote and wild than virtually anywhere you’d go in Europe. Like not even close.
It seems like people are just talking past each other here. The fact is that 99% of driving is not done by people in the process of visiting remote nature destinations.
Also, the USA is not the only big country in the world... I live in a small city in Patagonia. The nearest towns are 60 km, 90 km, and 480 km away. But you can still live without a car in the city.
they can't also realize a country that ditches personal vehicles can invest in buses or more trains to "remote places". nor they realize the vehicle industry is one of the biggest pollutants on micro-plastic; which screws the "remote nature" as well our health
In the future, I hope this becomes a thing. As cars become more commodotised and self driving taxis can be ordered easily maybe there'll be competing mass fleets?
Or have a "car-cabin-without-engine-and-wheels" and treat it like a packet on a network of trains and "skateboard car platforms".
Is this satire? In the nordics we have allemansrätten, the right to use even private land to camp as long as you're not too close to where someone lives, not to mention huge national parks. In the US you have the right to get shot if you enter private land.
The average american mind can't comprehend this works out to a huge number of them having to commute by car 1-2 hours per day to get to work in some ungodly urban sprawl while living an alienated existence in crappy suburbs, and destroying the environment while doing so. At the same time working far more, slaving year round with laughable paid vacation time or sick day provisions, while being subjected to far worse homicide rates, and being treated as subjects by cops.
No I love being stuck in traffic every day of the week for hours, its totally worth it because I can drive to an empty patch of grassland that no one wants to go to and there's nothing there. That's why cars are so amazing and freedom granting. Trains can't take you to the middle of nowhere to do nothing for the 1% of the time you don't want to be near other civilization so cars are better
lol, yeah. Meanwhile they can't even comprehend that it's a false dillema: Europeans have cars just fine, even several per family.
They just don't have to use them all the time since they can take the more efficient public transport, and they can buy one after college even, they don't need to drive one from 16 yo just to be able to get around...
Infringement on a right doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The perspective with which we look at rights vs. privileges matters in a society, so it's not just semantics.
If people start using the term AI, we better be living in I, Robot. Not whatever the hell this is.
Tangential rant. Sorry.
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