> US is because it's functionally illegal for it to exist.
This feels like one of those 'burying the lede' situations.
Can you explain what's functionally illegal (and I admit that I'm mildly curious about the distinction of functional illegality and non-functional illegality) about this existing?
I'm as breathless as you are, after reading that second paragraph, but I nonetheless remain ignorant about the nuances of the legality of this situation.
Basically every diesel engine after the early 2010s needed to have several emissions systems (EGR, DPF + DEF). You can do some reading on them if you're curious, but they basically all reduce reliability, efficiency (DPFs choke exhaust, and airflow is critical to a diesel running well), and power from the same engine without them.
In terms of legality, it means manufactures need to include all of those systems and their associated complexity, but the way that this startup is getting around it is using engines that were built before those requirements and are thus grandfathered into not needing them.
Also on the legal side, there's a thriving black market of mechanics who are willing to rip all those systems out of diesel engines. It's not uncommon to see double-digit percent increases in both power and fuel economy after it's done. The EPA has prosecuted a few cases against shops and parts suppliers for those "diesel deletes"
> Basically every diesel engine after the early 2010s needed to have several emissions systems (EGR, DPF + DEF)
Not true at all.
Every diesel engine sold after the early 2010s is not permitted to emit a certain amount of soot particles of certain sizes, and not permitted to emit certain concentrations of certain gases.
Manufacturers don’t have to use a DPF or EGR or DEF to achieve that. They can do it however they want.
Having lived around Africa for three years and in Latin America for two, I’m extremely happy the EPA doesn’t let vehicles belch black smoke into the air.
FWIW I’m a car nut, currently own a diesel with all those systems. Have also owned a 6BT 12 and 24 valve. I do not want to stand, or have my kid stand near the exhaust.
I don’t recall exactly wha the Trump admin has changed but I know there have been changes on emission requirements. The way I understood this is historically all equipment with diesel motors have had pretty strict requirements for emissions and an engine like this would simply not be possible.
My take on this is you are throwing all the good things away about modern engines. You could easily make a right to repair tractor with low tech but still enjoy modern improvements.
Which is extremely practical for French, where the colon comes after a space. So if you want to write an actual colon to introduce a list on the following line, you’ll just input whatever the default smiley is.
> Disabled people are allowed to call ourselves by the correct labels without apologising that our suffering is less severe or less obvious than someone else sharing the same label.
I think you guys are perhaps talking past each other.
The fact you acknowledge and recognise 'less severe' (a significant understatement when comparing ASD to Downs) suggests that you do understand parent's point.
Parent, I also note, was not seeking or implying an apology was sought from people with less severe genetic conditions. Rather, that the implications on QoL, lifespan, social / familial imposition etc of Downs, is nothing at all like so called high-functioning ASD.
The parent comment was specifically and exclusively talking about autism, not Down's syndrome. I'm addressing their claim that it is "ridiculous" for an autistic person to "claim" to be autistic when other autistic people have worse outcomes.
I'm not interested in litigating the fairly obvious point that Down's syndrome is a much worse prognosis than ASD, and the comment to which I responded says nothing about it either.
It's a source of minor, but persistent, annoyance that security people have tried to abscond with the prefix cyber, morphing it into a synonym for security.
Having grown up reading cyberpunk novels about life in cyberspace, a passing interest in cybernetics (though not of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation variety), it's frustrating to lose a 'this means computer or internet related' prefix.
Without consequences for illegal behaviour, there's no incentive for bad actors to not continue acting bad. This, in no small part, explains why we are where we are today - a misplaced attempt to 'move forward' by ignoring illegal actions.
Without holding those who do wrong to account, positive movement will always be dogged or straight-up negated by those who do wrong without facing justice.
That'll only work here if there are reforms to the pardon power while we're at it. Any convictions a Democratic administration manages to obtain will be pardoned the next time a Republican gets in.
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
Pure solar is indeed to much of a constraint, it make it more challenging than propelling humans over roads in an enclosure needs to be.
A big problem is sharing the road with conventional vehicles. Many could probably drive straight though it, a Tesla could probably drive straight though it.
If the car must be a strong metal container the choices quickly reduce to the things on the market right now.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
It was the fact you started using units the world knows - albeit misspelling metre - but in the next sentence, comparing that same dimension, you used an apostrophe to allude to a unit that only 5% of the planet uses.
Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.
Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.
That’s only because of the thermal storage. The output of the solar collectors is massively impacted by clouds, also just by haze and aerosols, much more than PV, which is happy with diffuse and direct sunlight.
Then there’s the cost, which has not been good for CSP’s market share.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
"Bad" comes in many shapes and sizes. Specifically, "technically competent person implementing a thing designed by a technically incompetent person" is remarkably different from "technically incompetent person implementing a thing designed by a technically competent person".
The way this plays out in practice is that those products you listed can hire actual UX designers, but many product decisions are made by people focusing on business concerns rather than product concerns, so you have competent people implementing designs by incompetent people.
Inversely, because open source software is usually built by people trying to scratch their own itches, they those people actually understand what the product should be, but, because they're usually software engineers instead of UX designers, they're typically incompetent at UX design. So you have incompetent people (devs with their UX design hat on) implementing designs by competent people (those same devs, with their "scratch my own itch" product owner hat on)
No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.
Gimp's single window mode was made the default years ago now, so that's not a great example anymore - there's scientific software that uses that paradigm that might work better, but most of that isn't OSS. Also, Libreoffice being slow and having bad font rendering seems pretty inline with Word nowadays...
Amusingly enough, the only OSS desktop applications with good UIs got them by shamelessly stealing from commercial software that had actual paid engineers and UI/UX researchers.
The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.
Depends on your system. A few years ago I ran it on a MacBook where scrolling on an empty page took ages. Seems nobody tried it out on a Mac before releasing the port since it was totally unusable. Hopefully it's fixed now, but I wouldn't recommend a piece of software I don't trust to anyone.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.
Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.
An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.
As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this?
The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.
Microsoft Teams was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.
Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.
For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.
Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.
Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.
Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.
>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.
My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it.
Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week
Lots of that is momentum and politicking. Or the result of decades of concerted effort to associate your product with it's niche, from education to industry, like Adobe
This feels like one of those 'burying the lede' situations.
Can you explain what's functionally illegal (and I admit that I'm mildly curious about the distinction of functional illegality and non-functional illegality) about this existing?
I'm as breathless as you are, after reading that second paragraph, but I nonetheless remain ignorant about the nuances of the legality of this situation.
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