efaref (u/efaref) - Readit News

efaref commented on In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution e360.yale.edu/digest/new-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

potato3732842 · 3 months ago

Nobody was even thinking about CO2 when the policies that got Europe where they are were enacted.

Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.

Giving a crap about CO2 is a recent thing.

efaref · 3 months ago

I don't know about mainland Europe, but in the UK it really was exclusively about CO2 emissions per distance travelled, to the extent that Vehicle Excise Duty (the annual tax you pay on a car) was defined in terms of g/km of CO2 emitted. This happened in 2001 and wasn't changed until the wake of the emissions cheating scandals [1].

[1] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables/rates-for-cars-re...

efaref commented on We Lost Something: 1970s REPLs Were Better Than Modern Development Environments programmingsimplicity.sub... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

rr808 · 3 months ago

Speaking of better in the old days, MSVC in the 90s had edit and continue, where you could stop in a debugger, change the source code and move the current breakpoint back and run it again. Even VBA had this 30 years ago, why cant I do in Python?

efaref · 3 months ago

The visual IDEs of the 90s (MSVC, Borland Delphi, heck even MS Visual Basic) were way more tightly integrated, performant and usable than anything we have today, despite running on hardware with a fraction of the power. It seems so bizarre how much we've regressed.

efaref commented on Microservices should form a polytree bytesauna.com/post/micros... · Posted by u/mapehe

munchler · 3 months ago

Came here to say the same thing. A general-purpose microservice that handles authentication or sends user notifications would be prohibited by this restriction.

efaref · 3 months ago

Or DNS.

I think the article is just nonsense.

efaref commented on In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution e360.yale.edu/digest/new-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

Aurornis · 3 months ago

> though diesel engines spit out a bunch of bad stuff.

Exactly. The noxious tailpipe emissions in a city are usually from diesel trucks, small vehicles like motorcycles (small or absent catalytic converters), modified vehicles (catalytic converter removed or diesel reprogrammed to smoke), but not modern gasoline ICE vehicles.

The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.

PM2.5 is also a broad category of particulates that come from many sources. The PM2.5 levels in the air depend on many sources, with wind being a major factor in changing PM2.5 levels. It’s hard to draw conclusions when a number depends on the weather and a lot of other inputs.

efaref · 3 months ago

The love for diesel came from a catastrophic misunderstanding and the resulting belief that CO2 must be reduced at all costs. Diesel engines of the past produced slightly less CO2 per km than petrol engines in exchange for much worse overall emissions. The fact that they were slightly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption helped with the sales pitch, too.

efaref commented on Why Steve Jobs Went 'Thermonuclear' over Android (2014) pcmag.com/opinions/why-st... · Posted by u/thunderbong

kalleboo · 2 years ago

Reportedly, the original Android was more of a Blackberry ripoff, with a keyboard and directional keys instead of a touchscreen. Once they saw what the iPhone was doing, they quickly pivoted and changed the whole product, so the Android we see today has nothing to do with the Android of 2004.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4...

efaref · 2 years ago

I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.

efaref commented on Meta's Mandatory Return to Office Is 'A Mess' businessinsider.com/meta-... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

meheleventyone · 2 years ago

They mean working class in the capitalist sense rather than social class sense.

efaref · 2 years ago

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the "middle class" was a fiction invented by the capital class to divide the working class in two and pit them against each other. If you or someone in your family has to work so that you can survive, you are working class.

efaref commented on A couple of messages about changes to ianVisits ianvisits.co.uk/articles/... · Posted by u/edward

krisoft · 2 years ago

> Those images would never be legally bought or licensed anyway

Why? If they are good enough that people choose to use them in their publications then why do you assert this?

efaref · 2 years ago

We only know that they're good enough to be used for free, so all we can assert that their current value is $0.

efaref commented on The Decline of Usability (2020) datagubbe.se/decusab/... · Posted by u/mmphosis

wredue · 3 years ago

The blocked app shit really gets me. Installing compilers by hand is always a fight and a half.

efaref · 3 years ago

It always reminds me of the shade Apple threw at Windows Vista. Chickens came home to roost. https://youtu.be/8CwoluNRSSc

efaref commented on Zoom’s CEO thinks Zoom sucks for building trust, leaked audio reveals arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/ctoth

savrajsingh · 3 years ago

Sorry my HP smell-cartridge ran out

efaref · 3 years ago

When the smell-cartridge runs out, the audio and video mute too.

efaref commented on JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default openjdk.org/jeps/400... · Posted by u/znpy

Delk · 3 years ago

> or integer types smaller than 32-bits

Java's got byte (8 bits) and short (16 bits)? (Still signed, though, of course.)

Unless those are actually padded to 32 bits in the VM or something.

efaref · 3 years ago

> Unless those are actually padded to 32 bits in the VM or something.

They are.