gizmo (u/gizmo) - Readit News

gizmo commented on Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription autoexpress.co.uk/volkswa... · Posted by u/t0bia_s

mk89 · 8 days ago

From a manufacturer perspective it costs less to produce and test 1 engine type than 5.

So it's questionable to me that you believe you're paying more.

You're just getting better hardware, but it doesn't mean it would be cheaper it it was specifically crafted for your needs. (= I buy 100HP and my engine supports only 100HPs).

gizmo · 8 days ago

If the manufacturer doesn't want to go through the trouble of creating a less powerful engine because it's not economically advantageous then the consumer should just get the better engine by default.

It's ridiculous and insulting to buy a new car (a big purchase for many) to be presented with options where the manufacturer went through considerable effort to _make the car worse_. Manufacturers should be in fierce competition to offer the best cars at the lowest price point.

Chinese competitors will absolutely crush Volkswagen and Volkswagen will have nobody to blame but themselves.

gizmo commented on EU OS for the Public Sector eu-os.eu/... · Posted by u/doener

gizmo · 2 months ago

This is all sizzle no steak. Marketing without substance, frankly.

A proof-of-concept doesn't provide any value. For Linux to gain further adoption a gargantuan effort is needed to get things from 90% done (or 90% working) to fully working. Any Linux distribution is already suitable for government use. Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian. They're all fine distros. The only remaining problem is quality. Things don't work or suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. For government use that's a deal-breaker. It's also a deal-breaker for gamers. Which is why SteamOS has been relentlessly fixing reliability issues. So if I had to bet on a linux distro going mainstream, it would be that one.

gizmo commented on EU Commission refuses to disclose authors behind its mass surveillance proposal old.reddit.com/r/europe/c... · Posted by u/nickslaughter02

nickslaughter02 · 3 months ago

Is Ursula von der Leyen "extreme right"? Because it was her (and her commission) who established the group responsible and it was the commission's decision to not disclose its members.

gizmo · 3 months ago

Her personal politics are not extremist in the conventional sense. She is a center-right technocrat at heart. She believes people like her have to protect Europe against the idiot masses. When she dismantles European civil rights she does so for the "greater good". People can't be trusted to vote in their own best interest, or so the logic goes. She thinks she and people like her protect Europe against the rising populist right. I think she's badly mistaken and that the populist right is fueled by EU arrogance, and the GP probably shares that view.

gizmo commented on What's working for YC companies since the AI boom jamesin.substack.com/p/wh... · Posted by u/jseidel

threeseed · 3 months ago

a) The next two years are the reckoning for a lot of these AI startups. In the enterprise space everyone was being pushed to trial AI products to see whether they can deliver the ROI that was being marketed. Newsflash: it hasn't. And many of these startups will see serious churn.

b) Everyone needs to stop perpetuating the YC lie that they invest in the best founders and they just happen to want to do AI. It's rubbish and insulting because it implies that only young, male, SF-based founders can be the best. Instead it's clear that YC has been aggressively pushing AI which makes sense given they are a significant investor in OpenAI.

gizmo · 3 months ago

Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.

gizmo commented on We Tested 7 Languages Under Extreme Load and Only One Didn't Crash freedium.cfd/https://medi... · Posted by u/nnx

gizmo · 3 months ago

All systems crash "under memory pressure" but there are no details provided that show what the actual issues are? You can write software that is very robust under memory pressure in a low level language, for instance by forking into multiple worker processes. If a process dies because of OOM this would then not affect any of the other processes. The kernel will do all necessary cleanup and do so nearly instantly.

I also don't understand why under "extreme load" there would be excessive memory pressure in the first place. When a server can't keep up with incoming requests it doesn't need to continue spawning new workers/goroutines. You don't need to .accept() when you don't have the resources to process the incoming request.

Very strange article.

gizmo commented on Good Writing paulgraham.com/goodwritin... · Posted by u/oli5679

luispauloml · 3 months ago

There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?

1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"

I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?

2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."

What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?

Also, did anybody else got confused too?

gizmo · 3 months ago

- He means written dialogue. Think Plato.

- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise

gizmo commented on EU startups fail because their press refuses to hype them up twitter.com/RnaudBertrand... · Posted by u/ryzvonusef

openplatypus · 3 months ago

Media coverage is definitely a factor, but the post has some gleaming issues.

> Take excessive regulations for instance, which gets mentioned all the time. If they were such a hindrance to startups, why would American startups succeed in Europe - like Airbnb in our case - and European startups not? We all face the same regulations

Nope, they don't. US companies in Europe generally don't care about EU regulations. Even if we skim over privacy, AirBnB succeeded in Europe despite there being laws preventing short lets in many municipalities.

gizmo · 3 months ago

US startups also don't care about US regulations. AirBnB, Uber, Tesla, Coinbase and many others break the laws in the US they don't like. I'm not making the moral argument that breaking laws is always wrong. Instead I'm simply pointing out that breaking "bad laws" is culturally accepted in Silicon Valley but not in Europe. Silicon Valley startups do what it takes to win.

gizmo commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn

LeonM · 3 months ago

I don't understand this sentiment.

Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too?

Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models.

Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple device?

gizmo · 3 months ago

After WW2 Volkswagen didn't change their name or Nazi branding (if you haven't seen the uncropped version of the VW logo you're in for a surprise) exactly because people in Allied countries refused to buy German cars after the war. Even if VW or BMW or Mercedes had rebranded and apologized it would have made no difference. Their ties with Nazi leadership was too strong for any apology to be credible. What Frenchman would buy a Nazi car over a French car in 1950s? And so the German car companies focused on domestic sales, which meant they had to appeal to humiliated (former) Nazis for sales for which any rebranding would have been a negative.

German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.

gizmo commented on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war insideevs.com/features/75... · Posted by u/rntn

acheron9383 · 3 months ago

As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software. Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A doesn't have the API to your MCU, or it runs some dogshit speed communication system that means you have 500ms lag. The feature is just unworkable, and if the PMs push it anyways you get what happens for the legacy car makers, terrible underpowered infotainment systems with no central design philosophy, stuck in an awkward, bad, middle between a full software stack and all buttons for everything. Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.

gizmo · 3 months ago

Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know.

I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.