Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.

I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

Can be a pain to move the whole suite to a new major (porting all their inhouse apps, getting all the hardware enablement from vendors updated to match, ...), but we're not dealing with a major upgrade here.

A security patch is "just" a matter of taking the last release, applying the diff, build, qa, release. No customization.

A filesystem is by itself just one big "file" acting like a file archive.

For example, a Mercedes Sprinter in the standard long box configuration (as is used by local grocery delivery services, plumbers and the likes where I live) is 7.4 meters long , way longer than even the longest American pickup trucks (for some of them, several meters longer!), and is just as wide as them.

In custom box or pickup bed configuration (used by e.g., gardeners), these vehicles get wider (and sharper).

These are strictly professional cars. When they are not "in duty" they're probably parked at a garage.

On the other hand, an American open truck driving/parked in a residential area is almost certainly some show-off.

Source: I live here and see it every day. Family, friends and customers are doing it, plus many eons ago I too was a tradesman driving home every day in the company work van.

(Heck, many companies wouldn't even have a place to park all their company cars at once, many such smaller companies run out of regular residential buildings with no dedicated parking.)

Seems correct on relative length but not width; the F-450 Super Duty body is a bit wider without mirrors than a Sprinter with mirrors;

It's the norm in many businesses for employees to drive their work vehicle home and park it where they live, so they're everywhere. Not as many as regular passenger cars of course, but you'll see them on any residential road. Gardeners, plumbers, electricians, delivery services, this is the norm for all of them (a perk of sorts). Even big name-brand logistics companies, as it's common for the drivers to be independent contractors owning the van themselves so home is the only place to park.

They are also used for errands. They're legal for private use proportionate to the amount of VAT paid irrespective of registration type here, so you'll see them pick up/drop off kids, do groceries, recycle bottles, etc. in such vehicles too. Pretty sure that would be just as legal where you are given familiar EU rules.

As I said, I rarely see Sprinters, might be an Amsterdam thing due to how hard it is to drive and park them here. Ford Transit / VW Transporter / MB Vito / Renault Trafic are far more common. It doesn't seem like much, but an extra 20cm width + 1m length make a massive difference in overall size and driveability.

For cars that can be sold without having to get special approval, the obnoxious drivers are a minority (well, maybe BMWs excluded ;-P).

But what driving/parking manners would you expect from someone who went out of their way and paid extra to get e.g. a Ram or an F-150? They're almost guaranteed to disregard any inconvenience they cause with their driving.

The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.

The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.

As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard.

I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.

Even if the owner is using it as a rugged machine for hauling tools and supplies back and forth, they make for terrible work vehicles. A bed that's advertised as 6 foot actually measures about 5' 7" if you're lucky and the wheel wells eat into it so much that loading anything wider than maybe 4' just feels stupid. Nothing about it feels convenient or helpful when compared to a proper work van or a small flatbed. It's basically just a comfy exoskeleton for the driver to pickup groceries.

Meanwhile, I'm driving from site to site with a 4-cylinder hatchback full of tools in custom boxes I made getting twice the gas mileage. It gets some funny looks, but it gets the job done, which is more than I can say for most of the not-a-scratch-on-them trucks I see on the road, here.

As you say, they are absolutely terrible for work use as well - Japanese kei trucks famously have larger beds than some common US pickup trucks, and the size of the custom beds we use in the EU makes the US ones look like absolute kids toys - but that too I wouldn't mind too much if they were just forced to be safe and with decent emissions so the idiocy mainly affected the driver and their wallets.

I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P

I'm going to blame the ham radio antennas and bike rack ;)

But in all seriousness, I was getting slightly better mileage when the car was new 6 years ago. It has declined a bit, despite my regular maintenance, but I'm still very pleased with it. It might be more than twice the mileage of the average truck on the road, to be honest, but I find it hard to get a clear number. I think some truck owners embellish the mileage they actually get, as does the dealer sticker on the new vehicles for sale since those numbers assume perfect terrain with no traffic, last I checked. Then I hop into a co-worker's 2020 truck and realize he's getting 12mpg on a good day and nearly have a heart attack.

My vehicle gets between 45 and 55mpg on average, depending if I'm on the highway a lot or more urban environments.

An f150 can do none of these things.

> While there are very visible idiots in the USA that drive big trucks for aesthetic reasons

That is 95% of the market.

> there are also plenty of farmers, contractors, etc. that need them as a practical tool to haul heavy loads.

For the average contractor a panel van would be more capable and useful. You can put 3 metric tonnes in a man tge (and actually have the space for it) and tow a 3.5 tonnes trailer. And it’s available bare if you need an open bed, or a custom rear (e.g. for a lift).

So? I gave specs for a typical 1 ton truck. A 1/2 ton F150 is smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. It depends on what you need.

A panel van is more useful for some things, a truck for others- it depends on what you’re doing. You’re not going to fill your panel van with manure or gravel and then transport it across a muddy field without getting stuck. I grew up in a rural area of the USA where everyone owned trucks they needed and used for work, most were old and rusty and they all also owned a regular passenger car they used when they weren’t hauling something heavy… people were poor and did not waste fuel driving a truck except when it was essential- not a fashion statement, just a tool.

My family owned a 3/4 ton truck that we needed for hauling our boat and livestock, but we drove an old Volvo at other times. My dad built the home I grew up in, and he had to transport all of the materials to build it himself.

I think the hate on here is coming mostly from a place of ignorance about what life in rural America is like, which is what full sized American trucks are engineered and perfectly suited for. Where transporting thousands of pounds of materials across a muddy field in 4WD isn’t something you do once a year but often twice a day just to survive.

So that's a small fraction of the market, and literally none of what's already landed in europe.

> I grew up in a rural area of the USA where everyone owned trucks they needed and used for work, most were old and rusty and they all also owned a regular passenger car they used when they weren’t hauling something heavy… people were poor and did not waste fuel driving a truck except when it was essential- not a fashion statement, just a tool.

OK. Apparently you're waking up from a coma and missed the last 20 year of US car trends?

> My dad built the home I grew up in, and he had to transport all of the materials to build it himself.

Cool. My grandfather did the same for his family, using an R4. And the odd rental when that wasn't enough.

> I think the hate on here is coming mostly from a place of ignorance about what life in rural America is like

Or you could just read what people actually write, and see that your "thinking" could not be more wrong.

There's never been less farmers in the US, or more trucks sold. And full-size trucks are nowhere near sales leaders.

I very much appreciate the capabilities and utility of American pickup trucks, despite not owning one because I don’t need one. I also find it distasteful when people use them as urban passenger cars to project some sort of “personal brand” without having an actual need, but that in no way diminishes my appreciation for their practicality when used appropriately.

I suspect people are in part so aggressively hateful of American pickup trucks because they see it as a symbol for an opposing side in a culture war. However that perspective seems really silly to anyone that uses them properly to meet a practical need.

> my appreciation for their practicality when used appropriately.

You can do that and still acknowledge that pickups are a massive problem. These are not exclusive thoughts despite your refusal to see it. It might be easier if you substitute pickups for mine trucks, excavators, or rollers, which I assume you don’t have the same emotional attachment towards.

I never said they aren't, you seem to be trying to have an argument against a position that I have never stated or held. I was explaining how these vehicles can be practical when used for their intended and engineered purpose, and your rebuttals are targeted as some other assumed perspective or position that I simply don't have. Please drop the insults- that isn't how we discuss things on HN.

My acknowledgement of the practical utility of American pickups for their engineered purpose doesn't come from any kind of emotional attachment, or affinity for them, nor any delusion that most of their owners actually need or use them properly- that's all coming from you. I'm a European car nerd/snob and wouldn't personally be caught dead driving any American vehicle, I just really don't like them. I own a fuel efficient diesel German SUV that I tow a flatbed utility trailer behind, so I can do some of the things one would usually do with a pickup, without having to own one.

In the EU, neither would any American pickup truck: If registered as a normal class B vehicle, the total gross vehicle weight would be limited to 3500 kg (7700 lbs), and it would at most be permitted to tow 3500 kg (7700 lbs) with full independent trailer brakes, 750 kg (1650 lbs) without. You can add roughly 1000 kg if you tow a semitrailer, but getting the vehicle certified with a fifth wheel would probably be infeasible.

It doesn't make sense as a class C truck here (special driver's license, tachograph requirements for commercial use). It's way less nimble than our Scania/Volvo trucks (their turning radii are way tighter, and and have much smaller footprint for a given capacity), and is obviously a lot less capable than a vehicle that can be build from small utility up to the ~100k lbs range.

At the same time, if a farmer is outside the scope of a regular personal vehicle, they're most likely going to use their go-to tractor (e.g., Lamborghini, John Deere) which can haul anything anywhere, otherwise if they really need to haul they'll be reaching for a Scania/Volvo.

(It is common to register smaller, 7500 kg class C vehicles, but that's usually stuff like large Mercedes Sprinter vans, often built up as specialized service vehicles - think sewer inspection and repair.)

In the context of the US: It might seem like the best choice given the common options there, but I think the issue is with the options and perceived utility. It's the same with large trucks: The common ones in the EU are much more powerful, rated to haul more, are more comfortable, safer, have much smaller footprint for the given load and turns on a dime compared to US options.

This is also another part of the whole truck-craze in the US that I do not understand. An F150, for example, starts around $40,000 USD for base models, not including taxes and hidden fees. I purchased my car (an HEV, mind you) back in 2019 for just over half that price, spend about $500 annually on regular maintenance that I'm not able to do myself to keep things tip top, and spend about half as much in fuel as my coworkers who travel about the same amount as me for our jobs. Accounting regularly double-checks that I turned in all my fuel receipts because they still don't quite grasp that my car gets far, far better gas mileage.

All that said, these guys make about the same money I do, some a little less since they're newbies, which is to say we are all very underpaid for what we do, wealthy by no standards. And yet, they made these massive purchases while struggling to pay bills or complaining that fuel is too expensive at the pump, etc. These are the same people who buy two paychecks worth of fireworks every July 4th just to watch it all burn in 15 minutes.

Makes me think part of our cultural identity includes regularly acting against our own interests.

This.

I'm living in EU, thinking about getting some pickup. Just want to try this kind of vehicle (and I would love to transport my motorcycle, building materials etc). But I want something small - it looks like almost non-existent market here (there are cars like older f150, s10, etc - but very, very limited offers). Everyone gets the big modern trucks, that are unusable in our tight spaces.

Just get a Renault Traffic or equivalent. I don't see any advantage pickup trucks would have against a white van when transporting anything.

I want it with all the pros and cons, just to try it.

There's plenty of variation as they're all custom, and as they are work vehicles there should be plenty of cheap used ones on the market. The bed is also just a plate bolted to a steel frame so you can do whatever you want with it easily - adding custom boxes underneath, built-in ramps, changing the floor, whatever. They're also available with tall roofs with openable soft cover.

But as others suggest, used closed vans are also cheap and quite spacious, and on the big end you have the usual choice of a long-body sprinter which could probably fit 3 motorcycles inside with space to spare, with a much lower ramp height needed to get them in/out. Look around - it might not be as sexy, but there's definitely something that fits your need.

Something like a Peugeot Partner (just to name something) + a trailer does all of that. With the added benefit that without the trailer attached it's a fairly normal size.

Even when I had a pickup truck, I ended up getting a trailer for my motorcycle. In the end, I've got tired of having my luggage getting wet (no such thing as a fail proof bed cover) and replaced the truck with a more sensible minivan.

Yeah, mentioned in a comment, driving a Ford Expedition on holiday in the US I almost hit a hit walking down the sidewalk.

It literally had better visibility going backwards in the rear view camera than it did going forwards.

What's infuriating is the EuroNCAP safety tests refuse to acknowledge this. SUVs get the same bonnet impact test as small cars do and end up scoring highly due to have a large bonnet surface area despite the fact that actual impacts with pedestrians does not happen like that with SUVs.

And then (wrong) smug wanks on the internet talk about how much safer their SUVs are for pedestrians than small cars based on quoting NCAP scores.

The pass side blind spot is massive, even in a day cab with no trailer attached. You can hide an entire minivan in there. Even something like a modern F550 is worlds better.

This isn't to say that modern pickups don't have huge blind spots, they very obviously do, only that your comparison is hyperbolic and unserious.

That is still just a normal VM, but it's nice that it's automated.

> enabling the installed video card to accelerate graphics within X and/or Wayland.

nit: X and/or Wayland is not involved in application rendering at all - its applications themselves that use the GPU and its acceleration directly.

Wayland and/or X is only involved when the apps are all done rendering[0], and the display servers own rendering is the comparatively simple task of stitching windows together[1], and sometimes not even that.

0: You can send buffers early over Wayland if you also send a sync fence, but this is just forwarded as a render dependency that the GPU scheduler will patiently wait for.

1: well also dealing with stuff like color transforms which can be complex to understand, but are computationally cheap and for fullscreen content possibly entirely free.

Also https://wayland.app to see the current Wayland protocols (the Wayland core protocol is mainly some common primitives, most stuff is across the other protocols). For example, the sync object stuff is in https://wayland.app/protocols/linux-drm-syncobj-v1 (in many cases handled by your toolkit or WSI of choice).

Same with asking a person to solve something in their head vs. giving them an editor and a random python interpreter, or whatever it is normal people use to solve problems.

either way a reply with a bogus answer is the fault of the provider and model, not the question-asker -- if we all need to carry lexicons around to remember how to ask the black box a question we may as well just learn a programming language outright.

Same happens with regular people - a smart person doing something stupid because they weren't overly critical and judgingof your request - and these tools have much more limited thinking/reasoning than a normal person would have, even if they seem to have a lot more "knowledge".

You can argue whether that is a meaningful use of model capacity, and sure, I agree that this is exactly the kind of stuff tool use is for. But nevertheless the bar was set.

While your base64 attempts likely went well, that it "could consistently encode and decode even fairly long base64 sequences" is just an anecdoate. I had the same model freak out in an empty chat, transcribing the word "hi" to a full YouTube "remember to like and subscribe" epilogue - precision and determinism are the parameters you give up when making such a thing.

(It is around this time that the models learnt to use tools autonomously in a response, such as running small code snippets which would solve the problem perfectly well, but even now it is much more consistent to tell it to do that, and for very long outputs the likelihood that it'll be able to recite the result correctly drops.)

Hmm, the Go GC is really quite capable, so I wonder what kind of pathological load it was being presented with. Even then, when the GC "fails" it means elevated CPU load from collection.

The main thing I can think of would be the application "leaking" by having unintentional references (or worse, actually leaking through cgo bindings), or trashing the allocator to cause temporary spikes in between cleanups.

However, while I don't think Go was actually to blame here, I would never use native UI bindings to a language that isn't 1:1 compatible with the original design and memory management principles, as such bindings get disproportionaly large and complex. It just sets you up for a bad time.

Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.

1. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop

The screens are a good point, but nothing about LED headlights require a single bright point. That's done for style and cost saving - old reflector headlights had to be big, so small looks "modern", and small means less material.

Cramming it all into one tiny spot just means cooking the LEDs, which are much better suited for either larger lens assemblies or multiple smaller lens assemblies to distribute the load, both of which increase the size of the light source and massively decrease the blinding and glare it causes. You could easily cut the glare to, idk, a quarter by just changing the geometry a bit while maintaining the same light output.