I just picked one, but I noticed this more than once. Either the poor are referred to as "trailer trash", "Walmart monsters" or "meth heads". It is just interesting to see how American culture is so anti being poor that it seeps into your language without you knowing.
All cultures have anti poor sentiments as well as empathetic attitudes towards the poor. What is "interesting" here is prejudice attitudes from people like you towards america.
Also stop calling Americans "interesting." Using a term like this is a deliberate insult on a culture or a person. You are examining the culture like it's a lab rat and commenting on how the behavior is "interesting."
You are not an idiot. People do not talk like this in real life by remarking on how behavior is "interesting" to the subjects face. You and others only use these terms behind the anonymity of a forum. Therefore you are aware this is insulting. Stop.
This is a common tactic used to get around the HN rules. You say "interesting" posing it as an innocent remark. It is not, you are conducting a deliberate and insulting attack on American culture here.
My old man opinion is that there is no point discussing with people who are using emoji because they are inadequately able to express themselves using words. I have found they are also likely to take offense and act irrationally when words are the forced medium.
Normal communication has probably 1000x the bandwidth of text communication. Any extra bandwidth you can add and not overdo, for written communication, is useful.
I use emojis, maybe one every 500 words or so, and they do offer added value.
NZ, if they continue at current rate, are on track to vaccinate 100% in 51 days. Of course that's never going to happen as not everyone wants the vaccine etc, but it seems their rollout is going well if not slightly delayed.
Australia meanwhile hasn't even vaccinated 5% of the pop as they put all their eggs into a political choice (on-shore produced AstraZeneca, support aussie produced!) and are now scrambling to find a replacement. There's not enough vaccine for demand.
Both took the same isolate approach, but it looks like NZ is gonna come out of this sooner.
Australians I know got Pfizer shots. I don't understand why they did though, none of them are from high risk populations or likely to be the source of spread. And it's not helping them to leave the country either - one of them just had to cancel an NZ trip.
Yeah, there's a supply of Pfizer but it's a drop in the ocean compared to what they committed to AZ. The government declined a deal for Pfizer last year in favour of majority AZ, and has had to renegotiate for Pfizer since. Increased Pfizer supply is due to arrive soon.
I can guarantee you that this is not going to happen... I would be lucky if I am vaccinated this year... Vaccines are super scarce so we are real snails atm!
I am in group 4 (out of 4) and vaccination was supposed to start in July and it has been pushed to end of July. Some people in group 3 have still not been contacted and there are plenty of frontline workers not vaccinated yet. The government is voluntarily vague to protect itself so it is frustrating
This is one for a write up I'm planning to do. TLDR: Software recalls are a problem across all manufacturers. Thankfully, software has yet to eat the car, so most of these defects have been benign. Mechanical failures and battery fires still dominate the most dangerous recalls, and I have a feeling those issues will persist until the space figures out EVs.
Do EV battery fires cause many deaths? I would imagine that "I crashed the car into a highway barrier at 70 mph" kills far more people than "It caught fire in my garage overnight".
The case of "I crashed but then my car caught fire before emergency services could give me medical help" is hard to categorize, and may be substantial...
I cant think of a single case where a EV just started on fire and killed someone. Its possible that the Bolt EV burned down some houses but I'm not entirely sure. Most of the time its a terrible crash that causes the cars to start on fire. But those are usually horrendous crashes that would have probably killed the occupant in the first place.
I don't have a good number on this, but its a more risky issue than "my infotainment display died" or "my backup camera stopped working".
Basically, the unknown unknowns for vehicle manufacturers is skyrocketing since they are now working outside of core competencies be that EVs, software driven power trains, or backup cameras.
I talked to a non-technical Tesla owner friend of mine and I was expressing the sentiment that I didn't want a Tesla because I didn't want to join the rent-extraction everything-is-a-SaaS world that Tesla (and just about every business) seems to be driving towards. His response was of course about how he's never had to pay for any upgrades or anything like that for his Tesla.
A lot of people have jumped on this train with us (the "techies") because some of said it was awesome and the best version of the future and it seems like a lot of people do not see where this track is leading and will be surprised when we get to the terminus.
Other than the Acceleration Boost and Full Self-Driving options available for purchase, what's rent extraction with the Tesla? I mean they'd need to disable a feature and then charge you for it in a future release, I suppose.
Then again buy or lease a BMW and you'll need to pay a lot of money to the dealer for simple parts to be changed, because a, the parts are pricey, b, the parts are hard to access. The Tesla at least doesn't have that -hardware- issue.
I'm a recent Tesla owner. What's the worst case scenario you're envisaging ?
> Then again buy or lease a BMW and you'll need to pay a lot of money to the dealer for simple parts to be changed, because a, the parts are pricey, b, the parts are hard to access. The Tesla at least doesn't have that -hardware- issue.
But you can buy parts for a BMW. Its not even an option to buy OEM or aftermarket parts with a Tesla. That simple fact cuts out a huge segment of the market from even considering one. You have the crowd that can afford to keep a late model car still under warranty (soccer moms, yuppies, suburbanites, etc) and then you have everybody else who drives used cars or runs them for business. That second group needs to be able to buy parts and the realistic ability to fix them themselves, independent shops, or fleet service. Without that teslas are disposable vehicles. Most people aren't going to buy a second wrecked tesla and park it in the side yard just so they can keep their daily driver running. They'll just buy a different car unless Tesla can sell theirs so cheap everybody will be able to buy another every couple years.
That's not true, and there are OEM modifications for Model 3s. And even, I hear, software mods. It'll probably do something terrible to your warranty but you can do aftermarket mods. I found some stores online by accident when searching something unrelated, and I've seen Model 3's that looked modded.
My point above was that talk to any BMW owner about maintenance costs and see if it's any better than the rent seeking concern around software above.
I'll give you a strike against Tesla if you want one, though. If I wreck my car or get it replaced, I lose Acceleration Boost because it's not tied to my account in any way.
There are no licensed aftermarket parts makers for Tesla and you cannot buy parts from Tesla without being Tesla certified.
This is unusual and unique for auto manufacturers. And its the only thing like it other than other industries such as agriculture (e.g. John Deer). Normal federal laws require auto makers to produce or stock parts for a time period after manufacturer date. This is usually the reason you have licensed aftermarket parts from other makes. Its also the reason GM forced everybody to return all those EV1s since they didn't want to take the loss making those parts after the trial run. Federal law also requires standard interfaces for diagnostics and information such as OBD2. So both state or federal inspection can happen as well as automotive techs can keep the economy going when your vehicle breaks down far from a licensed dealer. The US isn't being weird here, almost every country has the same sorts of rules on the books.
Tesla has these "strange" and extremely unique exemptions from both. Not entirely sure how you get those since its extremely lucrative to have. GM would have probably let people keep their EV1s if they had them. You'd certainly see regular makes come to production with more popular concept cars and keep them true to the concept if they had them. Basically, every other make would love to do the same thing Tesla is doing right now. But for them, they have no choice but to play the uneven playing field if they want to enter the American market. So they have to remain more cautious and careful about what they do release into the wild.
You can "mod" anything but that is not buying new suspension components or even a windshields. And hacking it is no different than what farmers keep trying to do with their John Deer equipment. That is also why right-to-repair is such a big issue. What I can't understand is why nobody ever talks about Tesla there. They're probably the biggest offender.
> Tesla has these "strange" and extremely unique exemptions from both.
I'm curious why. I've heard that they're exempt from reporting reliability because of some legislative tie-in to emissions reporting. Is it similar to that?
I’ve seen this a couple times and, whatever Tesla’s plans might be, the current Tesla lineup is not a “rent extraction” scheme: the only subscription is the option to pay for cell connectivity for media and a couple other things.
With Tesla, the base Model 3 SR+ doesn't have rear heated seats enabled, but they're still in the car and you can purchase them after-the-fact for $300. Whether or not that's acceptable is up to you, but it's not like you paid for them up front, they just made it possible for you to pay for them later. It saves them from having to make another sku variation (which is expensive in manufacturing and logistics) and makes it so that adding it after-the-fact doesn't cost $500 in labor.
This is also true of many manufacturers - a lot of the 'extras' that each trim level gets are just configurable settings in the ECU.
Personally I picked up a VCDS adapter for my VW GTI and was able to turn on things like a startup gauge sweep, automatic window closing when it detects rain, configure the puddle lights to turn on when the windows fold and heaps more.
Everything you’ve listed is a preference that has nothing to do with trim level, not really the same as whether or not you have heated seats.
When you don’t pay for heated seats in a VW it doesn’t come with heated seats at all. Maybe the Tesla way is better? But the comparison isn’t one to one.
You don't think this is a reaction to what Tesla is doing? I see this as manufacturers trying to get in on the wave that Tesla is starting but doing it awkwardly since they don't have a "acceleration" or "full self driving" mode to push.
The blurb at the top of the Tesla upgrades page (https://www.tesla.com/support/upgrades) feels like it would be a shot across the bow for any car company in the same premium car market that Tesla operates in. I really don't think this monetization model was considered heavily before Tesla existed. Info-tainment sure, but the rest of the car I don't think so.
Tesla's upgrades are definitely new: between OTA firmware updates and a slow body refresh cycle, there is much less difference between a 2020 Model 3 and a 2021 Model 3 than between spaced Honda Accords. I don't really see, though, how this is fundamentally different from the way BMW, Mercedes, Porsche nickel-and-dime you for various packages at purchase time: if anything, it's better because it lets Tesla release features developed in 2021 to people who bought a car three years ago. But, as long as this doesn't turn into a subscription model. I don't really see the analogy to SaaS.
True, it's definitely not different in that aspect -- nickel and diming is certainly not new.
> But, as long as this doesn't turn into a subscription model. I don't really see the analogy to SaaS.
As long as it doesn't! It's also fully possible that the sum-total of changes that this future Tesla is pioneering will be a consumer positive, will be interesting to see how it turns out.
So this reminds me of the dude that was doing repairs on teslas from a few years ago -- The Rogue Tesla Mechanic Resurrecting Salvaged Cars [0]. He runs a channel called Rich Rebuilds[1] (I'm not a subscriber) a company in New Hampshire that specializes in repairing Teslas, and has a recent video on his relationship with Tesla (and the community of fans)[2] (which I haven't seen yet, but watching now).
I don't follow this channel but I do not remember Tesla being particularly encouraging of the trend, similar to other defacto closed ecosystems. They're definitely not egregious but just a little bit closed-by-default.
Well you'll need to take out your tin foil hat from under the desk but I think this is a boiling frogs situation. Today it's Acceleration Boost and Full Self-Driving but tomorrow it will be smaller things.
To be fair to Tesla, infotainment systems were already heading in this direction, but they have a well established after market and most of the time it's very easy for people to refuse the option and install their own (with Apple/Google/etc integration). Tesla didn't invent this, but the move from just an add-on to what some might consider core "car" functionality seems to me like it can be attributed to Tesla. There is an argument to be had over whether those features are core or not -- are you selling a car that has better acceleration or not? Does it self drive or not? The answer becomes a maybe only because of Tesla's choices, and marks a shift in the thinking. For example turbo'd cars have to get their turbos tuned dynamically -- imagine a world where you have to pay for your car's turbo tuning as a service every month.
> Then again buy or lease a BMW and you'll need to pay a lot of money to the dealer for simple parts to be changed, because a, the parts are pricey, b, the parts are hard to access. The Tesla at least doesn't have that -hardware- issue.
I agree that the current luxury market has a lot of fat. Tesla has come a long way in reducing the fat (the amount of vertical integration they've done is amazing), but my problem is that I don't think the choice to buy an option that isn't doing this monetization model will be around much longer in the worst case.
> I'm a recent Tesla owner. What's the worst case scenario you're envisaging ?
I mean realistically, a world where cars are just another rent-seeking vehicle for conglomerates. For most of history you could buy a car that just worked, and eventually it would become an asset to you and "pay itself off". Cars that never pay themselves off are great at first, until you hit the inflection point where they would have paid themselves off. In a world where most cars (and/or functionality) are leases and thus rent-able machinery, it feels kind of like kicking the ladder in a way that's hard for me to pin down.
Further down the road in my worst case scenario, non-self-driving cars are outlawed all together for safety reasons (once the tech is down it will very likely be hard to argue for letting people put others in danger).
[EDIT] - Just to add for people who have never dealt with turbo-ing their own cars or getting "tunes" for turbo setups, you tune turbo setups on cars and essentially get a golden set of data that works for a certain performance profile. This is necessary because altitude, pressure, specifics of your setup can cause changes in what the software should be telling the components to do at any given time or place in the "power band" (your tachometer, roughly).
This is the kind of thing that can be a dark art since you could optimize nearly endlessly and bad settings are dangerous but once you do it can be reproduced for near free given similar inputs (and of course, dealer-made cars are very similar inputs by design). It would be a perfect thing to SaaS-ify -- most performance-concerned consumers wouldn't think twice about paying $xx or even $xxx a month for a decent tune (assuming a decent general tune wasn't free). Then you have to do things like make sure they're not hobbling base tunes to make premium models more attractive (this has happened in the past already IIRC).
That's decades away for places like Canada and Scandinavia. Outside of California where you actually have snow, the self driving doesn't seem very impressive when it only works for like 40% of the year
Yeah but leasing the physical car normally meant you got the car and all associated functionality, for the duration of the lease. The alarming change here is incorporating a lease (of software/hardware controlled functionality) into the actual purchase of a car.
I think a subscription would be different in that you'd be able to easily switch to a different car on demand, for example if you needed a truck/van to carry some stuff.
And possibly work like electric scooters, you just park the car and it's not your problem, the next day you use a different one that's close by.
IRC might be 'mostly' dead to you if that's your definition, but it is not 'remotely' dead to me and many others around the world.
I use it every day, and I use it for work, admittedly its not freenode but an internal server. I find IRC great for not having the focus of the general masses because of how disappointing the general masses really are.
> I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.
There was never a commercial sense to IRC. In fact this is one of the things I really love about it. It's so cheap to run it can be run entirely for free by some enthusiasts. Some sponsors too, sure, but the costs of running it are never huge.
> It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.
This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior."
IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources.
It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration.
Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations).
If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486.
Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing.
Indeed, you describe so well what I love about IRC. It's no heavier than it needs to be. It's niche enough to be free of 'influencers' with nothing to say but on-topic enough to attract real experts. I can idle on 20 networks at the same time for little to no resources on my end. And nobody needs to pay anything as its resource use is just a rounding error. It is indeed amazing.
A lot of IRC networks didn't require registration. That was the use case chosen for Elite Dangerous' Fuel Rats [1]
The ability to just drop in, ask a few questions and log out is great.
If I join a even a medium sized Discord server, I suddenly get tons of notifications unless I manually change the settings for the server (God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that)
Also, a lot of communities grew in and around IRC chats, which means a lot of people with the habit. With the usual Relevant XKCD [2]
> God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that
It's not in discords interest to do so. More notifications leads to more user activity which leads to more VC money (and indirectly to more nitro income if users who would have forgotten about the service get drawn back in and eventually convert).
An open protocol allows decoupling the client and service provider which defuses these misaligned incentives, which is likely one reason this current wave of messaging services are against ilthem.
That's the thing. Commercial services like discord want you to pay for their add-on services. So, they try to make you use it as much as they can. They try to build 'user engagement'. Attract you with notifications just to make you aware of how much you miss them, and how much 'value' they can bring to you. In my case they accomplish the exact opposite but anyway... This is how they think.
IRC doesn't need to do that. It just does what it needs to do without all the BS.
Well, it has been well over a decade after competitions have become common and if people can't change the habit for the better, stuck in an ancient tech, not sure what to say.
No voice, no proper file transfer and can't even see messages when you're offline meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.
A survey of IRC users would likely indicate that none of them care about it, and it's part of the appeal of IRC - I can only judge people by how they type and what they communicate. It's more or less impossible to tell anything about age, gender, nationality, etc on IRC unless someone cares to disclose it. It's far harder to mask anything like that in voice as opposed to text, so while you may consider it a fatal flaw, I consider it a feature. It's one of the better borderless sort of protocols out there for communication.
> no proper file transfer
What's wrong with DCC? Still works, last time I've used it. However, with a lot of the various free pastebin/image/etc hosting services out there, I don't see nearly as much of a need for that as I once did. DCC is a rare thing now, as opposed to a common way of shuffling files around as it used to be. So, again, based on "I literally make a living on IRC" sort of experience with it, it's not just a big deal anymore. Plus, an awful lot of people on IRC overlap with "I have my own hosting somewhere."
> and can't even see messages when you're offline
Bouncers exist, work well, and consume very little CPU or RAM. You can fit a freebie ZNC bouncer in the Google Compute Engine free tier (micro instance, 1GB transfer outbound), and might pay a few pennies a month extra if it's a really busy month. However, most channels are also entirely useful if you're only connected part of the time. I mostly use a bouncer to catch any PMs - I don't read scrollback unless I've been mentioned, and it works fine.
> meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.
Again, this only matters if you care about that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have more or less rejected the modern "everything mobile" ecosystem with the constant stream of distracting notifications, and that IRC doesn't overlap with my phone is a feature.
However, there are plenty of ways to make mobile clients and ZNC interact such that you effectively have a modern style communication app, on a phone, with IRC as the backend - if you care to do so.
Yes, I'm aware I'm an older style greybeard at this point, but the very things you list as "ancient tech" are part of what makes it appealing. It's lasted for 30+ years so far, and I expect it will comfortably outlast most of the modern messaging clients, because it does what it does exceedingly well.
If you're into mobile, try out Quassel with QuasselDroid. It's a really nice client for Android that brings a lot of mod cons to IRC. It's basically a bouncer but with GUI multi-network configuration, unlimited scrollback on demand, and a really excellent mobile client.
You haven't answered why IRC still matters. The only benefit you mentioned to sticking to IRC is that people are forced to have no voice communication but you can always opt out of voice communication yourself.
As for the rest, they work well on other services and you can simply completely turn off notifications if you feel it distracting.
It's just IRC doesn't have modern features when one wants.
Still wondering why people need to stick to it other than just because especially even after such a hazard.
The only benefit of IRC in my opinion is that sign ups are optional and might keep you slightly more anonymous but the again, most people would stick to a same nick anyway.
(1) It requires so little computational power on the server or clients that it's a lot more environmentally friendly than some bloated pig of a modern chat "ecosystem." I can still use old hardware easily with it. And, unlike most of the new chat stuff, it runs on low power ARM boxes nicely.
(2) It's lasted 30 years, and the Lindy Effect would argue it will remain relevant far longer than any of the hip new platforms of the year.
(3) It's not centralized. Discord is centralized. Matrix is less centralized, but matrix.org is still pretty effectively centralized for most cases. IRC is distributed, has been so, remains so, and it's utterly trivial to start up new servers.
Clearly, you see no value in it. And that's fine. Plenty of people see value in it, and... as one of them, honestly, a lot of the new people who show up for 5 minutes and then leave when nobody answers instantly are pretty annoying anyway. There's several decades of established culture, and it's quite easy to find writeups on the proper way to interact with IRC, but a lot of people don't bother and get irritated and then leave. Fine.
You appear to be making a bit of a "Other systems are better because they're new!" sort of argument here, and not everyone shares that viewpoint.
But Element, running on a modern machine, is using almost a gig of RAM. Hexchat, running on an older Pi, connected to quite a few networks, has expanded to almost 100MB.
