Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.

Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.

Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.

It might work at the moment, one of the gripes I’ve had is that day to day previously working stuff doesn’t work anymore. So it’s hard to specifically rely upon specific behavior.

Especially since the tendency of the LLMs is to say “Ok, I’ve done X” even if it doesn’t have a skill or access to do X. So you can’t rely on it to even accurately indicate that it can’t do it.

Frankly surprising. As pessimistic as I generally am, I at least assumed that the models could handle that prompt. However, worse than I would have thought.

Except for QWEN 3.5, maybe they trained that excessively on HTML clock software? Other models sometimes hit the mark or close enough, but QWEN 3.5 had it nailed.

Funny when I thought maybe it took liberties and made a numberless clock… Then I realize it just missed the clockface so badly that you could just barely make out a 5 in it’s upper left…

“At least he’s not a Democrat” is a phrase I have seen when a right winger gets vaguely unhappy with him.

Team sports mentality to the end

It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.

Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.

At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?

So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.

Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”

This is unfortunately a bit naive, that for every problem no one wants to do there’s a solution that people both want and can create.

If you want to dismiss excessive waste as a failing of society, we can speak of work like line men who repair power infrastructure. It’s not super engaging work.

Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.

Alternative motivation may be viable and in fact drive better results when feasible. You find the right person with the right passion who wants to do the job.

Problem is not every sort of job can pull that off. You aren’t going to find enough sewage treatment enthusiasts to handle that demand. You aren’t going to have enough line men to keep the grid going reliably and safely.

Now let’s discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants.

The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs.

But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.

He had the persosctive that once you hop between source code files that constitutes a security boundary. If you had intake.c and user data.c that got linked together, well data.c needed its own sanitation… Just in case…

I suspect he used a tool that checked files and noted the risky pattern and the tool didn’t understand the relationship and be was so invested that he tortured it a bit to have any finding. I think he was hired by a client and in my experience a security consultant always has a finding, no matter how clean in practice the system was.

Another finding by another security consultant was that an open source dependency hasn’t had any commits in a year. No vulnerabilities, but since no one had changed anything, he was concerned that if a vulnerability were ever found, the lack of activity means no one would fix it.

It’s wild how very good security work tends to share the stage with very shoddy work with equal deference by the broader tech industry.

In this case, there was file a, which is the backend file responsible for intake and sanitation. Depending on what’s next, it might go on to file b or file c. He modified file a.

His rationale was that every single backend file should do sanitation, because at some future point someone might make a different project and take file b and pair it with some other intake code that didn’t sanitize.

I know all about client side being useless for meaningful security enforcement.

Yes, recently we got a security “finding” from a security researcher.

His vulnerability required first for someone to remove or comment out calls to sanitize data and then said we had a vulnerability due to lack of sanitation…

Throughout my career, most security findings are like this, useless or even a bit deceitful. Some are really important, but most are garbage.

Won’t even impeach him this time.

The difference is that the jaws of life only come into play if the door is mechanically blocked, because the car is so bent that the door is binding or because it rolled.

The Tesla door design stops working if battery power is lost.

Then you have to ask “ok, but what does the car get from that change”. The answer is absolutely nothing. Some will claim improved aerodynamics, but the Model 3 exterior handle is fundamentally mechanical and is flush, but still interacts with an electrically actuated door latch. The electronics could have been replaced with a mechanical system with the same aerodynamic profile.

But fine, they have a mechanical backup. But it’s not the same place as you would operate normally. This means during an emergency, whomever is trying to operate the door needs to know that not only does the outside handle not work (common enough with locks) but the normal/obvious interior door release control also won’t work and you need to know about the hidden backup mechanical release. Other cars have done the electronic door with backup mechanical and the backup operation is simply “pull the handle a little harder” or somewhat worse but still “pull twice”, which is intuitive, but Tesla made the backup mechanical different than normal opening. Normal opening is a button, and you don’t really learn intuitively to use the mechanical latch that is in the front. To be generous, at least the front handle is vaguely guessable. The rear they hide the mechanical release on a cable under a plastic cover under the rubber mat in the door storage.

The point is this can and has contributed to people trapped in cars in panic situations, and there’s zero upside to it.

Note that Tesla isn’t quite alone, I saw a Corvette similarly obsessed with ‘button to open door’, but it’s a stupid thing to do regardless of manufacturer.

I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.

“Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…

I think the missing part in that is the “Miata”-ness. A fun little car with a bit of oomph to it and being ok with short range for the sake of a more fun/light drive. That has the light and affordable down, but doesn’t really approach the ‘fun’ part of the miata appeal.

Another facet I hope the H shaped battery would mitigate is the weight. Might have to further wait for viable solid state batteries to match the ICE for cornering. Yes the reving and shifting fun is lost, unless you go like the Ioniq N and just give the driver the toys to feel like they have revving and shifting…

I too would probably be fine with 100 miles for a ‘fun’ car or even commuter car. Though that’s a luxury many households can not afford, a designated car for ‘road tripping’, so I’m not going to expect too much attention to this scenario…

The thing is they do make the parts, but it’s a custom job and generally changing from a mass-manufactured EV to a hand-crafted car. The savings in reusing the reusable portions of the car are more than offset by the labor associated with putting them in. So it’s only really reserved for ‘classics’ with some iconic design, and even then the person risks enraging fans of the car who find it heretical to rip out their engines.