Looks interesting, I wonder to what extent they really want to make cars DIY-able again (as they state). On the one hand, they mention servicing is "easy" — just turn to their partner repair shop chain! On the other hand, there's Slate University and mention of repairability. I haven't followed development of this at all, so I'm genuinely curious. Hope it's not just "you can swap in and out our proprietary modules".
I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
Did I hear right that some new vehicles are claiming 20,000km service intervals?
I know I’ve seen 15,000 service intervals.
This is the minimum to maintain the warranty for the first 3 / 5 / 7 seven years whatever.
If you change the oil at every 5000k and never turn off a cold engine - all petrol engines have fuel wash down at ignition cut, but much worse when the engine is come - you should expect 500,000+ plus kilometres out of an engine barring any metallurgical problems or manufacturing defects.
Petrol makes a poor lubricant for engines, and fucks engine oil. The less of it in engine oil the better.
Modern engines and fully synthetic oils are way better than the their counterparts from my youth, but 15,000+ kilometres service intervals are less about what engines need and more about what the folks over in marketing need.
Edit: I did see a second hand commercial diesel van recently that had met all service requirements for the warranty period, x number of years or 90,000 kilometres.
This meant it had logged exactly two oil changes since new, and the third had just been done at 90,000.
I agree with this article. I just want to add one thing: the author mentions companies in general, CEOs and the media as culprits. I'd like to add the people working at those companies.
Few of those might be actively looking at graphs and deciding to make the product worse for the sake of short-term revenue increase. Yet every act of enshittification takes people to make it happen. Those who "just work here", who may be slightly uneasy with adding another popup or displaying more ads but still do it, actively contribute to the problem. That's a decision they make. Even if those employees feel they are doing this only to keep a roof over their children's head or something along those lines, it's worth pointing out there's a choice being made.
This is especially worth mentioning as I think there are rarely actual evil masterminds — most enshittification is a result of tens, hundreds, thousands of people incentivized to repeatedly do things that are just a little bad.
Speculating here but I'd say a big part of the reason Dan Luu has as big a reach as he has is that he isn't the kind of writer who'll change his style to accommodate the audience that just wants to do a quick scan.
Somewhat unrelated but Apple are mainly focusing on Apple Intelligence in these new announcements.
The first version of OS X I used was Mavericks. In hindsight, that was the last great version of OS X for me — the last version where it seems the priorities of the people deciding the direction of development where somewhat aligned with mine.
Many have written about the decline in usability and attention to detail in OS X since then — I guess Apple Intelligence represents this shift in focus perfectly: a black-box interface that may or may not do something along the lines of what you were intending.
I agree that the mainstream web is becoming increasingly useless, but at the same time, there are counter-movements: search engines like Marginalia, decentralized communities and federated protocols, open-source projects and businesses, "the indie web".
"Small Discord servers, Telegram groups and mailing lists" aren't the only places good stuff happens on the internet, though it might take some deliberate effort to find the right ones.
Yeah, and it's not just the drivers. It's that everything is about money first and foremost in the sport. That seems to be what happens with any sport once it grows big enough.
The drivers, incredibly skilled as they are, will also frequently do things like go on the radio during races and complain about their car to their team, i.e. the persons responsible for said car. Not offer any constructive input, just... complain. Often. On the other hand, that's one of the few times they actually show any emotions or say what they think, with all the media training and endless PR events and making sure the sponsor logo on their hat is clearly in view in interview after interview after interview... Yeah, I'm ranting. But it's all just so incredibly blatantly commercial. Again, like any sport once it grows big enough.
(Another commenter wrote about the interesting technical side of the sport: I agree that there would be so many more interesting stories to tell there: about car development, strategy, manufacturing... but whenever these things are touched upon, it's done in a very shallow way, to prevent people quitting their subscription in horror at having to digest some actual information. Instead we get things like PR events with drivers having to pretend they enjoy whatever ridiculous competition they're put in against their teammate as part of their contractual obligations. It seems there could be so much more there... but perhaps this way is more profitable.)
I agree with the article, but was thinking along the same lines.
What if a business actually takes a long-term view: investing in standards and fostering it's ecosystem instead of trying to outmaneuver competitors using any short-term tricks available? What if a company makes a great dishwasher and only change it when they can improve it? Will they inevitably be driven into extinction or bought up by more short-term profit-hungry enterprises? Maybe... but is that really inevitable?
Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there.
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
VS Code feels fast to me (on linux), but perhaps I'm just slow. I remember when VS Code came out, I was surprised at how responsive it felt, compared to Atom which felt like typing with a molasses membrane keyboard.
Actually, I realize now that I'm using Codium with lots of things disabled that made it less responsive to me (like code completion), so I'm probably an outlier.
You can paste images now as of the latest version; it was driving me crazy as well. Even in older versions you can drag an image in but that was an extra step.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
> running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.)
That's a terrible excuse.
Your terminal is a separate process and should not affect how the editor itself feels. The language server exists out of process. The linters / type checkers exist out of process. (Or at least shouldn't block the main interaction/GUI thread) If those things make editing slow, either the design or the implementation is bad.
Sublime text runs the same stuff for me and works much faster than vscode. No excuses.
This is an example for context. We've got 3 cases: Obsidian (non-ide/electron/fast), vscode (ide/electron/slow-ish), sublime (ide/non-electron/fast). My point was that neither the electron not the ide part is an excuse for vscode not being responsive, because we've got counterexamples for each.
Not arguing with that. In discussions about Electron, there are often comments along the lines of "Electron apps can be fast if done right, just look at VS Code" and that just doesn't hold true for me.
> users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me.
Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
Having just read Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now", I'm skeptical of any article that paints this cynical view of how humans are wasting the earth, living their short-sighted lives with no regard for their future descendants.
The reality is that science, described here as "keeping the whole system of technical improvisation from falling down", is eradicating extreme poverty and disease on an incredible scale. It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth). It seems likely to me that the hits taken by the economy in these circumstances will be felt harder in poorer countries, slowing this positive progress for a while.
The author actually notes that the earth holding close to 8 billion people is only made possible by science. He describes this as "unnatural and unstable". This, combined with the fact that further scientific progress is required for all these people to be healthy and well-fed makes me tend to agree with the poster reacting the the novel Aurora and noting "we don't have anywhere to go back to".
It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth).
How is that? People who are less poor –
almost per definition – consume more and hence tend to use up more resources/cause more pollution per capita.
* a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment
* a richer country has access to more efficient technology
* on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.
> * a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment
Can afford to. May even consider it. But don't act.
> * a richer country has access to more efficient technology
But will not encourage that efficiency unless there's some kind of profit to be made from switching away from the less efficient incumbent.
> * on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.
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