I'm generally sympathetic to arguments that are "we will fall down the slippery slope." But as someone who has spent too much time stuck in traffic, I WANT congestion pricing to spread. It's just basic economics that people end up paying for a "free" resource with time - grossly inefficient.
Right, because you’re an elitist who will happily pay the $9 whenever necessary, because you are in the top 5% of earners, and don’t mind imposing a $180 pay cut every month to the poor who need to commute to their $15 an hour job. That’s 20% of all employed people, by the way.
It's funny how the urban design forcing poor people to pay car insurance and auto loan, just to survive, is fine; yet charging a hundred or so to use the highly valuable space in the city is outrageous.
Concern about public order is fair. But instead of fighting for the privilege to avoid it cheaply, why not fight to actually fix it. Triple the prison population, or whatever your solution is.
Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.
This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.
I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.
What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.
Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.
Japan is not NY and arguments based on sociatal/cultural behavior don't apply universally. Do you personally use these scary subway systems in the US that you have so many stats about?
Interesting; instead of trying to answer my statistical objection, you are now forcing me to provide anecdotal evidence; to then most likely reject it for being anecdotal evidence. Pass.
As for “it doesn’t apply universally,” that’s not an argument because almost nothing applies universally - not even a sunrise and sunset, if you’re at the North Pole. My point can still be valid in almost all metro areas.
Finally, let’s say I did use these systems (and, sometimes, I do use public transit). I’m a man, you are 90% likely here to be a man, we’re not the ones getting groped, therefore our personal opinions on the likelihood are obviously irrelevant. You should be asking your wife and your 15 year old daughter to ride for a year and rate their comfort level.
The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.
As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.
This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.
The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.
> The first use case of connecting entertainment systems to a vehicle bus that I can remember was to read some engine settings and turn up the volume on the radio at higher speeds.
Is anyone actually begging for this though? And why do you need a full bus? This feels like a luxury car problem that could be solved over I2C or something.
I’m reading this whole SDV thing, and outside of using less ECUs, it seems like an overengineered solution to what was hardly a problem. If we can update ECUs already with OBD-II, step 1 is just making a virtualized OBD-II port that the infotainment system can talk to. Everything else can then stay unchanged until later.
One problem is that the ECUs are fairly dumb, they each have a limit on how fast you can send CAN frames to them without overflowing receive buffers. The protocol to reprogram them starts by asking the target ECU how much of a delay is needed between each frame then needs to keep to quite tight timing constraints when sending the new flash image, I have written a Linux network protocol module to do this.
I absolutely enjoy speed compensated volume. It's nice to have about the same apparent volume inside the cabin as road noise increases while not being very loud when going slow speeds or stopped.
I2C is also a bus, just one that's less reliable and involves more custom work to use.
A "virtualized OBD-II" is really just a UDS server if I understand what you're trying to convey. UDS is a dumpster fire of a protocol that should be expunged from existence, but my personal feelings aside can be run anywhere you want. That exists. I'm not aware of many systems that directly connect the infotainment processors directly to critical CAN buses. Usually there's an intermediary component to isolate them.
I have seen more broken SPAs than MPAs, by far. Ironic, considering SPAs are supposed to improve conversion rates and user experience. Even from big companies with no excuse - Reddit is almost unusable on phones, X was straight up broken for a month straight with image loading on mobile.
If you’re writing an SPA, and it isn’t Twitter or a content consumption platform, and it isn’t necessary to be API-driven, seriously just stop. You’re not clever, you’re not improving the experience, you’re only appealing to the tastes of other programmers. If billion-dollar companies can’t get them working perfectly, you certainly won’t.
We created a generation of developers that AIM to over-engineer requirements... and we also came up with extremely pervasive frameworks to go with it... My firm cannot hire people with no React experience... people REALLY only know how to build cruft these days...
As a Rails developer with no desire to work in a React codebase, I'm not qualified for about 50-60% of the Rails jobs postings. My lastest full time was at Shopify where I said over an over that I was Ruby only and not interested in a React position only to be told a few months in I needed to know React to get promoted. It is exhausting.
I have given up on doing frontend work for the time being, because of this crap. I used to do full stack with modern JS, TS, CSS, HTML and whatnot, but then someone made it all go to shit by advertising for NextJS and React, while there was zero interactivity on the whole platform, except for a couple of checkboxes. A few years later, there still isn't much. Some page transitions for when things happen in the backend. I told them in the beginning, that there is not much interactive stuff, but they all got flashed by some one minute low effort Material Design shit, and the idea of the whole thing being "modern" and hiring more React devs. So I stepped away from that while frontend part and let them dig their own hole.
Moving a navigation/menu from one app to another takes 3 people 2-3 weeks by now. Changing the "router" to update the TS version is just as time consuming. Things that would have taken 1 day max. take now 2-3 weeks. That is 1/14th of the productivity and people get paid for that, more than I did. Oh and did I mention the menu responsiveness was broken for months at a certain viewport width? I did report it, but apparently it was so hard to fix, that it could not be done in a quiet hour, so it took months laying around in the queue of things to fix.
I have no React, Vue, or Angular experience. My websites were built with Livewire, some HTMX (basically Hotwire in the Rails world, server rendered HTML partials; or maybe Blazor SSR in the .NET world). I use Tailwind and a Laravel backend, but have some experience with C#.
If you think that’s interesting, send me your firm’s URL, I’ll consider applying. (Edit: or really anyone reading this who is interested - government of a foreign nation outside the US is not viable, unfortunately.)
Might be a bit of a selection bias though. I certainly remember a lot of crappy MPAs before SPAs got big. The crappines just moved to SPAs as they became mainstream. Overall I agree that MPAs are better default, though, good SPAs are hard to build.
Part of the complaints about MPAs originally was that navigating all the different pages was slow, because loading new pages was slow. But plenty of today's SPAs deliver content even slower and the user is staring at a spinner for lengthy stretches. The key is quick, efficient server responses, whether using SPA or MPA approaches.
Yeah. In theory SPAs should be faster, but in practice rendering/sending the whole template is not as bad. And as you mention, both can be slow, due to the non-cached API/DB call, so...
Even in theory, producing json is just typically slower than producing HTML.
It seems unintuitive, but traversing an object tree using reflection to generate json is just slower than using an HTML template, which is probably a rope data structure.
That reminds me of when I first benchmarked a Rails app and noticed that JSON rendering was significantly slower than the remote database call. No lie, jbuilder was taking about 80% of the request time for about 90% of all endpoints.
I guess the rendering itself is pretty much the same for both SPAs and MPAs, since in the end it can be pretty much the same markup, but the SPA is also at a disadvantage here because it has to combine template/components + JSON to generate the HTML :/
> despite Nintendo being much more secretive and litigious
Eh, kind of? Nintendo has never interfered with solely modding your Switch, or the tools to do so, and will not ban you for loading CFW. Install CFW, overclock your Switch, even cheat in offline games, no interference.
Their lines in the sand for years have been changing your profile image to something arbitrary (and possibly NSFW), installing a pirated game, cheating online, or tampering with system logs. That’s when the ban hammer hits; and the tools for doing those get targeted.
Then you can happily tell Apple to fix it. Apple already has a system for this called Apple Pay, and it’s royalty free on top of regular credit card networks.
If it’s about security and privacy only, demand the ability to check out in an app using Apple’s own payment platform. Watch Apple squirm.
As for the subscription convenience, I know how to make this even better. Let’s give Visa and Stripe a monopoly on all transactions, and then have them build a unified subscription portal. Awesomeness!
I don’t understand your points. If I buy things through the App store on iOS I know if there is a problem I can get relief very easily. I can easily cancel subscriptions without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I prefer to keep things this way. You apparently don’t. As such we disagree.
This also, long term, could kill the 30% commission. Why, as a developer, would you be stupid enough to launch your app as a paid product on the App Store?
Your discoverability is massively impaired, we already knew that. You also give Apple 30% of your cash.
Free app + external web purchase = maximum discoverability at 0% tax.
When things get more advanced, that web purchase link will be an authenticated URL - meaning one click to open the web browser already logged in. Register a protocol handler, remember their card information (or, ironically, use Apple Pay), and one tap in the app, a flash of the web browser, and they’re back in the app with purchase complete.
Apple needs to address this at WWDC. In the US and EU, there are zero, heck, negative advantages of selling on the App Store. All pain, all fees, no benefit of any kind. That’s a big deal.
No one but irrelevant nerds think this. And the market has demonstrated this time and time again.
Most people think of phones as being console-like entertainment devices. And aren't interested in scams, malware, virus checkers etc that are needed in a free for all model.
Many companies would never use Apple's IAP regardless of the cost because companies want a direct relationship with their user for things like refunds and trials and other stuff.
My immediate interpretation of "direct relationship" is one part "we want your email to send you marketing spam" and one part "we want to add as much friction as possible to cancellations".
Anecdotal I know but my app converts from free trials at 4x iOS vs Android. Has done so for years and years. Same app, same price, same audience (North American boaters). Similar free trial numbers too.
Niche app that sells at a higher price than your average app. Ie my users have disposable income but the Android users don’t like to pay for higher priced apps like iOS users will.
b) Buying a product through IAP is one click. Versus having to go to a signup page, provide details, enter credit card details, wait for credit card verification flows etc. The drop off in conversions during this can be often greater than 15%.
c) Apple's centralised subscription management has been extremely useful and consumer friendly. Versus having to now deal with NY Times style scam tactics for every subscription again.
B is also one click, considering Stripe and others already offer Apple Pay as a payment option.
For C, customers can choose to continue using Apple's subscription management if they think it's worth the 30% premium that Apple charges. Or Apple could reduce the price to something more reasonable (Stripe Billing offers a similar feature set and costs 0.7%).
Now calculate the drop off every time someone saw the prompt: “Please confirm your Apple ID password.”
I’m sure it’s substantial over the years. As for point C, I really don’t care, every monopoly has had at least some advantages. We could make this even better by giving Visa a monopoly and having them build a web portal.
b) Apple Pay on Stripe seems a pretty low friction experience for web purchases. My app has a "buy" button that pops up a Safari window with an Apple Pay button the user clicks. Sure, it's an extra click but I doubt it's a slam dunk that the extra click is going to consistently cut conversions by 15% (or 30% for big outfits.)
That sounds like an awful user experience. There's no way I'm ever buying a mobile app that requires me to go enter my credit card into a website to pay for it. Cross-platform services can justify this sort of thing (because you're buying a subscription to the service across all platforms), but doing it for what otherwise would be a paid app purchase is incredibly user-hostile.
I think you’re in the minority there - users enter their information constantly for physical items. Nobody raises an eyebrow, let alone calls it hostile.
Also, problem solved, just use Apple Pay on the checkout page. Ironic, but royalty free, and one-click to enable in Stripe.
Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse.
Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going?
Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption.
As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades; if you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg; nobody who builds for Linux gets to lecture Mac about UI stability.
Or, for that matter, app stability in general. Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles? No? Then don't lecture me about good practices. Don't lecture me about how my website or app was sloppily engineered because it has dependencies.
You seem to be conflating 2 different things. Apple’s OS proficiency and the associated technologies they support on their OS and Apple’s dev tools proficiency.
People use Apple’s dev tools because they are the only/best way to deliver apps on Apple’s OSes.
If we changed the situation, so that Apple Dev Tools could be used to create applications for non Apple OSes, or non Apple Dev tools were first class citizens for creating Apple apps, I bet the vast majority of people would use the non Apple dev tools to create both Apple and non Apple apps.
What’s keeping Apple Dev Tools in the game is their privileged position in the Apple OS ecosystem.
And the UI situation still has issues. If you want flexibility in language choice, GTK is the only modern-ish framework option there is. The rest are tied to 1-2 languages, bad at accessibility, look archaic, etc.
People complaining about whataboutism are more obstinately committed to avoiding decent conversation than the people who commit it. This ain’t a formal debate.
Formal in what sense? There's certainly no set form for discussion outside of threading. But there's certainly no assumption of persuasion or sense of shared goals or values.
Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases.
It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible.
If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the main tower was built worse than their own.
(Edit, posting too fast: For the complaint that Apple has money, Linux does too. 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship, and has since 2004 when it was first counted. They are fully capable of doing better.)
Corporate sponsors on Linux provide a fraction of the money Apple does and even what they do are geared towards their own needs.
But more relevant is the fact that their donations are focused on running Linux as servers and there Linux is miles ahead of anything Apple provides, to the point that Apple has abandoned its server OS.
“Linux” isn’t a person or a company. Different people contribute to it with different goals.
> 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship
And approximately 0% of these corporate contributors care about the “Linux desktop” experience. Unlike Apple their goal is not to build a consumer-targeted OS.
Linux on the desktop is very, very niche, and even among the people who do use it, a lot of them will spend almost all their time in just a few windows (e.g. terminal, browser, emacs), not a rich array of desktop applications.
If you haven't used linux desktop for a while, even a year ago, try again. Use a bleeding edge distro like the latest Ubuntu or Fedora ideally running Wayland and you will be surprised how smooth and feature-full it has become, with gobs of high quality apps available with no finicky compile instructions or crazy installation steps needed to follow.
Whatever rough edges you may encounter will keep being sanded down at a speed I haven't witnessed since when linux was the hot new thing in the 90s. Linux desktop felt stale and abandoned trough-out the 2010s but nowadays its pretty marvelous how fast it's becoming a real alternative to windows and mac. I truly believe that if it had the proper developer adoption and first class hardware support from OEM vendors it would already be a true alternative.
The engineering standards, and churn within the Linux desktop, are hilariously bad.
Nobody who uses it has a right to complain about how node_modules has a thousand dependencies and makes your JavaScript app brittle. Their superior Linux desktop won't even be capable of running the same software build outside of a Flatpak without crashes in three years.
As for lack of documentation, good luck pulling together all the pieces you need to write a fully native Linux application without using Qt, GTK, or a cross-platform solution. Maybe you have your own UI stack that needs porting. A simple request, fairly accomplishable on Mac. The lack of documentation on Linux outside of that privileged route will make Apple's documentation look like a gold standard. Heck, even if you stay on the privileged route, you're still probably in for a bad time.
Desktop Linux is so good today that I have not turned on my Mac in 4 years. Sorry your experience has been so bad, but for ease of programming it is a black-and-white decision. Even Windows is a less excruciating Linux development environment, modern MacOS is a veritable dumpsterfire.
Speaking of development workflows, has Apple finally implemented a scan-resistant LRU cache within their VFS layer? Last I checked performance would fall off a cliff once you started scanning more files than can fit in the cache.
> good luck pulling together all the pieces you need to write a fully native Linux application without using Qt, GTK, or a cross-platform solution
Isn't those the native stacks? Unless you're going for system programming. The nice thing about GTK and Qt is that you have access to the source code when you're trying to find the behavior of a component (if the docs is lacking). No such luck with AppKit.
The answer is actually quite simple: It won't be different. Prove to me it won't spread, because almost every new tax spreads.
When is the last time a tax has existed in one state, and not spread to other states within 5 years?
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