3. The falling costs won’t benefit space as much. The cost of sending mass to space will still be a big factor in the space solar panel costs. Much of the reason why solar is getting cheaper is not the panels themselves, but due to innovations that reduce installation costs. Those don’t apply to space (outside of the already assumed reductions in sending mass to space to make this viable)

I am personally going to avoid anonymous social media as much as I can going forward. (Not counting topic-specific forums and such). They have all become toxic cesspools and now AI is making it all so much worse.

I’ve stopped using Facebook a long time ago, but started using a similar locally made social media app/site, which is based on logins tied indirectly to national ID. Holy crap it’s so much better. Only real people. No bots or scams. Even the ads are better. Actual relevant local businesses. And people hesitate before writing nasty comments. Not that I’m using it a lot, I’m still not a big social media guy, but having groups for the neighbourhood or town is nice for becoming aware of events and such happening nearby.

I still have the Facebook account for now. There’s a group or two I need to check in on sometimes. Every time I log in I get so confused why anyone would still use it.

Do you have to bring up D in every Zig related post?

I do like D. I've written a game in it and enjoyed it a lot. I would encourage others to check it out.

But it's not a C replacement. BetterC feels like an afterthought. A nice bonus. Not a primary focus. E.g. the language is designed to use exceptions for error handling, so of course there's no feature for BetterC dedicated to error handling.

Being a better C is the one and only focus of Zig. So it has features for doing error handling without exceptions.

D is not going to replace C, perhaps for the same reasons subsets of C++ didn't.

I don't know if Zig and Rust will. But there's a better chance since they actually bring a lot of stuff to the table that arguably make them better at being a C-like language than C. I am really hyped to see how embedded development will be in Zig after the new IO interface lands.

He doesn't have to, he _gets_ to! Its knowledge exchange. Take it as a gift and not self-promotion. There's no money in this game so don't treat it like guerilla marketing. Treat it like excited people pushing the limits of technology.

I think the history of D having a garbage collector (and arguably exceptions / RTTI) from the beginning really cemented its fate. We all know that there's a "BetterC" mode that turns it off - but because the D ecosystem initially started with the GC-ed runtime, most of the D code written so far (including most of the standard library) isn't compatible with this at all.

If D really wants to compete with others for a "better C replacement", I think the language might need some kind of big overhaul (a re-launch?). It's evident that there's a smaller, more beautiful language that can potentially be born from D, but in order for this language to succeed it needs to trim down all the baggage that comes from its GC-managed past. I think the best place to start is to properly remove GC / exception handling / RTTI from the languge cleanly, rewrite the standard library to work with BetterC mode, and probably also change the name to something else (needs a re-brand...)

My post was not about betterC, it was about the super easy interoperability of C and D. This capability has been in D for several years now, and has been very popular as there's no longer a need to write an adapter to use C source code. The ability to directly compile C code is part of the D compiler, and is known as ImportC.

One interesting result of ImportC is that it is an enhanced implementation of C in that it can do forward references, Compile Time Function Execution, and even imports! (It can also translate C source code to D source code!)

This is, like, the most ironic comment ever posted on HN. An article about cat nutrition could hit the front page and the Rust fanbois would hijack the conversation.

In this case, however, Walter was not the one that brought up D. He was replying to a comment by someone promoting Zig with the claim that only Zig and C++ have ever had a strategy to replace C. That is objectively false. There's no way to look at what D does in that area and make that sort of claim. Walter and anyone else is right to challenge false statements.

C++ is more C-like than Zig and Rust, so it's more likely to become a C replacement.

I do feel like allowing for in-place source upgrading was critical to C++'s early successes. However, I feel like this ultimately worked against C++, since it also wed the language to many of C's warts and footguns.

C++ cannot seem to let go of the preprocessor, which is an anchor hurting the language at every turn.

BTW, in my C days, I did a lot of clever stuff with the preprocessor. I was very proud of it. One day I decided to replace the clever macros with core C code, and was quite pleased with the clean result.

With D modules, imports, static if, manifest constants, and templates the macro processor can be put on the ash heap of history. Why doesn't C++ deprecate cpp?

This is a bad comment in so many ways.

Walter's short limited comment was quite relevant.

The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.

There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.

Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.

I really don’t think the impact on car culture is that big. There are a LOT of other reasons not to drive a car in the cities. Our company just built a new office building. No additional parking was built (we are renting some spaces in an existing garage nearby but it’s a bit of a walk to the office). I don’t think it’s easy to get new parking built in Oslo. What we did get was a huge bike garage with bike showers. Even though I have an EV and access to parking, I bike to work in summer. Some of my colleagues also bike in winter.

Yeah the subsidies are high, but so are the implicit subsidies for ICE cars. There was a new tunnel construction in Norway where they found they could save millions on reduced ventilation since the impact from EVs had already reduced pollution that much.

I totally think we should reduce reliance on cars more. But Norway is already doing a LOT in that department. The public transportation of Oslo is already ridiculously good for a city that size. (How many US cities of that size has a metro?) We should consider the switch to EVs as a hard requirement to get rid of pollution and increase the energy efficient and long term costs with operating cars in the country. Now that the switch is complete (for new vehicles) we can shift the focus to making biking and public transportation even better. But we will always need cars. An electrician can’t take the bus to get to a job, and most pure office workers I know in the Oslo city do not drive to work already.

“Just before” … this would mean all cars would be required to be self driving and that they’re forced to adhere to the set speed limits. You think this is just around the corner? In a country like Sweden with a lot of snow? Let’s talk about that this when we’re actually close to hitting 100% of self driving cars on the road.

And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.

Feels like the article is overstating the risks of Li-ion. Modern Li-ion battery packs from reputable manufacturers are remarkably safe. An EV with Li-ion is still an order of magnitude safer than an ICE car. Yeah it can take a while for the thermal runaway to dissipate completely.. but it’s not a huge issue. You just have to keep it cool so it doesn’t set fire to other flammable materials (there are inflatable pools firefighter can use to surround the car with water)

Badly made Li-ion packs are a huge risk. But that’s a QA/Certification problem as with anything else (badly made charging bricks are also a risk.. don’t buy them on Temu). There have been CT scans published now showing how big a difference there is in the manufacturing of good and bad cells.

I’ll add a third perspective that’s probably often gone unsaid: I love it on Apple TV, and kinda like it on iPhone and Mac. It definitely needs to be improved though. There are definitely a whole bunch of usability issues, but they shouldn’t be too hard to fix. And Apple has shown willingness to iterate until they get it right. Unlike Microsoft which just moves onto the next thing (the system settings UI design in Windows 11 is fine.. but can they pleeeease just integrate all settings into that UI now.. how many generations of settings / control panes are there in Windows now?)

The huge corner radius is one thing I do wish they reverted in Mac OS.

Yes and no. It's not a good word, but it has generally been defined in a way that wouldn't include any of the steps you mentioned.

One common description is that it includes lots of ingredients you wouldn't find in your kitchen.

It sometimes also includes ingredients that have been turned into extremely fine powder, and other very heavy industrial processing. My way of thinking of this is: adults shouldn't eat baby food. Some fast food essentially becomes way to easy to absorb.

I think this interview had a really good description about the problems of the "ultra-processed" label.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAPgzCiSk9Y&t=377s

But at least the label is triggering some interesting discussions and awareness about bad aspects of industrial fast food.

Some other brands rely on Mobileye for driver assistance. It’s clear from demos that Mobileye is on the same level as Tesla, the difference is that the don’t use end users as beta testers. I suspect that when actual full self driving is possible, other car companies won’t be as far behind as you’d think based on the features Tesla has in their cars now.

They mostly only work on pre-mapped highways. They're also not commercially available.

There's currently no other DA other than Tesla's FSD available in the US that will work on city streets and highways.

I'm going to assert that Tesla's FSD™ does not, in fact work on city streets and highways.

Or, if you want to loosely define "work", Ernst Dickmanns had self driving in the 80s, and put in on the autobahn in the 90s. I'd rather define it more tightly as "statistically at least as safe to be in _and_ to be near, as a human driver".

Tesla claims to have achieved that, but I don't believe them. That's because the data they report 1) omits a fair bit of critical info, and 2) frequently changes definitions. Both serve to make comparisons difficult. If it was clearly safe, I think they'd put effort into making the comparison transparent.

Bear in mind that Musk has been claiming "Full Self-Driving" since at least 2016, and people involved have asserted that he wasn't wrong, he was lying.

Rivian recently moved away from mobileye in their newer models, because mobileye is are far behind and limited. The progression of their new in house driver assistance since then is already proving that was a good choice.