I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I went to Ottawa once or twice when I was a teen, but only made it to Montreal for the first time about 15 years ago.
I agree with you about the Maritimes. The bridge has made a difference but it's still a long drive and as you noted there are few famous destination cities or attractions.
Regarding Quebec: It seems that far more Quebeckers are aware of New England attractions in Boston and points north than the other way around. You see them or hear them at ski slopes, beaches, concerts in Boston, etc. Yet few New Englanders have been to Montreal, and even fewer have even heard of Quebec City, the walled European city and heritage site just a few hours downriver.
The point of the article isn't "Malawi is poor compared to Europe," but rather comparing Malawi to other countries that were similarly colonized and how other colonized countries have done a lot better than Malawi - despite often having more adversity in their post-colonial existence.
Yes, being exploited will leave you in a bad state, but it's also important to learn why other similarly colonized countries have done a lot better over the past 30 years - what are the conditions and policies that improve things
I too don't want to write OS-specific stuff, but here's some counter arguments.
With egui, it's an immediate mode GUI rather than retained mode and that has trade-offs: https://github.com/emilk/egui#why-immediate-mode. It's going to use more CPU (and battery power), there can be jitter and things shifting after the initial rendering, and other stuff. I think egui is very different from most cross-platform and platform-specific libraries.
With .NET MAUI, you're getting native controls, but you're now using a layer that's trying to use native controls on the underlying systems that don't always align completely. A lot of things act mostly the same across systems, but some things don't totally.
With Flutter, your app is going to be larger in part because you're shipping a rendering engine, runtime, widgets, etc. Does it have the look and feel you want? Maybe. That's a bit subjective. Does it handle all the little things correctly? When I'm using an app, I want it to scroll like how I'm used to scrolling working on my system. If you have differently styled buttons, I don't care, but if the scrolling feels wrong, it's going to annoy me. And there's so many little things.
Frankly, one of the reasons why Electron often does well is that a lot of the little things "feel right" because the UI is essentially a Chromium-rendered web page which users are used to interacting with. But that has downsides too - shipping a web browser with your app and the memory usage.
Heck, Qt apps in Gnome or GTK+ apps in KDE can look/feel "off".
And it'll all depend on your ecosystem. Often cross-platform solutions are lacking in accessibility - sometimes completely missing, sometimes half-baked and it works in some parts and not in others or just is janky. Memory usage is often higher. Many little things that make an app feel right might not be there. Many have slower startup times since they're loading a bunch of stuff that native apps don't need to. And it really depends on what approach the cross-platform library is taking to determine what is going to cause pain.
So you kinda have to pick your poison and what's acceptable to you will vary depending on your goals and tastes. Maybe React Native is the way to go for you with lots of native controls available and the feel that provides and the performance and size is acceptable.
If you create a Flutter or Kotlin Compose Multiplatform or AvaloniaUI app and put it on the web, it's not going to feel right as something like HN does. Right-click, text selection, etc. are all going to be different or missing. If you're creating a solitaire game, maybe that doesn't matter - you get desktop and web in one go and it's not a big deal.
But you have to know what you're building to know if the trade-offs being made are good ones. This isn't meant to sound anti-cross-platform, but as someone who has suffered some pain in this area, I guess I just wanted to impart that it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Some times it can still be worth it, but just go in with your eyes open.
> electric-drivetrain with onboard gasoline generator
Generally speaking, it's more efficient to power a car using a series-parallel hybrid system than an electric drivetrain with generator (series hybrid) while not really being any more complicated.
In a series hybrid (electric with generator), you're losing energy converting the rotational energy into electric energy. It's better to use the engine's output to power the wheels while it's in an efficient range. It's why Toyota's series-parallel hybrid design offered better mileage than vehicles that (primarily or fully) operated as series hybrids like the Chevy Volt.
> No screens
You can't really sell a car without a screen due to government regulations which require backup cameras (since 2018 in North America, since 2022 in the EU and Japan).
> no assists
Automatic Emergency Braking is going to be required in the US in 2029 (detecting frontal crashes about to happen and automatically braking, including pedestrian detection).
The EU requires even more including blind spot detection and lane-keeping assist.
I certainly agree that cars need knobs and buttons for controls like AC/heat, music, etc. However, it'd be hard to make a car where you aren't putting in a screen and assistive technology. I think a better argument would be to make a car where the screen was simply Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and a backup camera - rather than shoving a lot of garbage UX into it.
> Automatic Emergency Braking is going to be required in the US in 2029 (detecting frontal crashes about to happen and automatically braking, including pedestrian detection).
I'm never going to want to drive a car that has that.
My car has AEB and it's great. I'll never drive another car without it. Why not take the energy out of the impact? Humans aren't perfect, and even less so as we age.
"Impact" as in an inevitable crash. I like it because it has unquestionably caused the avoidance of two cases where my car would have hit something. Once when I was merging onto a freeway and the car ahead of me basically brakechecked panic'd at the last second while I was briefly looking over my shoulder at the traffic I was merging into, and the other when a friend of mine borrowed my car and nearly hit a deer. Both cases the AEB kicked in, the car came to a very aggressive halt, and the crash was avoided. Yes, the AEB has kicked in at other times, but on the whole, it's been great and I appreciate having it. Probably other manufacturers have different implementations and different experiences. Mine is a Tesla.
So if you get into a crash, you would rather not have an extra few hundred milliseconds of deceleration? You would rather have more costly repairs, more injuries, maybe even more liability? I just don't see what you get in exchange for that by avoiding these features, or what principal is at stake
My car already has this awesome safety feature called a "windscreen". It's a bit of thick glass about a metre and a half across, kind of like the screens that cars now have inside but here's the clever bit - it lets you look outside the car! It's completely transparent with no electronics (although mine has very fine wires embedded to heat it to clear ice off, that's not really "active" in any sense).
By looking out of this "windscreen" at other things in front of your car, you can prevent crashes.
Ah, I see where you are coming from. As a driver with perfect attention, zero ms response time, 360 degree vision and a car that never fails in a world where no other driver ever makes mistakes, this feature doesn't help you.
You still never articulated an upside to not having it though.
I guess you know your cutoff date, then. My own perspective differs.
A couple of years ago, I was involved in a stupid car crash that probably would have been prevented by this kind of system. Everyone was pretty much OK (yay), but both vehicles were ruined. And for me, at least, it was a complete and utter pain in the ass to find something else to drive that fit my intended use.
> It was about x64 being unable to keep up - independent of Intel’s Fab capabilities which have improved lately.
But the big reason x64 couldn't keep up was that Intel's fab capabilities were horrible. Intel got stuck and couldn't get smaller nodes out and competing fabs caught up and left Intel in the dust.
Apple was able to ship 22nm Intel processors in Summer 2012 while their iPhone processors were 32nm that Fall and 28nm in Fall 2013. Spring 2015, Apple shipped 14nm Intel laptops and later that Fall 14/16nm iPhones. Competitors had caught up and soon TSMC started surpassing Intel.
Yes, Intel's fab capabilities have improved lately, but Intel's fab failures were causing x64 to fall behind. If Intel had retained fab supremacy, x64 wouldn't have fallen behind. I think Apple still likes the idea of being able to build exactly the parts they want (so they can optimize for power, thermals, etc), but Intel fell behind because their fabs stopped being competitive.
>> It was about x64 being unable to keep up - independent of Intel’s fab capabilities, which have improved lately.
> But the big reason x64 couldn't keep up was that Intel's fab capabilities were horrible. Intel got stuck and couldn't get smaller nodes out, and competing fabs caught up and left Intel in the dust.
It also was that Intel couldn’t execute reliably on their own roadmap, forcing Apple at the time to do extra engineering to incorporate Intel's chips. Apple sells a lot of laptops; Intel never got their act together regarding mobile processors for MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
The 8-core Mac Pro used Intel Xeon 5500 series; at idle, it used 309 W; it used 9 fans for cooling [1]. It sounded like a jet engine when it was running. And while it was an elegant design for the time, they shouldn’t have needed to jump through these hoops.
> It also was that Intel couldn’t execute reliably on their own roadmap,
Intel kept putting out delusional roadmaps that would assume their 10nm fab process was going to be ready for mass production in just another quarter or two. They spent years refusing to plan for 10nm to not be ready, so all their new architectures were unshippable and they had to resort to just using copy and paste on their 2015 CPU cores. Their fab fuck-up was hardly the only mistake they made in that era, but it was the biggest underlying cause of their problems.
It's really interesting how much the AI harness seems to matter. Going from 48% via Google's official results to 65% is a huge jump. I feel like I'm constantly seeing results that compare models and rarely seeing results that compare harnesses.
Is there a leaderboard out there comparing harness results using the same models?
Maybe the future isn't a human-like centralized intelligence but an octopus-like decentralized intelligence where more focus is placed on making the harness itself "smart"
Not really. Anthropic for example sells both the harness and the models as a unified kit via Claude Code, it is in their best interest to make sure both parts work as well as possible, via reinforcement learning of previous usage as well for new model performance increases.
That's not true that anyone can write a good harness because the LLM providers have information like prompts that they can RL train off of that someone writing their own harness would not have. Therefore a good and proprietary harness is a moat.
Because it's a way to make more money in the future. I feel like you're not really getting the difference between what a business does for profit and its technical decisions.
For my local tests the past few months on the same local model, I’ve found Claude Code to be way better than OpenCode, and OpenCode to be better than Codex.
Sure. Dirac is just a fork of the Cline harness and obviously OpenCode could take the same techniques and implement them. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement them in OpenCode, but given that Dirac and OpenCode are both open source, a future version of OpenCode could always be a re-branded Dirac (I'm sure there are ways to implement Dirac's techniques without having to completely replace OpenCode's underlying code base, but this illustrates that at the extreme, they could clearly just take Dirac in its entirety to get the same results).
I think the issue is that it's not just bad actors. It's every social platform that strips out metadata. If I post an image on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else, they're going to strip the metadata for my privacy. Sometimes the exif data has geo coordinates. Other times it's less private data like the file name, file create/access/modification times, and the kind of device it was taken on (like iPhone 16 Pro Max).
Usually, they strip out everything and that's likely to include C2PA unless they start whitelisting that to be kept or even using it to flag images on their site as AI.
But for now, it's not just bad actors stripping out metadata. It's most sites that images are posted on.
There’s actually a part of the NY state budget right now (TEDE part X, for my law nerds) that’d require social media companies to preserve non-PII provenance metadata and surface it to the user, if the uploaded image has it.
In the early days, Netflix benefited from other media companies not recognizing streaming for what it was: their replacement. They licensed content to Netflix cheaply without thinking about how it would impact DVD sales or cable tv subscriptions.
It's kinda like how IBM didn't see the value in software and that let Microsoft become Microsoft.
If this does bypass their own (and others') anti-AI crawl measures, it'd basically mean that the only people who can't crawl are those without money.
We're creating an internet that is becoming self-reinforcing for those who already have power and harder for anyone else. As crawling becomes difficult and expensive, only those with previously collected datasets get to play. I certainly understand individual sites wanting to limit access, but it seems unlikely that they're limiting access to the big players - and maybe even helping them since others won't be able to compete as well.
reply