ttepasse

As usual with culture war topics: Those examples in that article are often selective quoting and abridging information and a multi-step game of telephone and the language barrier hinders monolinguistic people from crosschecking.

Let's try one example, going back to sources:

1) Noah Smith writes "Meanwhile, some people at Germany’s Federal Environmental Ministry claimed (falsely) that portable air conditioners don’t work.", linking on a tweet by Andrew Hammel.

https://x.com/AndrewHammel1/status/2070436290915426555

(Hammel, in my opinion, has radicalised since 2015, producing culture war content about Germany for rightwing english-speaking audiences. I remember his old weblog from the 2000s, when he was a mild-mannered expat.)

2) Hammel's tweet shows a screenshot of an infographic which the news magazine ZDFHeute posted on Instagram. We can see those infographics in context, they are basically practical tips. There is the shortened sentence that the Federal Agency for the Enviroment, the Umweltbundesamt, advises against "portable ACs". That is true. But Hammel, I think, goes nuts.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ6xUPUlpYv/?img_index=2

3) Let's crosscheck with what the Umweltbundesamt actually wrote. We can find that on their homepage:

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/umwelttipps-fuer-den-alltag/g...

First practical advice how to behave in a heat wave.

Then practical advice for buildings and new construction, awning, isolation, heat pumps, etc.

Thirdly advice for AC, when necessary: energy efficient (it's the Umweltbundesamt after all), no polluting refrigerants, a preference for split AC units, where the radiator is on the outside instead of the inside. They contrast split AC against "portable units" also knows as monoblocks which are by definition not split but where the radiator is on the same unit and the radiator's hot air either goes directly into the room oder has to be transported outside through an open window. Hence the advice against monoblocks.

Additional complication nobody mentions: Practical all windows in Germany are of the tilt and turn type, which makes them not as practical for window AC units, because then the whole window is open. Take a look at the "portable" AC units sold by a national electronics chain:

https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/category/klimaanlagen-100.html

Almost all are inefficient monoblocks, no window units, only one portable split AC the Midea PortaSplit - which is sold out. And rather costly with 850 €.

But the PortaSplit is the best practical option for a lot of Germans, because it's a nation of renters.

In summary:

1) The Umweltbundesamt published practical advice including a preference for split AC units against monoblocks. I find that reasonable.

2) The news magazine ZDFHeute published a very abridged infographic quoting that advice. Could be better.

3) Hammel screenshots that infographic, doesn't crosscheck und rants in his tweet more about a strawman than what the UBA actually wrote.

4) Noah Smith simply believes what he sees on social media, I presume, because it fits his preconceived notions.

5) People on Hacker News ... well. Let's say most of them are not good on nuance on Europe.

...

What makes these discussions so annoying is that there is always a kernel of truth. But to put these kernels into context is work. I'm typing here for over half an hour already, just for randos on the net.

Something I'd like these culture warriors to look on concept like path dependency and cost-benefit. The reason a lot of northern Europe doesn't have AC, is a mixture of multiple things: heatwaves were extremely rare, the famous 2003 was described as a huge outlier. Hence there was a long time not a big market for ACs, hence the inventory and possibilities are spare.

Then a lot of old construction that can not easily modified. I live in a small apartment in a block built in 1904, now under historical preservation. Installing fixed AC would need major investment by the landlord and is often not practical. I think there is only a small wall usable for a per-apartment split AC. A whole-house of whole block unit or even better heat pumps would need major investment for 100s of small apartments here.

And for me, buying a PortaSplit when they are available. I'd like to. But 850 € is far out of my budget (I'm rather poor). And then there is the cost-benefit-analysis: There were only two days this year where the temperature inside was annoying for me. Those old building has 1m thick brick walls which isolate pretty well for the days of a heat wave. We had a few days with 37° C and more. The temperature in my apartment was the most time around 26° C, very slowly heating up. And now it's cooler for the next weeks. I was looking for a meteorological climate diagram for my city and the average temperature for June/July is around 24°. For let's say maybe five nights a year, I won't touch the emergency fund. If I lived differently, maybe under the roof, my calculation were different.

Those are all practical, economical decisions. But Noah Smith invents a whole ideological strawman. If we all were rich, we were living in passive houses or plus energy houses with air-to-air heat pumps. We aren't. It's always money. It's very seldom ideology.

> I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this.

MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under:

Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething

(Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastaturkurzbefehle → Eingabequellen)

Personally I dream of a Mac keyboard with OLED key caps for multilingual keyboard layouts.

Possibly related: The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Flesh_Pit_National_Par...

Back in the 2000s in the web standards development community there were multiple web development strategies called "progressive enhancement", "graceful degradation" and "unobtrusive javascript":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

There were a lot of practical reasons for that: The browser landscape was much more diverse, different browsers had different support of standard Javascript, some browsers didn't even support JS and some people still kept text-only browsers like lynx/links in mind. Also browsers were not evergreen, so a large part of the audience could be on some older versions. Another thing were sometimes brittle network connection, especially over mobile. Depending on JS could in the case of corruption mean non-functioning websites.

For a lot whose exposure to web development and the discussions abound that, that reason will be stuck in their head, even if in the last decade of React ets the "best practices" will have changed.

There is also an aesthetic thing: There is a thing of beauty in simply curling an url and piping it into grep or such to get the thing you need, instead of having so have an headless browser. In my mind that is still how the web should work.

There was even a polyglot (X)HTML 5 which I always found genius - there are many more XML parsers than HTML5 parsers in the world.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/

I was surprised to see an Eckart Walther cited as an co-creator of RSS. That was news to me, and I followed the RSS wars since 2000. I thought I knew the names of everyone involved.

Turn's out: he really is. RSS was created by Ramanathan Guha, Dan Libby and Eckart Walther at Netscape first as an RDF Site Summary but only Guha and Libby are named on the original specs. That format then got transformed into a pure XML-based format, then merged with Dave Winer’s format, who then became chief author for the following RSS 0.9x and 2.0 versions. And of course in parallel there were the rivalling RSS 1.0 specs (again RDF based) and the Atom effort.

Should anybody be interested in now obscure histoy: Twobithistory did a longer retrospective of the feed wars:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

And the (slightly disputed) RSS Board, its own fractal in the RSS history, keeps copies of the original specifications:

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-history

Also: They don't really work in other countries or demographics. Generational bins presume that shared experiences form a somewhat comparable outlook on life.

I am a Xennial. I grew up in Western Germany. Are my life experiences the same as someone who grew up in Eastern Germany, experienced the fall of the Wall and all the economic and political disruptions afterwards in their formative years or by witnessing their family's experiences? My life didn't change, the country got a little bit bigger. Theirs in many measurable and unmeasurable ways. Are we the same generation?

And that was a peaceful revolution. Other countries weren't/aren't such lucky.

... in a diminished state.

There isn't one. It's Google's web now. You should be thankful that you are still allowed to use it.

Some modern electrical solutions seem to be very near this ideal. Take a look a Mahle, their rear hub motor and small in-frame batteries only seem obvious I you take a close look.

https://mahle-smartbike.com/ebikes/

(What I'd love to see are more cheap bikes and bike components. I'm currently searching for an “acoustic” commuter bike and I find solid bikes are rather soon outside my preferred budget.)

Interestingly there was a real attempt to build an E-Puzzler for shredded documents, to reconstruct the torn Stasi files after the German reunification. But while the system worked for defined stuff, but failed for mass reconstruction of documents with different formats:

https://www.bundesarchiv.de/en/stasi-records-archive/the-rec...

That's depends very much on age, class, geographic location. Someone could have grown up imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, hence learning Russian as a second language. Nonetheless they deserve appliances, websites and infrastructure which they can use and understand.

One about the annoying things about Maciej is that he acquired Delicious the domain .icio.us, but never did anything auspicious, maybe suspicious or malicious with the latter.

I remember when purl.org namespace URIs where the thing for RSS 1.0 modules. 25 years ago,

Here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Easter egg: The example is named dogcow, after a 90s Mac icon, designed by Susan Kare, which later became a small mascot: https://512pixels.net/dogcow/

Regarding .length: Effectly that is just the result of Unicode, there is no one-to-one equivalent between characters code points, the code units in an encoding and the resulting grapheme clusters. That is in effect a result of the complexity of the world's alphabets, including Emoji.

As someone who memorised the key combo for em dashes, curly quotes and guillemot's back in IRC days this notion depresses me.

Only two parties have been banned in Germany's post-war history. Banning a party is a rightfully a huge hurdle, because it goes both ways: While it can be a part of a self-defence mechanism of democracy it is also a way in which Hitler & Co consolidated their power. Hence it can be only used after a ruling of the Constitutional Court – it is in a way a constitutional question.

> ... right away

Apart from the constitutional hurdles there is also the question of "right away": The AfD of the early 2010s is not the same party as today. Back then they were ... well cranky but not extreme. Banning it in 2013 would have been unjust. Over the decade it moved further and further to the right. Pretty much all the founders and bigwigs of the early generation left the party and distanced themselves from it. But radicalisation is a process not a binary switch from one day to the next.

For a computer what is the difference between 27 and 13000?

According to the video you don't seem to automatically translate everything - thankfully! - but should you plan this in the future, please, please give your users an opt-out or a setting.

Just minutes ago I wrestled again with Youtube which doesn't respect my language preferences and tries to autotranslate not just the titles but also dubs videos in a shitty AI-translation, which I don't want. Youtube doesn't really seem to give you settings for this.

Machine translation may have gotten better, but it is still not right if you speak both languages. It get's the information across but always feels like the uncanny valley, it doesn't feel right. So my preference still is to never have machine translation between languages I already understand.

Knuth in the wake of the Iraq war and the Abu Ghraid crimes asked some "Infrequently Asked Questions" which are of course highly political. He kept this page linked on top of his home page. And in 2022 he wrote a postscript with more political questions.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html

Back on New Years Eve 2016 I wanted to see once in my life one of these leap second which got inserted every few years. Emerald Time was the only clock app I found which displayed the deciseconds: https://imgur.com/a/r1d6OkW

(00:59, because of UTC+1)

Further down on the page they rightly notice that strictly necessary cookies don't require consent. This mirrors the opinion of European Union's Article 29 Working Party back then: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

gdpr.eu is by the way not an official resource of the European Union but by the Swiss Proton AG. They note down the page that gdpr.eu doesn’t constitute legal advice. Although they are correct in this case and your misunderstanding was in reading for future internet discussions I'd recommend not using private sources.

But current Volkswagen leader- and ownership is not nazi, unlike Tesla.

VW in effect was re-founded after the war by the British military administration as a trust and only privatised into a public company in the 1960s.

The biggest shareholders of BMW on the other hand are still the Quandt family whose grandfather Günther Quandt definitely was Nazi member, collaborator, donator and massively profiteered from the slave labour by concentration camp victims and prisoners of war.

The value of "enough" is a moderation decision made by a human.

Apropos Drawers: The may have looked a little bit silly back then but today almost every Mac app main windows has a big grey sidebar, so that in Exposé view almost all windows look the same. Drawers got an unfair rap, I think.

For anecdotal feedback I'm taking myself as an example, although I don't flag, I just don't upvote anymore.

(At the same time I think there is a flag problem on HN. I'd recommend /active for a better view into HN discussions.)

Historically I should be your target group, I'm a Mac user since it was uncool (and tribal), I think I have DF in my subscriptions since NetNewsWire 1. But I'm just not interested anymore, I fell off as a regular reader.

Partly it is topical: I'm rather disinterested in inside baseball or opinions on journalism on Apple. "Claim Chowder" as a concept should have staid in the 2000s, I think. My Apple interests are more in the technical details or in the opinions of the wider Indie Devsphere or how people use their technology. Hence Michael Tsai's blog is my favourite Apple blog.

And where you touch an Apple business aspect I'm often baffled by your reasoning. That your Apple-vs-EU-opinions are rather outlier opinions I don’t need to recap, although I found the tone of your language sometimes going in an off putting weird direction, almost as if those Europeans should not allowed to give themselves laws.

But even when I share the complaint of a critical article of yours there is a fundamental disconnect. Taking your recent "Rotten" post: You closed the article with the hope of someone berating the lower ranks of Apple like Jobs did with MobileMe. I found that sociopathic by Jobs then and I find the suggestion absurd today. Telling the slaves to row harder has never motivated someone, I think.

And even if, the software problem at Apple is managerial. Senior management invented the annual releases, probably for the Christmas season. Senior management started to announce features in advance, pushing them back more and more in the release year. Senior management releases features before they are ready. In my opinions the directly responsible individuals are Federighi and Dye, as good as that hair may be. And for all of it: Cook himself.

Plus: Apple's position has fundamentally changed. Instead of an upstart, it is a trillion-dollar-behemoth. That changes how we look at the company. And the company has deeply changed, like all tech company they become more vertical and insular in their services (“Feudal” is a wrong metaphor, historically speaking, but it goes to an emotional truth). Why should we root for them anymore?

Recently I tried helping someone to get a file from a PC to their iPhone. The best options were either weird file sharing services or an USB stick like a barbarian. I blame Apple. I remember a time when computers could talk to each other, based on shared, open technical standards. Of course I blame Apple.

For your hypothesis to be true you'd see falling Model y numbers but somewhat steady Model 3 numbers, since that was refreshed only in 2023 and is in no danger of getting a new refresh.

That is not the case. I took a look at the German numbers for Januaries 2025 and 2024 and Model 3 fell proportionally the same as Model Y in the YoY numbers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43027039

Numbers are rational, are they?

iOS got profiles the same time. They sync.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iphd27a9ff22/io...

My main observation in temperature scale and imperial lengths discussions om the Internet is that Americans seem to have a strange aversion against fractional parts of numbers, as if those were irrational.

(On the other hand a lot of Americans consume fava beans.)