Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.
> Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs
Cars aren't complicated. Make the right choice (buy cheap, buy japanese or french, avoid wet V-belts, prefer timing chains). Change oil and oil filter often. Keep an eye on the brake pads, shock absorbers, brake discs, tires, brake fluid, rust on the bodywork. Taking care of all this is surprisingly inexpensive. Of course, you can also have a car mechanic do all of this. Then you pay for their labor. But I really don't see any nasty surprises that might be lurking there. Of course, it depends on how well informed you are. If you've never looked under your car, then it's obviously a surprise when the floor panel is rusted through.
I understand that this is unreasonable for most people. But there is scope for ensuring that costs can be planned very well. However, I must admit at this point that you might as well deal with the complicated DB tariffs if you want to.
> but also because the price of gas is literally political.
Super 95 currently costs between €1.60 and €1.80. I still find that pretty easy to budget for.
> The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of ...
I agree with all your points. I'm just totally disappointed that we as a society can't manage to make public long-distance transport appealing. I would love to live in a world where I would feel like a complete idiot if I drove from Leipzig to Stuttgart and back instead of just taking the train.
Maybe not as extreme but I also always took great care of my hearing, wearing protection whenever I went out dancing when I was younger and never turning up my music to be nice and loud like my friends did in high school. Now in my mid 30s I have stress-induced tinnitus. Oh well.
Funny enough, OpenAI to this day violates EU requirements on price advertisement by charging VAT on top of the advertised price. They still owe me and every other customer in the EU ca. $3 VAT for every month I've had the ChatGPT subscription.
I don't understand why people always feel this is bad.
The times when people "hacked" the JS of the websites they visited are long gone, and for nearly all web applications (which is what WASM is useful for, as opposed to simple websites) the code is already completely unreadable (even if it were not minified, I mean, you would probably need to spend weeks understanding what it's doing for non-trivial stuff)... it's even illegal today to alter websites you visit to use "hidden" features, depending on your jurisdiction.
Besides, WASM is not going to displace JS, it will just give people an option to achieve things they couldn't with JS alone.
> The times when people "hacked" the JS of the websites they visited are long gone, and for nearly all web applications (which is what WASM is useful for, as opposed to simple websites) the code is already completely unreadable
This is an overly narrow and ungenerous interpretation of the criticism here. Frequently JS can be close to unreadable after minification (and even then, that's still only "frequently", "can", and "close"), but the anatomy of the page is as manipulable as it's ever been through standardized interfaces (DOM). Browser extensions and other features baked into browsers that depend on this ability to fiddle with or read e.g. form controls are ubiquitous. Flutter (or Flash) rendering a blob of pixels to a canvas destroys this. We'd never have gotten tabbed browsing or popout picture-in-picture videos with native playback controls or password managers or AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin if executing opaque SWFs and Silverlight bundles were gating users' access to Web apps.
(Worth pointing out that there's nothing really "Web" about them at that point, either—only through a dubious transitive argument involving the fact that the thing they're executing in has traditionally been called a Web browser).
> This is an overly narrow and ungenerous interpretation of the criticism here.
What? No it's not. It seems to me you completely misunderstand WASM by saying "the anatomy of the page is as manipulable as it's ever been through standardized interfaces (DOM)" as that's clearly unchanged with WASM! WASM doesn't even have access to the DOM yet, so literally WASM uses the same JS code browser extensions do.
I think they're talking about replacing the DOM entirely with a canvas based renderer through WASM, as Flutter and other WASM based UI frameworks like Slint do.
> All software is open source if you care to look hard!
Not really, because open source has a definition and that definition refers to the form that the software was authored in.
In addition, there are homomorphic encryption methods which make it possible to completely obfuscate the SW function, practically speaking. You don't even have to go that far, just look at a typical LLM network.
(As an aside, I think it would be funny if someone implemented a game where Minecraft-like crafting functionality would be implemented through a one-way hash function. So no one could look up the recipes in the source code. Or an adventure game which would hash the input command and the world state to decode the resulting progress.)
> Not really, because open source has a definition and that definition refers to the form that the software was authored in.
Well, yeah I was referring to reverse engineering it.
> ...which make it possible to completely obfuscate the SW function, practically speaking.
"Practically speaking" is the keyword here. Given enough resources (time and money), anyone with enough skills can find out how any software works and re-implement it, even if the original source code is lost.
The main premise here is that the CPU has to be able to see the instructions to execute them. If the CPU can see them, I, as a reverse engineer, certainly can.
> (As an aside, I think it would be funny if someone implemented a game where Minecraft-like crafting functionality would be implemented through a one-way hash function. So no one could look up the recipes in the source code.)
The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.