All roads and their usage comes at a cost, toll roads just at more of a cost due to their additional overheads. What you end up with is a more expensive path that disincentivizes a public path there. Drivers on it pay the overheads of the tolls, drivers avoiding it continue to pay more in gas and wear. Everyone would pay less if it were just a public path.
Seems to me you are focused on money rather than time here. However, people using these road are not in alignment with that metric. What’s important is not the cost, but the value. Why choose a toll road over a public path from A to B? It’s all about saving time—that’s the value the transaction provides those users.
If a toll road becomes public, its value goes away because traffic increases on it, eliminating any benefit of traffic reduction that provides time savings that the gate keeping of the charging a toll provides. Also this notion of “everyone now bears the cost of the road” creates damage. That cost now hits the folks who don’t want to use it currently because they do not see its value. All you have done is hurt both the drivers of the road and the drivers who do not use the road by “sharing the burden” and making it public.
I'm not sure money and time are cleanly separable metrics for this in that changing one changes the other, which is why it's not as simple as looking at the toll roads' dynamics in isolation. If a region spends more on transport infrastructure then the average transit time is going to be less (and conversely the opposite) for pretty much any method of buildout except fraud. The notion of "everyone now bears the cost of the road" causes the roads to be optimized towards the average public good. This is not to say it's without tradeoff to anybody at all - just that it's geared towards the best tradeoff for everyone as a whole. The notion of "those able to bear the cost and extra overhead of the toll road bear its cost" certainly still causes a reduction in time for those willing and able to pay, but only for the able who now have no interest in their public infrastructure funding duplicating a path they already have for the common good.
That's where the shift in burden to the poor so the rest can have shorter commute comes from. If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility. Of course it doesn't have the same opportunity cost, so who benefits from the toll road is more slanted than who benefits from the public road. Whether or not the shift of burden is acceptable/ideal is a matter of opinion on public policy, but it's there.
> I'm not sure money and time are cleanly separable metrics for this in that changing one changes the other, which is why it's not as simple as looking at the toll roads' dynamics in isolation
Sure they are, tolls regulate the amount of traffic on a toll road and should hopefully decrease congestion and improve travel time. Eliminate the tolls, you will gain more traffic, more congestion, and more travel time. This will diminish its utility in that regard and it becomes yet another congested path.
> If everyone had the same opportunity cost to use the toll road then it wouldn't have the shift in burden as much as a pure shift in utility
Not that sure that a Marxist-style “equity” argument is all that convincing here. There is no huge mass public benefit here in eliminating an existing toll road. Your only true benefliciaries of this change are those people 1) who have to go from point A to point B, 2) need to arrive somewhat sooner than they do now (and can’t leave any sooner to get there) and 3) cannot afford the toll to get there faster under any circumstance.
Seems like that’s a pretty small subset of folks. Everybody else probably falls into 2 basic categories. Those willing to pay the toll to get there sooner—-but they lose the time benefit in your world. Those not willing to pay to get there sooner—but they now get the privilege for paying for a road they were choosing to not pay for before. Seems to me the bulk of the affected, lose.
Bear in mind, I am only arguing against the elimination of existing toll roads. Public infrastructure needs are what they are and region planners should make best efforts to deliver reliable and reasonable road infrastructure for its population. However, there is no doubt that toll roads can help improve overall transportation needs. So if a beneficial road can be created sooner if its costs can be offset via toll vs. waiting until public money is available to fund the construction, I think there is value to be explored there.
Can you help share more of how we can know more about these claims? The only thing I could find related to this was https://x.com/jaredlholt/status/1757799398707188046 and the replies don't add any clarity to understanding what is real and what is not. I'm not saying that's all there is, just that I don't know how to find more and figure out one way or the other what is up where.
I don't know how to find superchat history, but honestly you can just peruse his own twitter here: https://x.com/ATDrummond
The guy has had a long running reputation on this site. Which is why he decided to add this to his profile:
>here from hacker news? don’t be a creep
And by creep, he of course means "don't call me out for advocating for genocide."
His last post is even out right decrying ANY type of immigration, and his second post is being critical of Israel. And mind you, not because of any "normal" sociopolitical commentary, but simply because Israel = Jews and "Jews are bad."
Thanks, I don't use Twitter/X so it would have taken me a while to figure out how to see the content of the posts (gee thanks X for requiring login to see most things properly!)
Knowing this, I managed to find 2 additional things which help strengthen this connection as not just being some random twitter account with a matching name:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38840473 where it doesn't actually link to the Twitter to see what the content is but he doesn't bother denying he'd have a Twitter account that could be taken that way.
- https://archive.ph/pJqzD where someone acknowledges they interacted with the account knowing it was really him as part of sharing their discovery of the news.
Much thanks, I would never have thought to look for such an unhinged Twitter account for a seemingly above average HN user being praised long after his death.
Yeah, I understand it's seemingly hard to reconcile. And without revealing other aspects of my identity I can say his posts on Twitter and here do not reveal the extent of his views.
Because one property doesn't guarantee the other. A modular system may imply that it can be extended. An extensible system is not necessarily modular.
Wayland, the protocol, may be extensible, but the implementations of it are monolithic. E.g. I can't use the xdg-shell implementation from KWin on Mutter, and so on. I'm stuck with whatever my compositor and applications support. This is the opposite of modularity.
So all this protocol extensibility creates in practice is fragmentation. When a compositor proposes a new protocol, it's only implemented by itself. Implementations by other compositors can take years, and implementations by client applications decades. This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".
> E.g. I can't use the xdg-shell implementation from KWin on Mutter, and so on.
Why not? It's open-source software. Depending on your architecture you may be able to reuse parts of it.
But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.
> and implementations by client applications decades.
Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.
> This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".
Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform? If it were like today for 18 years and fail to improve, sure, something must be truly problematic. But there were absolutely different phases and uptake of the project so it moved at widely different speeds.
> Why not? It's open-source software. Depending on your architecture you may be able to reuse parts of it.
"The system is not modular, but you can make it so."
What a ridiculous statement.
> But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.
Great! How do I use wlroots as a user?
> Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.
Ah, right. Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do? So we can tell users that all their applications will continue to work when they switch to Wayland?
> Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform?
It's not fare, you're right. I'll wait another decade before I voice my concerns again.
Why would you want to use it as a user? That makes zero sense.
> Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do
I don't get your point. The reason it exists is backwards compatibility. There are binaries as well where changing a library is not so easy, and not every version change is equal within a toolkit.
But it's much different to go from X to Wayland then from Wayland to Wayland with one more protocol.
Am I not loading all of this article? It basically stops for me after saying "magnet toys top the list" with 3 examples of such (well, really 2) for me, with no real investigation into other toys or exploration of why the variants like the Minecraft magnet toy scored much worse in cleanup (I assume it's due to the piece size?). Anything about toys other than magnet blocks?
Another type of toy I've seen fit this bill has been wooden/plastic train tracks (the solid larger pieces type, not flimsy model type, and simple sturdy trains to go on them). It still has the element of customization and playing with what you build but cleanup is "scoop the large pieces into a bucket" (and stepping on them usually isn't painful!)
The confusion was less on the author and more on the submission reaching the top of the front page - it wouldn't have been the first time the issue was my ad blocker or something. Thanks for confirming!
A quality PSU can often last 10 years and multiple builds. Quality in this case just means "has things like over voltage protection, proper wiring included, decent caps, and decent voltage regulation" not "was really expensive". E.g. that $140 85 W Seasonic Focus tier is quality in this regard, the $80 no-name 850 W PSU is what people warn about, and the $400 Seasonic Prime titanium rated PSU is mostly for those scrutinizing VRM designs or wattage limits on the cables to the GPU for their overclock goals.
It's common to upgrade your PSU anyways though as it seems like parts wattages only go up over the years (particularly for the +12v rails) or one may want to cycle out the old system completely for reuse/resale. Generic advice (since most people buy cheapo no name PSUs and upgrade rarely) might be to say to replace just to be on the good side of every situation... but if you're one that knows you got a quality PSU or likes to upgrade your build every other CPU generation, then swapping out the PSU every time is likely a waste.
I agree there is certainly more than one factor and no place has 100% of them perfect, but that doesn't make an individual factor any less stifling - just perhaps it's outweighed by good approach in other factors.
Maybe the thing that might equal this out most is the US and EU seem to be equally as interested in censoring and limiting models, just not for Tiananmen Square, and the technology does not care why you do it in terms of impact to performance.
I think the bigger problem is Framework doesn't actually offer as much in upgradeability as it sounds. While it can be compared to laptops without modular RAM, SSDs, or Wi-Fi cards, the real comparison is to laptops with modular ones of those for significantly less and suddenly the amount of upgradeability value drops significantly. Unofficially, many of the laptops I've had I've been able to upgrade even the screen on as well. The value prop for replacing the mainboard+CPU while keeping the same generation RAM and SSD is really not that high in terms of upgradeability - especially with the breadth of selection so far. In the meantime, you're paying significantly more for less quality to have said ability.
To me, the core value proposition of the Framework is actually more in customization than about upgradeability. That's just a lot less valuable overall. I.e. you can place your port layouts in any order you want, you can customize the keyboard style and layout, your order builds up without really assuming you want a charger, RAM, and SSD to be included. If you don't particularly care about those things or you can find a laptop which matches what you want up front then it just leaves you questioning the massive price increase to do it the Framework way instead.
I'd really like to enjoy the idea of fully upgradeable laptops, but I think trying out a Framework laptop just made me realize how much it doesn't work out like I'd hoped rather than making me more excited for it. I ended up returning it and, ironically, getting a 395 laptop with soldered RAM (in my defense, Framework sells a desktop with this as well).
I don't see why upgrading a motherboard to one with a newer generation CPU is not valuable. Or why going 16 to 32 GB RAM a few years after buying it first isn't.
Yes full upgradability of each component would be pretty nice but now we have a desktop and factors like compactness and "premium feel" would be even worse
I only said the value is not that high, not that it's not valuable at all. Paying a premium up front and on the upgrade to swap out the CPU + Motherboard (also forcing the GPU on certain Framework models) eats heavily into that limited value vs just buying lower cost laptops that aren't as modular.
Regarding the RAM, again, you don't need to pay for a Framework to do be able to do that. Same for the SSD. These are probably the two most reasonable components to upgrade, and it's not novel to have options to do so.
That full upgradeability actually doesn't make sense in the end is my exact point/realization I had trying it out. You can get somewhat upgradeable laptops where it makes sense already, and compromising every which way to be more upgradable is a hugely diminishing return.
In my experience, when there is a time to replace the CPU/board by a newer one, the case if a notebook also accumulated enough wear and tear damage that make sense to replace it.
And when not, replacing whole notebook means i still have the old one, which i could use as a backup or sell or give to someone.
> I think the bigger problem is Framework doesn't actually offer as much in upgradeability as it sounds. [..,] Unofficially, many of the laptops I've had I've been able to upgrade even the screen on as well.
The Framework's screen is officially upgradeable, though, and I see that as a strength: while you or I might not blink at doing an unofficial screen replacement for some other laptop, I'm sure most people would be afraid to attempt something like that.
I've also (officially) replaced the webcam (new one is definitely better) and speakers (new ones are better but still meh). When my battery starts to go, I'll replace it with the higher-capacity battery that's available now.
So it's definitely quite a bit more than just RAM, SSD, Wi-Fi.
> The value prop for replacing the mainboard+CPU while keeping the same generation RAM and SSD is really not that high in terms of upgradeability
I agree on the RAM: I have a Framework 13, and my next mainboard upgrade will require new RAM (which is of course crazy expensive right now), as my current board uses DDR4. But I view that as a forced upgrade; if I didn't have to go to DDR5, I'd probably stick with DDR4, and I'm sure it would be fine, even if not optimal.
But I really don't understand or agree with your comment about the SSD. I have a 2TB NVMe drive in my current laptop, and I expect I'll be using the same drive for years to come, certainly through my next mainboard upgrade, and probably even the following one.
> That's just a lot less valuable overall. I.e. you can place your port layouts in any order you want, you can customize the keyboard style and layout,
Right, agreed: I have not changed the layout of my ports in more than a year at this point, and I never changed the keyboard style/layout. It was nice to be able to easily replace the keyboard when my original one developed issues a few months ago (not Framework's fault... it was my cat's fault), at least.
But I think all of this is a matter of taste. I expect there are some people who change out their expansion ports fairly often. It's fine that I don't value that feature as much as I expected I would.
My expectation is that I'll have this laptop chassis for another 10 or so years, probably with 2-3 mainboard upgrades in that time. My prior two (non-Framework) laptops were in the $1800-$2000 range, each of which lasted three years, and had significantly less RAM than my Framework does (those two laptops weren't even offered with 32GB, let alone the 64GB I have now).
My next mainboard upgrade will likely be the cost of that new laptop, given the crazy cost of DDR5 right now (though it looks like I'd be paying Dell around $2400 for a 13" laptop with 64GB; I could probably do the Framework mainboard upgrade plus RAM for $1800 or so). But maybe the next-next mainboard upgrade will still use DDR5, and I'll get a brand-new computer for around $1k. That's a really great value prop for me.
"Most people" don't upgrade individual components of their desktop or spend thousands on their computer either, especially beyond the storage and RAM, so I'm not sure who the average person it's supposed to comfort that it's official vs not to do things as small as upgrade the screen out of cycle from upgrading the rest of the machine. Framework is, unfortunately, positioned in every way for exactly the type of person who would do this (high end, willing to assemble, Linux compatibility, customization - it's all exactly that kind of power user target). I mean I'd like it to make sense, it just doesn't.
Same with replacing parts vs customizing them on equivalent "standard" laptops. I've had to replace the keyboard on my laptops due to failure/damage once in the last 10 years, each time it took less than 15 minutes. Would it be nice if it was 3 minutes? Sure, but how much is 12 minutes really worth paying for and what do I lose for it in terms of the sturdiness problems with Framework.
Barring the decision to go with something like the 395 where standard RAM wouldn't make sense for it anyways (which is why Framework didn't make the RAM modular in the desktop version) there is nothing special about Framework that lets you reuse RAM between upgrades giving Framework an advantage. Every other normal x86 laptop I've ever used has had swappable RAM I've taken advantage of without paying $1800 for even the entire laptop, let alone the upgrade board.
There is some subjective preference in it all of course, but it seems that is just for a lot fewer people than it might have seemed. I.e. I don't see average people buying $500 laptops ever going for this and it almost feels like it has already reached its peak interest in the tech crowd too.
This is the first time I've ever even heard of unofficial screen upgrades even being _possible_, and I'm at least two standard deviations from the mean on the "likes to tinker" scale.
I can't even begin to think about how a laptop screen upgrade would go. Who's manufacturing them? How do I get just one? How do I make sure I don't spend a month waiting for shipping and get a fake? How do I make sure the housing is going to fit right? How do I make sure the pin outs match?
... and etc etc. An official upgrade pathway eliminates all of that. Sure, it's not bringing you back to "average person", but Framework have been super clear that's not who they're after. They want people in my bracket. To be honest, as a cohort, we've proven we're willing to (over)pay for this kind of thing, too. It's why the PC Market still exists despite graphics cards being overpriced by about double.
I don't think it's particularly common for techies to upgrade the screen, just that they are the only ones who would because... well, upgrading a screen usually isn't ever needed. The only reason I did is work was offloading some good laptops for low cost but they had sub-1080p screens. I took one with a broken screen for free and when I did the replacement I used a higher end model's replacement part.
I.e. the only different part is finding a laptop of the same screen size and eDP (embedded Display Port) generation to select from. The rest is the same. If you've already got a good screen it's usually not possible though as you're limited by the eDP generation's speed instead of the panel.
On a phone at the moment so I can't try it out, but in regards to this "stricter mode" it says global variables must be declared with var. I can't tell if that means that's just the only way to declare a global or if not declaring var makes it scoped in this mode. Based on not finding anything skimming through the examples, I assume the former?
it also talks about the global object not being a place to add properties. So how you might do `window.foo = ...` or `globalThis.foo = ...` to make something from the local context into a global object. in this dialect I guess you would have to reserve any global objects you wanted to set with a `var` and then set them by reference eg
// global. initialized by SomeConstructor
var fooInstance
class SomeConstructor {
constructor(...) {
fooInstance = this;
}
static getInstance(...) {
if (fooInstance != null) return fooInstance;
return new SomeConstructor(...);
}
}
If we all resorted to snarky replies on HN then the conversation would be in a sad state despite the posting in the guidelines saying not to. Of course the posting of the guidelines is not the source of their enforcement, it's just a notice of what will be corrected by the mods via means other than written notice or group encouragement towards the environment the guidelines create.
While that doesn't drive comments against the guidelines to 0, I think it does a better job than if we all took to being as a defense to snark instead.
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