There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.

> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.

You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.

> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.

No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).

> Oil is a must in military.

I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?

I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.

> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.

It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.

The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.

I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)

It was a relatively easy fix which didn’t fully solve the issue but made the very real issue of pervasive tracking visible to everyone.

The breakthroughs in mathematics are impressive. But it doesn’t feel that different from what machine learning has done with Chess, Go and protein folding. They’re finding patterns in our systems and in nature. That’s what they’ve always been good at.

I dont see how the outlook is any better for the open weight companies. They’re in the exact same situation as the closed weight companies except they have had much less revenue, and built up less of a brand, leading up the the point where they are equal in terms of model quality.

There’s a small port on the east side of Taiwan which could be used to supply some of the bare necessities. I don’t know if USA would fully enter a war but I do think they might do freedom of navigation exercises east of the island. Would China dear hit a US military vessel with missiles and escalate the conflict. I don’t think so.

It shows that, yeah, bad designs can fail early. But if you buy from a reputable company, it is likely to be fixed.

You say the article is nonsense but all your points are about entirely different products/markets. So what exactly was nonsense about the article. It’s factually correct, and it’s raising awareness of something important: that we shouldn’t trust narratives just because they’re compelling and useful to make people engaged in a cause (the fight against planned obsolescence).

The kind of standardisation we got with light bulbs is exactly the thing we want: the avoid companies trying to sell you a bad product (one that wastes electricity and dumps heat in your home whether you want it or not), so they can use some less important metric (buy this! It lasts twice as long the competitors!) to sell you stuff. Basically a scam.

We don’t want to throw the baby out of the bathwater. Companies should be allowed to cooperate and set standard (NACS is a recent example) that is mutually beneficial to everyone. Then we create regulations to address egregious cases of planned obsolescence. Like EUs recent regulations for replaceable batteries - though as we now see it’s a double edged sword. Some products were made worse in a mildly significant way. That’s OK though as long as we decided that’s what we want through a democratic process.

Afaik it’s the same in US, isn’t it? Just with the complication that there’s no government mandated standard, but NACS seems to becoming the de facto standard? So a benefit to Tesla for older models I suppose?

The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.

An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.

I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)

We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living.

So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions.

We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases.

And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.

So it’s more of an issue when you want to use that excess solar to power your computer in winter.

If not nuclear, I think the northern regions need to focus on geothermal (Quaise?) and trash burning (yes, recycle first, but eventually everything non metal degrades and should be incinerated)

An LLM could probably also trivially give you accurate reviews saying which parts were unsafe and in need of tests or reviews. I mean, considering their LLM budgets they could probably have had nightly reviews running every night for years before spending more than their Rust rewrite.

Not that I think Rust rewrite was a bad idea. Rust is a good fit for this kind of project. I say that as a Zig enthusiast. It’s just that their stated motivation and reported results are kinda BS. If they just wrote “we just like Rust and thought it’d be cool to see of LLM could do the whole rewrite”, and left it at that, I think it’d be a more honest description of the motivation. The rest is just rationalisation.

libghostty is more impactful than Bun IMO. It doesn’t matter to most other developers that Bun was written in Zig, but that such a a good library is written in Zig could have an impact on whether other devs use Zig to write libraries, or if they consider Zig for their app when having libghostty as a dependency

TigerBeetle is also more important than Bun since Zig is a better match for their needs it was for Bun, and TigerBeetle team seems to be a better partner for the Zig foundation. The Bun/Oven team seemed to be an annoyance rather than a synergetic partner.

But in general, pre-1.0, I think any large project that uses it is just a bonus.

1.

> Id like a clarification on how this is safer than Rust?

(Seems reasonable enough)

2. meme image with the words “bait” and “retarded” - should be deleted

3.

> Funny how memory safety suddenly became a priority right after Bun moved to Rust. That feels like a pretty big departure from Zig's original philosophy.

> Someone's still pretty butthurt about Jared and the Bun team.

Just toxic negativity in my opinion. Author has clearly not followed Zig closely as memory safety has always been a priority as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of Zigs other more basic goals. This isn’t serious criticism and it’s completely valid to delete it. Andrew’s interest in Fil-C predates the Bun debacle AFAICT

And now I see a bunch more comments that are just utterly toxic, which I also expect will be deleted.

Serious comments seem to be kept, even when they’re sceptical.

I really don’t see how you could find the community toxic unless you take everything they want to do differently from other languages (which may come along with some criticism - explicit or implicit) as some kind of toxic negativity?

“I'm tired to see zig head people trying to diss Rust whenever they can.”

I feel like in every Zig post you’ve got Walter Bright saying D did this 10 years ago and a bunch of other people saying Zig isn’t a robust language because it can’t do memory safety like Rust. I find it annoying, but it’s just how it is. We like to compare things we like and there will unavoidably be some negativity in there. We should try to steelman these comments. And the steelman case for Andrew’s mention of Rust here is that this is just a different approach to memory safety, and that’s it’s just more complete in the specific way he and Fil-C is referencing

I’ve seen many Zig enthusiasts who is positive to Rusts approach to memory safety (it’s definitely nice to catch things at compile time), but just don’t consider it the ultimate approach that is best for all kinds of software

How many times did that point have to be reiterated in unnecessary AI style?

Was the article AI generated. I hope so, if not it really shows how bad AI has degraded our ability to write. Could you at least have read over and cleaned up the prose a bit? That whole section could have been written in straight forward human language, and it would be shorter, clearer and less infuriating to read.