No smokers in my neighborhood, but people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings and often during the day. Not sure how to train them. And unfortunately, there are too many. Burning wood should be forbidden in residential areas. It’s similar to smoking in restaurants, except you can’t escape them.
My romantic views of wood smoke hit reality when I first camped in Canada's Banff-Jasper national parks, where you could buy unlimited firewood for the night for $5. Everyone bought it, it seemed. Trying to breathe downwind of a campground was a rude wakeup call. It should definitely be restricted in denser residential areas. I can't imagine some of the towns in Germany or Poland where residents depend on wood fires for heat.
Where they depend on wood for heat they are more likely to have efficient stoves that completely burn the wood. Smoke coming out of the chimney is "firing for the crows" and wasting fuel.
The stink remains even for efficient fires. Smoke is often correlated of course.
I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand which gets winter smog,. The city council enforces rules and woodburners need to meet strict emission standards. They regularly tighten the rules so that if you want a woodburner you need to replace it every 15 years or so.
But they do still smell.
The rules have radically improved the air quality here and we now get much less smog than when I was a kid.
Outright banning open fires and coal years ago made a big difference too.
I'm not sure what happens if you don't follow the rules. A neighbour can make a complaint and there will get taken seriously and I believe they have a van sometimes checking too. Although I've personally never heard of anyone actually getting caught.
It achieves cleaner air, which I personally like, and which is especially great for anyone with lung problems like asthmatics.
I suspect part of the rule tightening is to slowly squeeze to get rid of fires altogether (the outcome with the cleanest air).
> what do you do if you build your own woodburner/fireplace?
You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive). I don't know what the penalties are for illegal woodburners/fireplaces. My personal experience is that it isn't enforced. I'd guess penalties can be avoided unless you're a repeat offender with a complaining neighbour.
Note that outdoor braziers are legal AFAIK. Although Outdoor fires have some restrictions - especially if very dry and high fire risk.
Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.
>You couldn't afford to do it legally (I expect emissions testing is expensive).
An honest answer at least and something i hope we don't see here.
But I think similar legislation is going to become common trough the EU (something is already on the books i believe) and is already a thing in Germany.
It's silly too in a time when most still heat with fossil fuels, pumping up more and more that could be avoided and i can build a fireplace with outside air intake or get a damn near ancient finish masonry heater that's far more efficient than anything one can get at the store.
>Firewood is not cheap for heating. Even if you have free trees then it costs a lot of time (in my experience) and often equipment or transport is expensive too.
I live in Western Europe but it's been cheap.
If I counted up the time invested and compared it to equivalent time worked for money to spend on other heating with fossil fuels then it comes out far far cheaper.
Even if i add some egregious estimates for the cost of a chainsaw, trailer and wheelbarrow it's still only a fraction of the cost.
Christchurch doesn't use much fossil fuels. Coal, Coal gas[1], Coke, and LPG were used in the past for home heating. Electricity generation can come from coal when hydro lakes get dry. Utility Solar will replace that usage.
I use firewood for heating when I'm using the living area but I'm not sure I'd replace the current woodburner. I currently use gas for hot water for showers but LPG is getting more expensive so when the gas califont fails it will be replaced with electric heating.
I have access to free trees, but I've been slowly finding that my "free" firewood is expensive (because I value my time highly). I'm not sure how to account for the risks of hurting myself, or the benefits of exercise!
We had a massive problem with smog, and although the regulations definitely have some bad side effects, the regulations have worked.
No one is forcing you to get/build one that doesn't far exceed the current regulations to the point where it is expected to exceed them until the end of its useful lifespan.
We have a very nice Jotul stove that we use occasionally during winter to supplement our minisplits (e.g. when it drops to -10C or colder overnight). I've been told it's one of the best wood stoves you can buy.
But we burn Siberian Elm wood that grows (and dies) on our property, and even when the stove is working at its best ... jeez, I feel embarrassed for how much we stink up the neighborhood. Burning elm wood is just inherently nasty in terms of the smell.
It's particularly embarrassing because a lot of neighbors use pinon in their stoves and that makes parts of the village basically like walking into a cafe with the best smelling chili you've ever eaten (while remaining outside!).
People have romantic ideas about heating with fire and burn the most awful green wood in their fireplaces, stinking up the whole neighborhood. I understand burning bad wood because you have no options -- I witnessed a chimney fire or two as a kid that resulted from burning too much wet pine -- but I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who does it recreationally.
100% agree, many people don’t realize just how harmful wood smoke is. It’s also the main source of pollution in the Bay Area during the winter. Unfortunately energy costs are high enough here that people resort to burning wood to save money, so collectively beneficial policies are likely to face resistance (understandably).
The purpleair map has been awesome to at least make the problem visible. I hope they are using it to aid enforcement on spare the air days.
“domestic wood-burning is the largest source of particulate pollution in the UK. Only 8% of the UK’s homes burn wood, but this accounts for around 21% of the total PM2.5 emissions, whereas all traffic on the UK roads produces 13%” https://medium.com/the-new-climate/why-the-environmental-mov...
presuming your suggestion is correct (that forum goers are indistinguishable from walking echo chambers) , wouldnt screaming at forum goers just end up with a scream being returned right at you ?
> a full 1/3 of lifelong smokers never develop any kind of cancer,
That's "true" in the sense that it's the CVD (Cardiovascular disease) and COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) that are way more likely to take them out first.
Lifetime Smoking History and Cause-Specific Mortality in a Cohort Study with 43 Years of Follow-Up
Sure, you absolutely can be 98 years old sucking back on a deathstick, just like you might find yourself screaming "suck it" as you take home that giant lottery cheque with some winnings.
Pachinko's a hell of a game .. but still the house wins.
The atmosphere above Christchurch, NZ tends to form layers in winter that trap the smoke and make this worse, and new fireplaces have been restricted to clean-burning log burners and dry wood by law.
It seemed like the biggest change in air quality in recent years came from the tragic earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 knocking down all the unreinforced-masonry chimneys, though.
Well, it's not the burning of the wood as such, but the lack of flue gas treatment.
I too wish we had much stricter imissions rules for fires in residential areas.
> people use their goddamn fireplaces too much and it’s kinda impossible to get fresh air in winter evenings
Not a problem with a properly designed HEATAS approved wood burning stove and properly seasoned beach wood.
Being daft enough to buy an inefficient, unapproved stove and/or and burn unseasoned green wood is ridiculous. Not to mention its illegal to sell small quantities of unseasoned firewood in Blighty; large amounts to season yourself are fine.
EDIT: If you disagree with the above, then get off your arse and write a rebuttal saying why! Downvoting simply because you disagree (rather than because the text doesn't add to the conversation) simply turns arguments into a popularity contest and is turning this place into another Reddit. (A statement of fact, no matter what the old HN guidelines say about Reddit).
Good neighborhood = keep your emissions low. Be it sound, light, or smell. These rules apply to almost all public places. If you want to be loud, burn shit or have floodlights, move to a place outside of the city.
i see both sides, having lived with both super sensitive and petty neighbors, and also inconsiderate, loud neighbors.
There are definitely sensitive people who have either misophonia rage, or PTSD from something, and they can't handle normal levels of city noise.
on top of that, some apartments simply allow smoking inside. If they always use the balcony, they're really doing you a favor.
if you are worried about emissions, you really have to think about cars and refineries and jets, and even restaurants. These are incredibly out of control when it comes to pollution and disease.
in my experience, if you're buying machines and building devices, and your target refuses to play that game, then it's clear who the adult is, and who the child is.
I don't mind the gunshots near my house during hunting season, because I have good neighbors. Those shots mean my freezer is getting stocked with venison.
I live far enough out that the gunshots are usually people hunting NFS land.
A huge swath of it borders my property, as I'm the last house up the road on my mountain.
I don't mind 'em at all, though. I think it's locals, just folks I haven't met. They keep it clean and they go up far enough I can't hear anything besides the rifle crack.
Not so obvious, because the model still needs to look up the required doc. The article glances over this detail a little bit unfortunately. The model needs to decide when to use a skill, but doesn’t it also need to decide when to look up documentation instead of relying on pretraining data?
Removing the skill does remove a level of indirection.
It's a difference of "choose whether or not to make use of a skill that would THEN attempt to find what you need in the docs" vs. "here's a list of everything in the docs that you might need."
I believe the skills would contain the documentation. It would have been nice for them to give more information on the granularity of the skills they created though.
This is outrageously wrong. Back in 2011, the pricing model for "an app in your pocket" was 99 cents. The universal pricing model of apps was a one-time fee and the pricing range was that of an mp3 roughly. 30% of that is a lot. App sales worked only in volume.
If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentially was ~$1. Stripe had roughly the same fee when they launched. You had more traditional credit card merchants and when I inquired one in Germany back in 2010, it was more or less in the same ballpark (~10%).
In Europe, you could also just get money wired, which cost you something like 0-10 cents.
30% for payment processing were always extremely high.
Edit: The only thing where you had no other options was when you tried to sell stuff on the internet for $1, because the flat fee part of credit card processors would eat up all of that. Apple indeed helped here a little bit, because it was always 30% and no fixed part.
I was thinking about something comparable, where there is a digital storefront, payment processing, security, delivering, installing on all my devices and so on...
Steam comes to mind. They take 30% (and I think 5% for credit card or whatever).
So I do not think that "outrageously wrong" is characterizing my remarks adequately.
Steam is fundamentally different in very important ways.
Your phone is general purpose, steam is focused on a narrow band of market
The iOS store adds nothing but cost to the purchasing process, with hilariously terrible discoverability and sorting, steam makes navigating and discoverability breezy and easy
Your phone is arguably not an optional part of your life, whereas nobody ever missed an important call because they weren't on steam
Steam does not take any money from apps or companies for transactions it was not involved in. Here, and in other cases, the costs of doing business with apple extend to people who have no relationship with apple at all
It's not a "processing fee". It's an distribution/access/market fee for the captive audience that Apple has spent tens of billions developing and supporting.
If you think you can make any money selling software on the internet and paying nothing other than $0.35 + 1.7%, think again.
Yeah I heard this before, but no, it is mostly a processing fee. The reality is:
- Developers helped to make Apple the platform it is today.
- Apple had their 30% fee when the App Store was MUCH smaller. It's not like that fee came only after they had the audience.
- Apple will do zero marketing for you unless you are already successful.
- Apple doesn't earn money with the most popular free apps, but still hosts them. They could charge by traffic, by downloads, whatever, but they won't.
- Apple will charge you if you make money in the app. They will force you to use their payment processor if you want to make money.
So, it is 100% a processing fee and everything else either came later or isn't congruent with what they actually charge money for.
Just as an aside, everything here is true of Android as well, and I think the cut was higher (or there were more intermediaries taking a bit as well): I priced an app $1.47 in 2010 so I'd get about $1 on every purchase.
True, the Google cut was also 30%, but they didn't make such a fuss about "no links to website" and stuff like that. They didn't even have a review process for a long time.
While I am in the camp that believes camera-only FSD won't succeed, your comment isn't entirely accurate.
CCD and CMOS sensors can easily work in sub-freezing temperatures with various kinds of heating. There are 10's of millions of surveillance cameras installed outdoors in sub-freezing climates that work fine.
Cameras also have moveable IR cut filters, which is analogous to your sunglasses example.
Human eyes do have greater dynamic range in the visible light spectrum, but solid state sensors can commonly interpret light above 1000nm, and of course you can do thermal/IR imagers to provide optical sensing of wavelengths outside of what a human can see.
Sensor technology relative to the human eye isn't what is holding FSD back.
Apple's 30% tax was introduced under Steve Jobs and there were no small business exemptions back then. Jobs died in 2011. It's time to stop extrapolating what Jobs would be doing 15 years later in 2026 if he were still around. Could be the same, could be better, could be worse.
It isn't 'You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain', it's 'You either die a hero or live long enough for people to realize you are a villain'. While it's ultimately meaningless to speculate on what the dead would do if they were living, Steve Jobs in life did have plenty of belief and made plenty of decisions that are perfectly inline with what we are seeing in 2026 and there is no particular reason to believe he would not just be up there with the worst of them.
Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command. Also has fantastic tools for scaffolding and harnessing the code. You can define everything from your coding style to specific instructions for designing frontpages, integrating payments, etc.
Implementation differences do matter. I haven't found Copilot to have as many issues as people say it does, but they are there. Their Gemini implementation is unusable, for example, and it's not because of the underlying models. They work fine in other harnesses.
The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.
If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.
I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.
Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.
The impression I get from this post is that anyone who doesn't like it needs to try it more. It doesn't really feel like it leaves space for "yeah, I tried it, and I still don't want to use it".
I know what its capabilities are. If I wanted to manage a set of enthusiastic junior engineers, I'd work with interns, which I love doing because they learn and get better. (And I still wouldn't want to be the manager.) AIs don't, not from your feedback anyway; they sporadically get better from a new billion dollar training run, where "better" has no particular correlation with your feedback.
I think it's going to be important to track. It's going to change things.
I agree on your specific points about what you prefer, and that's fine. But as I said 15 years ago to some recent Berkeley grads I was working with: "You have no right to your current job. Roles change."
AI will get better and be useful for some things. I think it is today. What I'm saying is that you want to be in the group that knows how to use it, and you can't there if you have no experience.
Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."
There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.
> You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity.
I don't think this has yet been established. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out. My inclination is it'll turn out like most other technological advancements - short term pain for some industries, long term efficiency and comfort gain for humans.
Despite the anti-capitalist zeitgeist, more humans of today live like kings compared to a few hundred years ago, or even 100 years ago.
But you seem to have jumped to a conclusion that everyone agrees: AI is harmful.
I used GitLab only as a remote repo for private projects, no CI at all. The laggy interface and that damn browser check every so often made me close my account.
The new direction isn’t Liquid Glass, but a more unified branding across Android and iOS. WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, Netflix, Prime Video, and many others don’t look dated, because they don’t make heavy use of the older iOS design language at all.
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