As someone who does not own an F150 (or any truck), I find myself frequently wishing I had a truck, and either borrowing a friend with a truck, renting a truck, or doing some really unsafe things with my hatchback while muttering with my wife that our next car with be a truck.
If we had a truck, what % of the time would we be using it for things that can only be done with a truck? Very little, since it would also be our daily driver, but even if just 1% of the time, it's 100% worth having a truck over some sedan (or a hatchback!)
As someone who until last year has only had (mostly sports) cars or motorbikes, I now have a ute and it’s awesome to be able to do ‘ute stuff’ with it. Carrying toolboxes, transporting large/heavy/dirty cargo, collecting firewood, going off-roading and camping. I use it way more than I thought I would.
Likewise with my Jeep Gladiator. I traveled, hauled and camped with it more than I ever expected.
The bed is only 5 feet long but I'm thinking of taking out part of the back seat for even more room .
I also used 4x4 in 4H mode more than I thought on bad roads even though I didn't go truly off-road that much so no need for 4L. I did take advantage of the higher wheel clearance and the more rugged suspension and the 8-speed manual shifting is useful going down mountain roads.
Tbh as someone who does not drive or own a car regularly, I get by renting those U Haul vans (not trucks). It’s not expensive and it’s a hell of a lot more useful than a truck for doing the random heavy odd job.
Can't be more than 1% at this point. The cleanest cars on the road, and the only rough terrain they face is climbing kerbs to bypass queues in traffic.
It's wild to see all these people clowning on truck owners... and then say they are going to buy two 5090's for local AI even though they know it's less efficient than a cloud and don't necessarily need the privacy aspect of it... but want to do it just "cuz" . The hypocrisy here is amazing.
I realize the shortages you enumerated have different reasons , but a highly respectable French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici , has been repeating for years that we are heading into an inevitable age of "degrowth".
It is not an "if". It is now inevitable.
He is very pro alternative sources of energy but he clearly explains nothing can replace petroleum right now. Petroleum is used to build everything. Gas for your car. Your clothes. Plastic bags. Our beloved computers. Everything uses petroleum one way or another.
We are doomed.
I’m just happy I’m too old to go through all the bad times that are coming.
We should have accepted that our trajectory is not sustainable, and voluntarily replaced and reduced consumption over decades. But growth was more important - "because the others won't stop growing either!", or "because we're only x% of global emissions", or similar arguments.
Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.
2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.
You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses.
It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century.
> We are doomed.
More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers.
A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic.
Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".
In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn.
> We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth
I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint.
I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
> In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn.
Bad things have caused degrowth, that doesn't refute what I said though. The Edo Period in Japan is said to be a canonical example of degrowth that was not catastrophic. Japan today has had GDP per capita pretty steady for the past 35 years and so far nothing horrific, just the hilarious wailing and gnashing of teeth from western "experts". So I think those are sufficient counter-examples.
> I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint.
1. Have we, really?
2. Various objective and subjective quality of life metrics have been going backwards in some western countries for a generation now.
3. What about it is it that you think is foundational to social order? What happens if we don't have it.?
In any case it's an unsustainable expectation that is going to have to change one way or another.
If we're going by feelings and anecdotes, my feeling is that people in general don't actually need that at all. They want some amount of fairness, freedom, self-determination, and the ability to personally get ahead. They don't need to be ahead of where their parents were at the same age, they want to be able to be ahead of where they were yesterday (at least in economic terms).
You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it.
You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance.
It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable.
Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it.
Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.
> You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance.
Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience.
Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything.
Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
Yea our lives are too convenient and too much filled with useless stuff that no one really needs anyway - and like other comments pointed out the goal is not to replace petroleum 100% immediately - any reduction would already go a long way.
Seeing that we use about 2/3 of the total for transportation fuel it’s not like we need most of it to build the renewable infrastructure - that’s more like a drop in the bucket.
Most petroleum gets used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, and to produce electricity - and it’s definitely not without alternative there
> Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience.
Not at this scale and price and convenience.
We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems.
If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
133 posts out of 30022 (0.443%), with an emphasis on last month. You're complaining two weeks into this month, despite the volume having clearly dropped off and gone back to early July levels. If anything, the topic is winding down!
133 posts, of which people basically didn't interact with 78, and barely interacted with 38, leaving 17 posts that were appreciably interacted with. This is out of 1283 total posts of the same caliber, a rate of 1.325%.
Even if we consider frontpage presence, only 31 of those 133 posts actually made it, and that is in the context of 3160 frontpagers total, so a rate of 0.981%:
They're doing a bit stronger in this metric this month, but it's still a drop in the bucket overall.
I could accept identifying this as a "persistent presence as of late", but identifying the whole place with this now is more than a bit hyperbolic, I hope you can acknowledge. There's a higher percentage of impurities in prescription pharmaceuticals than this, to give you a parallel.
Would you really say that <1% of the frontpage being Flock related makes this forum flocknews.com to you?
See also the sibling comment about AI. I don't think I need to run the numbers to convince you just how much the place has been overtaken by related news, and how it is leaps and bounds more prominent and emblematic than news about Flock ever will be.
This is the disconnect. You say that politicians are allowing them - that's not right. They're directing them to be set up, they're spending citizen tax money on buying them.
The blame lies entirely with government officials who sought out and purchased surveillance tech, and we should not blame the technologists who responded rationally to the incentive that local governments provided for them.
I'm always confused by LLM proxies that claim to support tool calling. Even for Bifrost that claims to be doing it, at least when I was checking it out, I found out that while it injects the list of MCP tools that's available on the proxy-side, it doesn't actually make the call on client's behalf, and clients get confused by it (response returns MCP call request whose tool doesn't exist on the client-side).
I don't have specifics since it's been months, but LiteLLM on a hetzner server, deployed through Coolify was using 1-4 GB (cannot exactly, and dont know why either).
Bifrost feels very light, though.
Will try LiteLLM if it's in Rust.
Would also appreciate a slicker aesthetic. I got used to Bifrost shadcn with 0 border radius.
You are not referring to to a specific git feature, right?
You use your filesystem ability to perform a snapshot of your local git repo? Or you do a cp -reflink?
How do you handle the exposure of secrets to agents?
One thing I like about worktrees is that you get a clean copy (with share git objects though), so you have to copy over what the agent will need, not remove what you don’t want the agent to see.
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