The difficult bit isn't the core JavaScript support. There are a dozen engines packaged as libraries that can use for that. The difficult bit is supporting all of the hundreds of DOM APIs.
Also the "undefined behaviours" used for fingerprinting and denying access to non-mainstream UAs even if they have JS support. If I remember correctly, YouTube was doing something like that.
So funny to see all the cmake instructions. Really makes you want to go back in time. Turbo C or Pascal, hit F9 and you're up and running.
It does showcase our incompetence. In this age we should be able to point to some online compiler and run it. Or download it and run it on a folder. That should be the extent of our involvement with tools. But apparently they are not tools, but rituals we insist on.
GP most likely meant it was a solved problem from the user's perspective. Autotools might be "horrifying" for the programmer (IMO that is an exaggeration, AT isn't that bad, with the potential exception of libtool) but it provides by far the best UX for a user (that knows how to use a command line and what building from code is, not your average grandma :-P) compared to everything else out there.
However one important aspect here is that there is no reason for Autotools to be what provides the `./configure && make && make install` UX - the GNU standards (not sure the exact name) describe the UX itself without mentioning anything about Autotools so any other approach to implementing it would be just as valid. However in practice whenever you find a configure script in the wild it is either Autotools or a hand-made one (that more often that not misses some of the GNU standard stuff).
Autotools can be daunting if you plan to write code that’s portable to Ultrix, IRIX, Apollo’s UNIX whose name I forgot, NonStop, UNICOS, OpenVMS, z/OS, macOS, and modern Linux.
Nowadays we don’t bother supporting dozens of platforms. Even Windows is something we can push aside and suggest WSL if you really need to run it under Windows.
And I even try to make sure my code runs correctly on z/OS (which IS a UNIX).
I'm kind of the exact opposite: I don't want a doctor between me and my medical AI. Because he limits my agency to heal myself and his value add should be optional, when I need him, after I explored self-treatment options and realize I need a non-patronizing third party to step in.
In my whole life I have experienced the mzungu paradox happening: (mzungu) professionals promise to do a good job, get well paid regardless of results, and in the end most often I end up having to solve everything myself.
Mzungu is the word for white people, though here it is used in the sense of white collar people, which is appropriate as they are all exponents of the white collar financial tribe, the faith in professionalism now vying for world power. Note: power, not competence.
This requires 1) that everyone has access to the tracker, 2) the link remains active, and 3) people will take the time to visit something else entirely to get context.
Code is a specification for execution. It should include everything needed to fully execute and understand it.
This is why even microchip makers put much of the SPI signal specification into each datasheet despite SPI being a super common protocol. The more your code's comments act as a datasheet, the better longevity it'll have.
A tractor does actual work like pulling an implement like a plow or spinning the PTO to power a machine like a wood splitter or well drill.
Airplane engines are rebuilt every 5,000ish miles because they’re constantly running at like 50% load, it’s much harder on the engine than moving a car, a tractor is very similar.
Car engines do very little work once you’re up to speed, it only takes a fraction of the max power available to keep the car moving. This is why EVs are possible.
Running a tractor engine under load requires a lot of energy, battery density isn’t quite there yet, diesel has around 50x more energy by weight than a battery.
Off by an order of magnitude. Average TBO (which airplane engines routinely exceed if they don’t rust out) is 2,000 hours assuming piston, or about 300,000 miles for a Piper Arrow at cruise speed.
Thanks for clarifying, I thought that sounded wrong - otherwise aeroplane engines would have to be "rebuilt", each and every time, after more than half of all international flights in and out of Australia (5000 miles, aka 8000km, is just down the road to grab a sausage roll for us!).
For comparison, latest commercial turbofans approach 6000h (they don't have a strict TBO limit AFAIU, overhauls are decided based on various inspections and measurements). At a typical airliner speed that's something like 3,000,000 miles.
The energy balance just does not work with current agricultural paradigm. For example, plowing is really energy intensive and electric tractors just can't carry the required amount of batteries. Too heavy tractors compact the earth and sink in bad weather conditions.
For electrification to really proceed in ag, we need a revolution in the paradigm, something that removes most of the energy heavy processes.
JCB came to the conclusion there was no future in EV tractors and earth movers and went all-in on hydrogen ICE instead. We will shortly see if they were correct.
There's been a few. The big manufacturers don't really want to make them, and for the last decade just show off expensive concepts at industry shows and that's it. The small companies only get investment by making a VC play for "autonomous" and "smart" agriculture; they soak up investment, make very expensive product, then go out of business.
I think Monarch tractor just folded up and sold their assets, for example. They were a nice looking product but did what I described above.
Innovation here will happen in Europe and China, not here in North America. "Tractor" here in North America means big giant machine that is owned in a fleet by a giant corporation that manages multiple properties, and works over a dozen fields in a few days.
Every time I've looked into it for my hobby farm, a compact utility tractor that is electric ends up either being vapourware or twice to three times the price and missing features.
Electric excavators are there, as they are low duty cycle, see sibling comments for details, but high load percent for long time is a killer for battery tech.
I could imagine tethered tractors with power line tensioned in the air, but the grid building cost will be quite high for intermittent usage. Only some land usages and plot shapes would work economically.
the battery in a tesla would run a medium tractor for less than an hour. The tesla can produce more power - but soon it is up to speed and so making a lot less. Tractors are expected to produce their full rated power for 10 hours without stopping.
Maybe a row crop tractor, but a utility tractor is not running continuously for 10 hours. Just running around doing chores and a lot of that time is sitting idling a diesel engine.
Depends on the farmer. The utility tractor is commonly used by farmers for 12 hours a day every day. these are however farmers in poor countries with a much worse economy than anyone who has time for discussions here lives in and so we don't think of them - but they are the an important customer for the utility tractor.
> And nuclear is making a comeback: More than 12 GW of new reactors began construction in 2025
By the time they are ready they will have contributed so many carbon emissions, that they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back. But by the time they are commissioned (~2036), solar + battery + solar-made hydrocarbons will have made them uneconomic, and solar would have made far fewer emissions.
Furthermore, they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about. Investing in nuclear is like willingly tying a brick to your foot, severely limiting your investment options.
They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.
> they'll have to run for 25% of their expected life span to get them back
Do you have a Life Cicle Assessment source for this? This paper [1] quantifies the Energy Payback Time for a modern nuclear plant to be roughly 6 years (see Table 18), and EPT is a conservative metric because it accounts for the total embodied energy of construction (steel, concrete…). For a plant running for 60 years, this means that it will be significantly less than 10%, not 25%.
> solar would have made far fewer emissions
Again, do you have a source? Referring to this, it does not seem so [2]: 6 tonCO2/GWh for Nuclear vs 53 tonCO2/GWh for Solar.
> they are big up front money sinks, creating a sunk investment, diminishing the gamma of future options one might have wished to invest in, or take advantage of, something nobody talks about
True, nuclear has a big initial cost, but this is an incomplete metric. It ignores system integration costs, which grow non-linearly as solar penetration increases. Intermittency forces the grid to over-build capacity and storage, and significant investments are needed to fix it.
> They are perfect for government vanity projects, though, where a lot of money can be siphoned off to personal crypto gardens, repeatedly. Money laundering is likely the leitmotiv behind why you see them being built.
I agree, but this is true of any technology. In countries like Italy and Germany the Government provides >10 G€/year for renewables. It is quite likely that money laundering is happening in these cases as well, as corruption is generally a failure of the Government and auditing bodies, not a property of the energy source.
Solar made hydrocarbons are never going to be economical.
Confident predictions of the inevitability of renewable diesel at $3 a liter don't add up because diesel is $3 a liter right now. I am literally paying that at the pump. I will actually happily pay more then that if the diesel were actually renewable, but instead it doesn't exist.
Of course they are. We aren't going to be able to take hydrocarbons out of the ground forever.
You won't burn them in your truck, though. That's an almost certainty. But whatever use they still get when we end transitioning to solar will be met by synthetic hydrocarbons, there's no point on keeping the entire oil production and distribution industries when you can just make a bit of it near the point of use.
I expect in a post-fossil age we'll get organic chemical feedstocks from biomass, and non-biomass solar will help with that by providing hydrogen for hydrodeoxygenation. That will roughly double the hydrocarbons one can get from a given quantity of carbohydrate. Biomass here will also include waste stream organic matter.
Airplane fuel seems like a use case that's likely to be economical even if most of the rest of the economy is no longer using fossil fuels as a source of power. Batteries are heavy and that matters a lot in an airplane. Not to mention all the petrochemical uses of oil.
> Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.
When I see rps in development context, I immediately know it is requests per second. x/s on the other hand… 3x/s. kx/s looks like a physics formula to me. Some spring action? K is for coefficient, x is displacement.
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