Agreed. I've been on the market for a new car to replace my aging Prius for for the past three years. All of my top choices are "not sold in the US".
I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.
FYI: Gemini Cli is used internally at Google. It's actually more popular than Antigravity. Google uses MCP services internally for code search (since everything is in a mono-repo you don't want to waste time grepping billions of files), accessing docs and bugs, and also accessing project specific RAG databases for expertise grounding.
Have you tried it? It's like working with an idiot savant. It's absolutely brilliant, but goes off the rails constantly, spewing out CoT when it shouldn't be, getting into weird loops, spewing gibberish or repeated phrases. But when it does actually work, it's brilliant. But the issues make it unusable for dev at any level - and completely untrustworthy. Contrasted with CC or Codex CLI it's night and day. The latter two are incredibly reliable, rock solid, and crazy productive, and becoming exponentially more so by the week.
No other country is quite as heterogeneous as the US. And there is a significant history in the US of using restrictions around voting to disenfranchise certain ethnicities. That makes any restriction around voting a sensitive topic in the US.
Proponents of voter ID claim it is needed to prevent fraud, while opponents point out that there's not enough fraud for it to be worth the cost.
Note that countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand also didn't require voter ID. First-world countries that do require ID to vote have systems in place to ensure that getting that ID is easy even for poorer people - such as automatically sending the ID to the voter by mail if the government requires you to report your residence or filing out the necessary forms once, before turning 18.
> there's no scientific link between race and the ability to go to a DMV once every 10 years
That form of ID is neither accepted per the proposed legislation [1] nor does it last 10 years (more like 4-5 years from what I've seen). Please go look at what's actually required per the SAVE Act.
If you have to go to a specific DMV at a specific time, it's a link to a ZIP code and economical situation (i.e. having enough time during work hours just for that). That's a good enough proxy for race. Bonus points if you can also make a specific DMV for a specific ZIP code shittier experience on purpose. Nobody would ever try to do that in a-country, right.
FWIW, I don't think you're really addressing their point. What they're really saying is that they find it implausible that any significant fraction of the population is genuinely unable to go to the DMV once every 10 years. You're not really providing a counterargument, but rather just arguing that going to the DMV is more difficult for some people than others. Sure, but that's true for pretty much everything -- even just putting food on the table is harder when you're poor, yet people still find ways to do it.
I think of it as another step in a leaky conversion pipeline, but instead of minimizing the dropoff the pipeline is optimized for maximizing. It's not that people are unable to fill 10 field form that sometimes randomly loses all your input, but more people will complete the form if it doesn't.
Another thing is when the id requirement is not just there, but added right before the election, so it's not "going to dmv once every 10 years", but "going to dmv this year especially so you can vote.
If I would be optimizing for the minimal dropoff, the policy would look like "passing the law that takes effect in 5 years from now, tasking the blah blah agency with increasing the id coverage and putting reminders how important it is to get an id and vote everywhere you look at, increased funding for the dmv and whatever". But no, it's has to be done with the urgency and framed as threat.
So the actual argument is not that there is link between race and going to dmv once in 10 years, but that the intent behind passing such laws is not increasing integrity, but favoring a specific party. Even if doesn't actually work, it's still one of the worst things a party in a democratic system can do.
I had a much longer comment here but I ended up scrapping it since it would make for too long of a discussion. I'll just quickly address a few specific things:
> added right before the election
I feel like it's not hard to counter-argue that the writing has been on the wall for decades and it's not a genuine surprise at this point.
> So the actual argument is not that there is link between race and going to dmv once in 10 years
IMO, it's probably better to make the the actual argument.
> DMV
This entire discussion appears to be over a red herring. You may be interested in my comment on the sibling thread: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47345614
Depends on what qualifies as an ID and how hard it is to get one. But unless you're actively providing them to people that need them with no extra work or travel on their part then you're going to be discriminating against people with less money or time.
In the case where disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it affects the population of that race differently). If the reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race is because of racism, then a policy that disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic discrimination into political discrimination.
Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and should be avoided where possible.
My wallet was stolen a few weeks ago. I was able to get my bank cards cancelled, but my only state ID is lost. I live within the US, so I've never needed anything more than my state ID.
I got this state ID using my previous state's ID. The old one is now void. So I need to get a new one. I'll need my birth certificate mailed to me from my parents, because I'm still in the habit of letting them keep all the important family documents. I move alot.
My car broke down a few months ago. Good thing I can walk the relatively (americanly) short distance to work. For after-hours or weekend travel I take the buses (the few my city has) or an uber. Even though it would take me 20 minutes to drive directly to the DMV, the bus route is an hour and ten minutes, and the Uber is going to cost me money. Even if the ID was free, I had to have money to get to the DMV to get it. If I drove, I'd still have paid for the gas.
My work is understaffed and I'm one of the more knowledgable non-managers. I'm working before business hours start and leaving after they end. I can't see a weekday in the next month where I can take time off during the day "just" to get an ID. My boss might understand a medical appointment, but the DMV is not on his list of "reasons I can lose Qaadika for half a day or more".
Americans who make this link to racism are welcome to explain why the same argument gets zero traction in Canadian politics, even among the most left-wing parties.
I have to imagine the Canadian ID situation is different. Here, simply obtaining a copy of your birth certificate can be a long trip to a different state.
I'm not supposed to vote for some other person too, but I could if spend some minimal amount of effort. The same applies to a birth certificate.
The document itself says that someone had a name listed there, or at least that the authorities who issued it believed so about 20 years ago. If anything, the voters roll itself is more reliable for that matter (somebody still believed the same facts more recently).
I mean, proof of possession is some level of assurance, which is better than nothing. Knowing my mothers maiden name and birth date is also some level of assurance (this of it, you don't know those about a random me in the internet, so you can't vote for me in the elections for the next 15 minutes at least). But what is a desired level of assurance for something so many people feel strongly about? Is it more or less compared to visiting porn websites, boarding a plane, drinking alcohol, crossing international border and driving a car on a public road?
Canadian legislators don't have a history of setting arbitrary restrictions on what counts as voter ID, whereas American politicians seem absurdly fixated on it for ~some reason~.
You can look up the Canadian list of accepted identification documents if you want the full thing, but it includes library cards, public transit cards, correspondence from educational institutions, student IDs, blood donor cards, letters of confirmation of residence from shelters and soup kitchens, residential leases or utility bills, and personal cheques.
You can also vote without ID in Canada by having a guarantor with ID vouch for you.
Contrast the proposed SAVE act, which accepts... passports, birth certificates, naturalization documents, and "REAL ID-compliant documents that also indicate citizenship", which is a fun one.
So we replace an OS owned by a search engine (Google) with an OS owned by a search engine (Murena)? You're going to need to give me more details than that before I consider switching.
I'm an /e/OS user with a Murena account and I had never even heard of Murena being "a search engine". After searching (on DDG), I see that they in June 2025 they launched a collaboration with the Qwant search engine to launch a Murena-branded version: https://murena.com/discover-murena-find-your-new-privacy-fir...
That does not make it "an OS owned by a search engine".
API keys were always secrets. They control billing for heaven's sake. If you had any per-call billed APIs (like some of the voice processing APIs) enabled on the project then they're effectively keys to your pocket book. Otherwise they're a key tool to manage denial-of-service attacks.
That happens in times of bullish markets and growing economies. Then we want a lot of SWEs.
In times of uncertainty and things going south, that changes to we need as little SWEs as possible, hence the current narrative, everyone is looking to cut costs.
Had GPT 3 emerged 10-20 years ago, the narrative would be “you can now do 100x more thanks to AI”.
I think you could build a product with it, but you need to carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual engineering work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them together.
In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for any moderately complex piece of software.
Code is also design. It’s a blueprint for the process that is going to do the useful work we want. When something bad happens to the process, we revise its blueprint. And just like blueprint, the docs in natural language shows the why, not the how or the what. The blueprint is the perfect representation of the last two.
It's kind of tricky though because if you want to have a good design, you should be able to do the implementation yourself. You see this with orgs that separate the design and implementation and what messes they create. Having an inability to evaluate the implementation will lead to a bad product.
Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.
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