A little syntax sugar that won't break backwards compatibly and makes the intent of the code clearer is a win-win. I've never seen a really reasonable response from the Go team on why they don't want to do it.

- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish

- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.

So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)

Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.

Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

If Minio just wanted to use the changes under AGPL, the contributor could just license them under AGPL, no CLA needed.

I'm a fan of that model. IIt allows for a path to funding, a legal framework to keep contributed code open, and also allows them license agility to more permissive license ass needed. I've started using that for my own larger projects too.

https://element.io/blog/synapse-now-lives-at-github-com-elem...

DCO is something different, and not a rugpull mechanism.

Each author retains their copyright, and is not giving away anything, just licensing their contribution according to the project license.

https://developercertificate.org/

CLAs are a corporate tool for making money off of open source.

but also seems i was mistaken about the status of linux copyright, they actually do have distributed copyright, apologies

If I get my patches upstream, then I don’t have to waste time reintegrating patches and rebuilding packages when I could instead be doing productive things.

Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.

Methane has good energy density, doesn't demand cryogenics or diffuse through steel, burns very cleanly, and can be used in modified gasoline ICEs - without even sacrificing the gasoline fuel capability.

CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits.

They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.

It's just the physical properties of methane.

That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car.

Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.

Actually higher working presure than regular welders' oxygen tanks.

Too bad the higher the pressure, the heavier the tank, especially steel.

I had a pretty good job offer from a company that was going to start building CNG tanks out of carbon fiber.

This was a few years before the failure of the Titan submersible.

CNG has made some progress since then, here's the kind of thing there is now:

https://steelheadcomposites.com/sites/default/files/2024-01/...

Not like it's a necessary thing. CNG conversions were already viable even with 00s steel tanks.

EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...

Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.

Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.

Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.

All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.

Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.

Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.

Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.

Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.

if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas

(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)

Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.

Irrelevant. It seems like everyone who argues against H2 is stuck on "now". Had that been the case with battery powered cars, they'd have never got off of the ground.

Batteries were terrible, wildly expensive, extremely unreliable. It's only been the immense research poured into them, that has brought their costs down.

Meanwhile, the cost of storage on an H2 car is nothing, compared to the immense and exorbitant cost of all those batteries. Batteries which make a car extremely heavy. Batteries which cannot be charged below -20C, and require heaters. Batteries which are incredibly dangerous in car accidents. Batteries which are costly, and damaging to the environment to create, difficult to recycle, and damaging to the environment to recycle.

Compared to battery tech of any type, H2 is a dream from the gods.

Yet because there hasn't been 17 trillion dollars of cash thrown into h2 generation tech, people prattle on about how expensive h2 generation is.

And it doesn't matter where h2 comes from now. It matters where it can and will come from. The goal isn't to make sources of power to generate h2 clean, the goal is to get end-polluters, cars, clean.

If the only goal was "clean", then most electric batteries charging right now, would fail that very goal. After all, there are still coal and gas power plants this very moment, and if we pulled all electric cars off the road, those would close.

No, the goal is to work towards more and more solar power, wind, etc. And in parallel, get cars ready for the day when power they're charged from isn't polluting.

The myopic view of what I deem hyper-environmentalists, is disturbing to me. It is paramount that we don't let short sighted views fog the reality around us.

Anyone arguing 1000lbs of batteries, all environmentally damaging in their construction, recycling cost, and disposal, is superior to h2, is arguing from a pedestal of sandy, earthquake prone, unstable support.

Because it must be a really killer feature to justify wasting about 50% of the electricity you put in and developing a distribution network and building cars that can handle H2 and even using the H2 for driving instead of steel mills or other places that might need green H2. Not to forget about the hassle of refueling with gasses that is totally different from a normal gas pump where you have to create a high pressure seal and the handle gets to cold to touch.

Also comparing a technology that will be only useful in many years with the battery technology from today is an odd choice, to say the least. Not only is the content of problematic materials constantly shrinking, the number of batteries that need recycling is currently so low that there is very little need for a big industry. But it is very likely that just like with the classic car battery recycling the more recent batteries will definitely be stripped for their precious materials.

You're asking questions that were answered in the very post you responded to. You're also simply inventing costs, such as 50% power loss.

What is the precise cost? You don't know. If you research the precise cost, my post discusses "what about the future after research", but this upsets you too.. for, researching things is a waste, you say.

(Even though you realise h2 is used elsewhere, and any improvements would help those industries?!)

For power, a real world example is that charging a car, tends to result in ~15% power loss. Some is converted to heat. There is also power loss in keeping the battery warm, when it's cold out (-20C). There is power loss when it is very hot outside, when draining the battery too. There are also transmission costs related to power infrastructure, upwards of 15%. When generating h2, the stored gas is simply transported as is, 30% plus loss of gas seems unlikely.

Batteries also age, and as they do, they are less and less efficient at discharge/charging. They lose range:

https://www.slashgear.com/2008627/tesla-owners-reported-batt...

Losing significant capacity is unhelpful for range. Further (same article), most car companies recommend not full charging on a regular basis, to extend battery life. So you lose range over time, and you're not really supposed to charge to full. Great. So much for that range!?

You ignored my comments on recycling, by simply saying there aren't many batteries to recycle?! This is an absurd response, absolutely absurd. The point is adoption, and every car requires recycling at end of life. We're comparing car tech side by side, and your response is "well there's only a few of these horribly polluting battery cars!". What? Recycling a horribly polluting tech is just that. It's amazing how the most environmentally conscious among us, simple ignore that electric cars are cesspools of 1000s of pounds of polluting materials.

Lastly h2 works perfectly right now. It is useful right now. It has range as long as electric cars.

These are the sort of arguments that are constantly leveled against h2. Ones without any real research, with made up figures, and not comparing battery tech in the same light. Ones ignoring the downsides.

If people had this attitude when modern battery based cars appeared on the market, no one would have tried a single one.

>(Even though you realise h2 is used elsewhere, and any improvements would help those industries?!)

It doesn't upset me but I am struggling to see the killer argument for H2 right now. The cost I am talking about is the cost of researching improvements at this exact moment and the cost of rolling out H2 infrastructure. I can not name them but they are probably not small.

> For power, a real world example is that charging a car, tends to result in ~15% power loss. Some is converted to heat. There is also power loss in keeping the battery warm, when it's cold out (-20C). There is power loss when it is very hot outside, when draining the battery too. There are also transmission costs related to power infrastructure, upwards of 15%. When generating h2, the stored gas is simply transported as is, 30% plus loss of gas seems unlikely.

The 50% I am talking about is a very positive estimate of the "well to wheel" efficiency of H2 in a car right now. From what I read about 30-50% of the power needed to produce the H2 is available to the car. As far as I read the efficiency of BEV is more around 70-85%.

> Batteries also age, and as they do, they are less and less efficient at discharge/charging. They lose range

H2 tanks and fuel cells also degrade over time and that doesn't just mean that they have less capacity that means they have to be replaced because they get very dangerous. Both should hold for the lifetime of the car though. There was study recently that car batteries last longer than we assumed: https://www.dekra.com/en/batteries-of-electric-cars-are-more...

I do cede that very cold or very hot weather will harm range and that a H2 car has more range than a BEV car. I don't think though it is significant enough though (from what I read about 100 miles more). There is though the thing that batteries are getting are getting better. Less harmful and rare materials, better density, less susceptibility to temperature. So there is the distinct possibility that the problems you mentioned might be solved before H2 even gets to the point that it's downsides are addressed. That is what I meant when I was talking about the viability of researching H2 (for cars). It might be too far behind in adoption at this point to catch up to even make sense spending time on it.

It is good to keep in mind that BEV has and had a lot lower barrier of entry. H2 fueling will never work without specialized fueling stations. That means a hassle for the owner of the car and for the potential owner of a fueling station. As a society we went through the hassle of building gas stations everywhere and figuring out how to store and transport the fuel once. It is very unlikely that we have to do that again when there is another solution that doesn't need that. Power infrastructure is already widely available even though some upgrades might be necessary. You can charge your BEV on a normal outlet at home if time is not important.

> You ignored my comments on recycling, by simply saying there aren't many batteries to recycle?! This is an absurd response, absolutely absurd. The point is adoption, and every car requires recycling at end of life. We're comparing car tech side by side, and your response is "well there's only a few of these horribly polluting battery cars!". What? Recycling a horribly polluting tech is just that. It's amazing how the most environmentally conscious among us, simple ignore that electric cars are cesspools of 1000s of pounds of polluting materials.

I didn't mean to ignore what you said but the problem is currently that to build recycling infrastructure you have to have batteries to recycle. Most BEV cars and their batteries are still on the road. Even crashed car batteries often get a second life as home storage. There is development though regarding the recycling.

https://insideevs.com/news/787778/ev-battery-recycling-growt...

> Lastly h2 works perfectly right now. It is useful right now. It has range as long as electric cars.

I'd say we have part of it. We have a way to produce H2, we have a way to create electricity from H2 but we don't have a huge overproduction of H2, we don't have a distribution network and we don't have any widespread interest. From my point of view it only makes sense to even think about H2 in cars when we have enough green energy capacity to satisfy the industries that need H2. The previously mentioned inefficiencies in converting electricity to H2 and back mean that we need to deploy much less renewable energy sources before reaching a net neutral goal.

What BEV has now is moderate momentum and it's why I am asking for the killer feature of H2. Because whatever it is it must be so good that it overcomes the downsides of H2 as well as the momentum of BEV. In the end I do not care about what kind of power storage we use as long as it gets us to not use fossil fuels anymore and that as fast as possible. I am skeptical though if it is a good idea to split investment and research now when time is of the essence.

I don't know if I need to say this but am looking at this from a strictly zero emission standpoint. That means I don't consider H2 from natural gas as relevant.

It's a solved problem. It's not an issue.

Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.

And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".

If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.

And I didn't say it could never under any circumstances be feasible.

> If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.

I don't follow your logic here. Nobody went out and built tons of lithium ion batteries for cars until they were actually feasible. We're living in the world where companies wait, and it worked out for electric cars.

Now apply the same logic to h2.

But while research and scaling up made batteries 50x cheaper, batteries are mostly about material costs and technique. For hydrogen there's a huge per-unit energy cost and that limits how much research helps.

you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")

if transport switches to electric, what's your role?

answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant

but what if hydrogen took off instead?

if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel

but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business

at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas

... and that's exactly what they're trying to do

If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.

Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.

But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.

You'll find EVs that will go 700km+ with just one, 15min stop, as they charge at over 350kW in this day and age:

https://ev-database.org/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&rs-pr=10...

You'd want to make that 15min stop at least once on such a trip. Or fly instead.

> It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.

Problem is that while batteries only needed scale and improvements in manufacturing processes to become cheaper, there's no such path with hydrogen.

The tank and the fuel cell are inherently expensive. The fueling station costs literally 10x that of a fast charger and in this day and age doesn't even charge faster as while the first customer will be done in less than 15min, the next needs to wait for the system to repressurize and that takes time. Also it goes kaboom if it fails, which is something we know, because it already happened. The fuel itself cannot be cheaper than electricity unless you want to make it from natural gas, in which case you better just use that instead.

> (batteries are terrible, environmentally)

The sheer energy that's wasted by a hydrogen car vs EV over its life cycle is enough to produce and safely dispose of a battery.

And this is what it really boils down to: hydrogen is not energetically efficient, therefore you can't make it cheaper unless you use fossil fuels. We already have fossil fuel cars.

As with any car, you don't wait until out of fuel to recharge. Instead, you seek to do so well before. These pages at least understand a little of that, and cite a real-world range under perfect conditions of 450km before recharging, with a range of 300km afterwards.

Yet these figures are with no heat or AC, with it not below -10C, and with an incredibly slow speed of 110km/hr, which is illegal on some freeways in the US and Canada (yes, too slow on a freeway is illegal). At least, according to this page.

And yes, this is a "long trip" after all. I often have circumstances where I drive 1600km a day.

For current situations, although the future can be different, if you click on the details, it's actually 22 minutes to get an 80% charge, and of course with 400kw thrown at it. You have to get to the charger, hope one is free, then start this business. Just the on/off plus charging would realistically be 30 minutes, and taking 1 1/2 hours off to charge is ridiculous.

The current real world problems are, you'll never find that level of charging anywhere along the route of your long trip. Not with assurances it actually works, and that you don't have to redirect 100s of kms out of the path you wish to take. I cite current, because the future is just that. However, you'll literally have to spend trillions on infra just to do anything more than that, because if you're having literal parking lots full of cars charging at turn-offs on interstates, that's going to require massive, new long-haul electricity infra.

Which is really the point. Very slow to charge, hard to get charged, and once the infra is in place, there's still issues. Like recycling. And weight of car. And peak demand vs storage (such as with h2). And more.

Each tech stands poorly against gas cars, in terms of usability, reliability, range, fueling issues, and so on. That's to be expected though, with over 100 years of relentless development of carbon beasts, in planes, ships, cars, engines of all sorts.

It will take decades at the very least to get as good with electric in any form.

Yet what do I hear and see?

What madness do I see relentlessly spouted?

That one tech is the only answer, that R&D will change nothing, that even though range is an issue, the person is the problem, not the range, and so on.

Like the crass "use an airplane" comment.

Ah well.

Do you not do stops? The ranges I've shown include a 15min stop to recharge.

Anyway, I used to do such trips regularly. Covered over 100k km like that. I still did stops every ~400km because a man's gotta eat and, more importantly, wee.

Also sleep, because after a few close calls caused by 18h+ of driving I figured it makes more sense to find a hotel after 1200km or so.

Overall, current-day EVs and infrastructure wouldn't add more than 30min (if anything at all) compared to a combustion car if I were to do the same trip today.

In hindsight I should have flown and take taxis at my destination - would have been cheaper.

My view is that you're arguing about a non-issue, because the small minority that actually runs down a full tank before stopping is endangering others and being unkind to their bodies.

The ranges you showed were inaccurate, for the reasons I cited, including 22 minutes to charge under only special circumstances, with super special very rare chargers.

When I stop to refuel a car, I put fuel in and drive through. I urinate often on the side of the road, or (what takes 2 minutes) while the car pump runs.

Driving 1600km is under 12 hours driving, including those stops. No I'm not tired or lacking in focus at the end of that time. It's only 12 hours.

You'd need to recharge three times time make that range, or 22 minutes * 3 plus the fact (which you are ignoring) that you can't drive where ever you want and get that speed of charging. No way.

If you think driving for a few hours is dangerous, you are completely out of it.

This is the problem with these discussions. People sugar coat all the issues, and pretend they don't exist.

And this isn't even a conversation about "use fossil fuels". Oh no. This is "you'd better use MY green tech, or you're nuts! and I don't want you to even try another tech, how dare you!"

The more options we have, the better.

The article is about a sign of failure of one of the multiple paths that was pursued by Japan and Ca State subsidies that was attempted over the last 20 years.

You can work on multiple paths, but to not measure and adjust defeats the purpose.

Apart from that a modern BEV can charge pretty fast. Just enough time to get a snack and eat it.

This conversation is about R&D too. Batteries used to take forever to charge. They're better than they were. But I guess h2 can never improve, ever? And all these made up "hassles", oh no, you have to plug the nozzle in right? How tiresome! And I guess they can't insulate the handle? And the speed, well it takes hours to pump? All made up problems.

Apart from that I find it a bit unfair to compare today's BEVs with tomorrow's H2 cars.

On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.

High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.

>One of the reasons we use cryogenic liquidfied gases is so the density can be in the same ball-park of more-easily liquified gases which do not need low temperature to keep from expanding until the tank ruptures.

Propane, butane, LPG are all gases but the pressure which needs to be contained as the gas is turned into a liquid using pressure, is not too high for the typical welded BBQ tank. Designed to hold about 350 psi.

The two lighter hydrocarbons, methane & ethane can be compressed way beyond what a high-pressure spun cylinder (like the typical 3000 psi rated heavy oxygen tank welders use) can handle, and still not liquefy.

So similar to oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen and other "fixed" gases, methane needs to be liquefied cryogenically or any reasonable size tank will still not hold enough to last but a very small fraction of the time compared to the same capacity cryogenic storage.

But "storage" is doing a lot of work here.

Interestingly, with cryogenics you're going to need to handle even less pressure than the BBQ tanks, and the same size container ends up holding way more than the high-pressure cylinder at 3000 psi.

A typical liquid nitrogen cylinder runs at about 50 psi, the tank will be rated quite a bit higher than that but not considered "high-pressure" by anybody. Thinner and non-curved shapes can be fine which can be lighter in weight than higher-pressure ratings would require, but you really have to have plenty of good thermal insulation to boot.

The thing is, once you refill your cryogenic tank with cold liquid gas, you can never actually shut the tank completely. There is no additional cooling. The only thing keeping it cold is the low temperature of the liquid itself, no matter how good the insulation is, heat will gradually soak in and given enough time the whole thing would eventually end up at ambient temperature. Not cold enough to remain as a liquid any more.

That would be eventually explosive whether it was a flammable gas or not.

Instead, the tank is continuously venting a constant stream of gas from top.

IOW the rate of heat absorbtion is compensated for under equilibrium as it boils the liquid a little bit constantly and there has to be a way for that gas to escape. The remaining liquid maintains the low temperature because the boiling point of the gas (at that low pressure) is still in the cryogenic range.

The liquid self-refrigerates by evaporation to the (negative) boiling point of the substance. Which is why liquid helium is so much colder than liquid nitrogen in an identical cryo tank.

That means if you fill a tank with one of these cryo gases, depending on your usage rate the losses to evaporation may be more than the amount you are utilizing.

Or if you fill the cryo tank and don't use any at all for a while, it will empty itself by evaporation anyway and it could be before you got to use any of it.

Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?

The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.

This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.

With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.

If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.

Storage is a bigger issue for sure.

H2 doesn't compete with ICE. It competes with BEV. That and in that comparison I do think it is much simpler. I'd be open to be enlightened why the killer feature of H2 is that makes it even worth considering with all these downsides.

Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.

Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!

Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.

The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.

Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?

And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.

If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.

This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

I remember when big sites started having to put big banners in your browser console warning you that if you weren't a dev and someone told you to paste something there, you had been scammed, and not to do it. They had to do that because the average Facebook user could be tricked very easily by promises of free FarmVille items or the opportunity to hack someone else's account, and those are fairly low stakes bait. Now people bank with real money on their phones.

Maybe the real solution here is not to. Pay cash when you can (better privacy), else use a credit card. Other types of "banking" such as sending wires is best done on a big screen anyway. The idea that everything can and should be done on a phone is terribly misguided.

We should be prioritizing securing our systems so that they run only what we want them to run, instead of putting all of that trust in gatekeepers who make money when they let you get scammed.

HN tends to forget that linux is not a target for general malware because nobody gives a single fuck about linux as a real malware target because they're smart, and therefore not the target of most scams. HN has the cute attitude that technology is king and that as long as you inspect it and open source it and care enough and have full control, then that's enough. Often the same people ignoring that AI has made it way easier to fuck stupid people over with no effort at all.

I don't not want unlimited control over the hardware that I buy from vendors like Google but I don't know yet of any better way to keep stupid people from kneecapping themselves other than introducing harder and harder quizzes. If you think it's an advantage that third party vendors like f-droid are absolved of responsibility then you deserve and own the fault when you get hacked and fucked over. Most people don't want that. They have real life to deal with. In real life you can kill people or sue them and it's harder to kill people over the internet.

How many people have successfully sued Google because of malware on the Play Store? Ever?

People can learn about links to payment websites, self-signed apps/updates and unlocked bootloaders, because anything less is restricting computers for idiotic reasons.

I recently saw some house building videos and it is somehow fascinating how different the building materials and methodologies are. North America obviously made it work, but still very odd to me.

I don't think of the walls as especially flimsy, though. Built correctly, they are totally fine. Yes you can punch a hole in one if you are sufficiently motivated (and you better miss the stud...), but the only times I've ever punched any hole in drywall it was because the door stop was removed for whatever reason and a dumb teenager threw the door open with no regard for propriety. At least drywall is trivial to fix.

Over a lifespan of 100+ years that's very well expected in the US given that cities aren't growing much any more and infill has been made almost illegal in most places, using long-lasting materials and techniques like in Germany becomes a lot cheaper, and more convenient. It always surprises my US colleagues when I told them that in 20 years living in the house I grew up in, the only thing that ever broke were once the roof gutters due to very heavy rain. Otherwise, houses are expected to just go on and maybe need repairs every 50-60 years.

* drywalls are inherently sensitive to humidity, which makes it necessary to cover them with wall paint which is essentially a waterproof layer of plastic, which makes it not breathable and thus drywalls develop mold rather easily (even worse, it's often invisible mold). In contrast, walls made of stone, cement or brick (or a mix thereof) and covered in stucco are breathable and much more resilient to humidity and mold issues.

> I may be biased, because I live in a city filled with houses over 100 years old, and we get incessant rain. They seem to hold up fine

I wouldn't be so sure.

... or so you think. Mold contamination is most of the times invisible and triggers long-term chronic intoxication. People only realise there's a problem if the mold starts growing on the walls, at which point it's too late.

I have family like this.

Prolific recent media example: JK Rowling.

ChangeTheAirFoundation.org

This is probably one of the European vs. American divides though.

In my current Spanish town I don't know any building older than 1900. Rapid expansion of coastal towns due to European mobility caused that.

It's not really a European vs American divide, it is more country specific than that.

Edit: Ireland apparently has one of the youngest building age in Europe so I guess a 17th century pub is very rare and special there too.

This is what I meant with "flimsy". If I hit my wall my hand breaks. But as I said It seems to work. I am just used to the massive nature of our houses and I admit a part of me prefers it that way but I don't think it's the one true way.

Earthquakes are a factor where we are, but also, if NZ can find a way to do something cheaper, we will always do it. Quality be damned.

Have a look at that second link, and skip to 22.2.2011. At an about 12.51 it goes wild, and it lasted for years. It’s still shaking now.

https://earthquakelist.org/new-zealand/canterbury/christchur...

https://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/february

Steel-reinforced ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) has become a much more common frame material for homes in the US, especially in the hurricane-prone southeast.

The closest major earthquake zone is in South Carolina, which had M7+ earthquakes as recently as the late 19th century.

Given how prevalent strong earthquakes are across most of the US, I always wonder if the few areas on the map without a known seismic hazard means we just haven't discovered it yet.

It does indeed.

There’s a portion of our populace who accepts waking up tired with flu-like symptoms daily.

Those stigmas are also odd for most of our heritage-like old towns that are full of still-intact "Fachwerk"-Wooden-Constructions - which basically use the same technique, should give us a hint or two. Also wooden constructions do allow to comply with our ever climbing ecology standards, without complicated venting mechanisms to keep mold out (as you need for stone). Those two stigmas are also odd, given, that drywall and wooden construction sectors are actually huge in Germany. Knauf is one of the worlds largest companies in the wallboard sector.

They're not. The long-term reduction in maintenance costs more than make up for it. Tell a German that the "normal" North-American "common sense" is saving 1-2% of the house value every year for repairs and you'll be considered a madman.

> and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another

Both stigmas are very well justified.

Wooden structures allow for a lot cheaper adjustment later on (you usually have a few beams that are structurally important, often its just the outer walls that bear the load). If you try that with stone you can start with hiring an expert upfront or your house collapses.

Same goes energy efficiency. The isolation needs require thick plastic-covers on the outside (for stone), which are prone to mold, birds nests and lead to moss. Every residential stone building in Germany that is older than 10yrs provides you with a prime view through its plaster of where its plastic blocks are assembled, because of the moss. If you don't then they already paid the extra cost of recoating.

Every mortgage issuer will calculate 2-4% extra repair costs for the exterior alone. And we'Re not even talking about the venting, which officially requires a replacement and cleansing every 2-3 years, but of course nobody ever does it.

I could go on for hours about our German stonerism, but will end with the most funny thing, which is that most "stoners" are adamant about longevity vis-a-vis wood, pay extra for the stone, have to wait 3-5 times as long before they can actually move in (drying of mortar and screed can take up to year here in Germany) – but then the most important thing for longevity, the roof, will be made of wood ;-)

As much as I don't want to be a stereotypical German thick walls feel right to me. But I honestly don't think that our building style is the true one. It is just what I am used to.

This led to the highly evolved wood-frame and steel-frame structures used in all construction in the US you see today. There are still a few old brick and masonry buildings from before these building codes, but most of the buildings from those eras collapsed in one disaster or another.

The timber-stud and drywall model also works well for the modern world, where layout preferences and in-wall technology changes often. It was only about 20-25 years ago where having POTS lines/jacks in multiple rooms was cool, and now they're mostly useless.

It's mostly unused. I have PoE wifi access points around the house. And the sound system I hardly use.

The UK is a damp place! We built one-off- houses. We built exclusively with 'brick and block'. Brick outside (to take the weather), cavity and block inside. Downstairs walls were block. Upstairs walls were studding, unless blocks were required to go up to support roof purlins.

The blocks inside were normally 'dry lined', sheets of 'plasterboard' (what we call drywall) 'dabbed' to the blocks with a plaster-like adhesive. Often these were 'Thermal boards', plasterboard laminated to urethane insulation foam. Plasterboard was always 'skimmed', plastered over with a plaster designed for this. The drying time is much lower than 'wet plastering' on the blocks.

On big spec built sites they were using prefab timber frames instead of blocks for the inner wall. Then they would plasterboard, and just fill the joints (no skimming). This is always considered a lower spec than skimmed walls.

Concrete or brick buildings are much nicer to live in, but expensive, so they are not very common among new constructions.

That said, plenty of steel-framed apartments are effectively sound-proof. I’ve lived in them. You don’t need masonry, just wall mass.

Masonry can be engineered to US seismic standards but it is extremely uneconomical to do so. In my city, my house must be engineered to survive without structural damage an earthquake stronger than any in European recorded history. That’s not over-engineering, large parts of the US just have earthquakes that strong. It limits your material choices.

Similarly, US construction must also be engineered for extreme wind loading. Some of the buildings in my area are designed to withstand 300+ km/hr winds. Because that is a thing that can happen here.

Just about everything about US construction style can be explained by the necessity of engineering to survive extreme seismic and/or wind loading. Which it demonstrably does for the most part.

It’s also quite expensive.

Normal Japanese construction has always been wood frame.

Once you start moving out of the dense parts of Tokyo, wood construction becomes a lot more prevalent for the same reason: it’s cheaper to build a stick house to code than it is to hire RC specialists.

Some recent skyscrapers in severe seismic zones don't use conventional reinforced concrete. Their cores are built from welded steel plates, between which they pour concrete. It is much less labor-intensive and purportedly has excellent seismic properties.

It’s called a 5-over-1 and it’s so much cheaper than doing five stories of metal pan and concrete deck that the economics force the decision. You see these everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

Anything over 6 stories will be concrete and steel, or rarely, engineered wood or timber framed.

Concrete and steel apartment buildings do not have vertical concrete partitions or wood stud walls between the units, they have steel stud walls with two layers of double 5/8” drywall on each side to provide a 4-hour fire rating.

I am a construction professional, FWIW.

I've lived in pretty large buildings (eg dozens of units and four floors high) that were largely made of wood in both the northeast of the US and California.

They aren't high-rise buildings but I wouldn't argue they aren't apartment buildings, and they're far from uncommon.

What is your definition of "often"?

Of course you might say that durable materials exist in North America, but almost nobody chooses them. The likelihood of being able to move somewhere and be able to buy a modern durable house is ~0% in NA, and 30-90% in Europe depending on country and location. So you can do it in NA if you have enough money to rebuild a house. Good luck with that.

That being said, if you want them, you can get them (this is how I know the above), and you can get other options. All of this is orthogonal to stick-frame construction. I've seen copper-roofs on stick-framed buildings even.

It's so fun watching Europeans reinvent the Soviet approach to building that they used to mock and shit on

Please explain why you think this is true, I disagree and I work in construction.

Once you get a roof and siding on a building, the framing material doesn’t matter. As long as it’s strong enough for the application, the building will remain standing, provided you maintain the roof and siding. I’m living in a balloon framed stick-built house that is 140 years old right now.

All that being said, I’d be skeptical as hell about buying a Lennar or similar tract house built in the last 30 years for the same reasons you stated. I run union electrical work and trust my electricians to do good work, but residential construction is a whole different ballgame, lower skill levels and lots of corner cutting. I will lose money on a job to complete a project correctly, if that’s what it takes. My company has to compete locally and our reputation matters. I don’t trust the people working at home builders to make the same choice, they shit out a bunch of houses and move on, while I have to maintain my reputation and keep customers coming back for a couple decades if I want to keep my job.

Let’s just say if I was having a house built, I’d GC it myself and conduct frequent site visits, probably daily.

My main point was a well-constructed stick built house can last a long time if it’s maintained, but determining if a house is well-built is not particularly easy without cutting walls open and so on.

I'm just saying - different people prefer different tradeoffs. My dad was his own GC in W. Germany in the late 60s and built our house. Took him years of working after-hours, etc. Sure, it's still standing. So is the "stick" house built around the same time in Canada that we bought used in the 80s. And the "stick" house I bought in the 00s in CA. Yes, we did the roof back then, and it's probably going to need a new roof soon - probably like 2-3% of the total value of the house. And possibly, putting solar panels on the house reduced it's lifespan. Oh yeah, our neighbors put clay tiles on the roof, which is an option.

It costs perhaps 50% more than a stick frame house and preserves its value much better because it's more durable. The house appreciation that people all over North America have been seeing is due to the land, not the building.

> different people prefer different tradeoffs

I don't think that everyone in North America would really prefer stick built, but due to regulations they have no choice and brick is much more expensive than just 50% extra.

There are a lot of variables at play and I am not sure the answer is to build stone houses like in parts of Germany.

Sure it's not as strong as brick or concrete blocks, but it's strong enough for normal, every day use.

Where it does pale in comparison is hanging heavy objects on the wall. You do need to secure heavy loads to a stud, instead of just drilling and anchoring anywhere in the wall. However what it lacks there it more than makes up for in ease of routing low-voltage cables in an existing home.

Also, if I really wanted it, I could knock out almost all of my interior walls and completely change the layout of my home. Not something you do on a whim, but you can absolutely do so when renovating a home.

Here's a timelapse of a Swedish house being built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbSm0Zw00Cs

I watch a lot of building videos from the US, it’s eyeopening watching for someone used to better construction methods.

The construction of UK inner walls is even better, it”s often plaster applied on plasterboard/drywall usually by skilled trades. Very strong.

The only place that conduit is mandatory in residences in the US is Chicago.

Hell, most office buildouts in the US use very minimal amounts of conduit, most of the lightning and receptacle branch circuits are metal-clad cable (MC cable).

I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.

Yea, if we’re hit hard enough, the stucco may or drywall may crack, but, big picture, those are cheap cosmetic fixes compared to anything more structural being damaged.

Back during the Northridge quake, my friend was buying a second floor condo in Santa Monica (which was hit pretty hard). It resulted in several drywall cracks, but nothing worse than that. Even better, the closing day was scheduled for the day after the quake.

Ubuntu has never ever been the most stable or useful distro. What it did have was apt and more up to date stuff than debian.

I would never willingly choose Ubuntu if allowed other options (Fedora, Debian, maybe CoreOS, etc)

But I mostly agree with you. Once you get out of that phase, I don't really see much value in Ubuntu. I'd pick pretty much anything else for everything I do these days. Debian/Fedora/Alpine on the server. Arch on the desktop.

So I'd say it is very much a personal preference but just saying it is not stable is just not generally true. I could say the same about Fedora that shipped graphics drivers so new that all my software was broken for a while. To each their own I guess.

You run into the same problem on other platforms too of course (eg Android)

From my view it is more productive to find out what you like about something and always be open to maybe finding someone else who can deliver on that. And sometimes things that we thought were essential are not. You might even find something new to like.

Most comments are interpreting this as purely tech. It's worth mentioning that this applies to basically everything: the only things that are worth gifting your loyalty to are living things: humans, pets, nature.

Pets are only interested in who feeds them and make them feel good, eventually offloading cognition to other tasks the same way we do; nature merely an agglomeration of entities seeking growth and propagation. We can count on these things, we can think about them, we can engage with them or let them slip past our minds, which a person might call “trust?” a lack of mental friction after that work has been done to our satisfaction.

Recognizing what may benefit us, and the short and long term dimensions of it, as well as acknowledging that we cannot know all those dimensions or control them or the future, seems the best way to go, if i may.

The idea of loyalty is naïve and dangerous, if I may use those terms without defining them also.

To be clear, it’s not cold calculation, far from it, simply acknowledging how systems tend to play out while leaving room for the unexpected. Once we recognize a pattern or system locking in that pattern in order to use our limited cognitive energies in other ways.

Those are the key words. You have the option to walk away from one distribution to use another if things start getting bad. Such has happened in the past, either because of distribution maintainers making decisions that certain users don't like (think Ubuntu from Unity onward) or because of distribution makers maintainers making decisions that put them ahead of the pack (think early Ubuntu). Overall, it has resulted in a competitive marketplace.

And if things got really bad, people can either fork the offending software or (if they use Linux as a more traditional Unix environment) there are various versions of BSD. If you use Linux for desktop applications, there is even the option of switching to Macintosh or Windows since open source applications tend to be multi-platform.

Being a Windows guy is a bit different. They are sticking all of their eggs in one basket. There isn't a viable Windows-like alternative to Windows if Microsoft messes up. Heck, it is growing increasingly difficult to stick with versions of Windows that are out of support. While I won't go as far as calling this brand loyalty, it means one is pretty much at the whim of the brand.

The better example is being an "Arch guy". That's the same kind of problematic as being a "Mac guy".

I also consider myself an uncritical and proud fan of handwashing and daily toothcare. Is that bad?

The other question is, is it even worth it? These things have worked for you well enough up to this point, all three. That’s fair and valid.

The question might be is it worth the cognitive friction to change those things? I change the way that I brush my teeth, and now my overall health is better perhaps. Perhaps my mouth biome changed over decades, while I was unaware. A better way involves changing a habit, getting some new technology, and even this simple change may have knocked on effect in the rest of my life if I have a tight schedule and rigid habits, which benefit me. Is the trade-off worth it? Can we really know?

I’m not a surgeon so I don’t have an extensive method of washing my hands. However, some people don’t even wash their bodies more than once in a while. Science has discovered that this is probably healthier over the long-term, but other people simply take a shower and scrub scrub, scrub every single day. They say it benefits them, but the facts point to otherwise. They have a hard time changing that habit or believing the facts.

Same applies to an OS. Sure, looking backwards it has been good, but will it continue to be? Is it worth the cognitive friction to make those changes though? Honestly? For you, probably not at this point. But who is to say? Could what you have learned be leveraged in a different OS and bring you even more of what you feel benefits you? I suppose only you can know this, and that’s totally OK.

Past returns are no guarantee of future performance, in short.

Much like Ethernet, this has happened several times but the replacement was also called Linux.

(I'm also forced to use Windows at work)