Agreed, LLMs mean that it's MORE useful and important to learn Racket and C, the LLM will help you much more with knowing the specifics of python/js/go/java or whatever human-focused language you end up working with for your job. If you want to be a stellar developer in 2025 you want to learn the things the LLM ISN'T good at, understanding the fundamentals of computer science is way more useful now than it was 5 years ago because the baseline for being good at a language is so much lower with an LLM aiding you.
This, along with facebook cancelling DEI etc is a performative measure that basically means nothing, these people never cared about DEI or the climate, they just correctly understood the political zeitgeist and performed accordingly, just as they are doing now.
I’m rooting for EV’s over ICE cars all the way (I own one), but I agree — I always found it a bit weird/misleading that the Mach-E carries the “Mustang” name, when they have so little in common.
I feel like it’s just marketing to the “cool” demographic, similar to how Tesla is (or at least used to be) a big status symbol.
These two cars are targeting a completely different demographic and should not be compared/considered in competition.
> Who said Ford’s electric crossover SUV wasn’t a real Mustang? The Mach-E outsold the gas-powered Ford Mustang for the first time last year as one of the top-selling EVs in the US.
Just because the vehicle carries the name and outsold the original Mustang still does not make it a “real Mustang”.
Again, I’m glad it’s selling well (and also glad it’s selling better than the Mustang). I just don’t think the two vehicles can be compared.
Real Mustang owner here, at least if you consider the '69 Mustang and the '72 Mustang to be Real Mustangs. I don't have them anymore, but they are forever burned in my driving habits.
What makes a Real Mustang? Head-turning looks? Acceleration? The Mach-E has both in spades. It's a new implementation of the Mustang formula, but it works. It out-Mustangs any parameter that a Real Mustang owner will tell you is the essence of his beloved pony car.
I agree. The mach-e looks like a crossover suv. It does not look like a mustang. I would imagine the venn diagram of young drivers that would choose the mustang vs mach e do not intersect.
Maybe ford is targeting older people who are at the stage where they give in and get a "practical" car.
It's not an inexpensive RWD car with a V8, for the most part.
It's an SUV that can't out-run a Tesla. It's barely faster than the 4-cylinder Mustang
(Except for the most recent model (2024) that you can finally get a performance add-on with ($995). The previous model only lets you accelerate for about five seconds under full power)
Agreed. Tastes evolve. People want SUV style vehicles and I think Ford did a decent job with the Mach-E. I would hazard a guess that most traditional Mustang buyers aren't the sort who would consider a car that doesn't go vroom and smell of gas, so you've created a weird conflict between your loyal existing fans and people who want a practical vehicle. It'll probably blow over.
In 10 years it might not even be profitable to build a gasoline car. How many times has the Viper being canned and reborn? The only way to continue the Mustang badge at all is electric.
How well accepted is the Urus now in Lambo circles?
I don’t know. They built this and broke the Nordschleife record for the “first American car to do the lap under seven minutes”. It’s a good lap: https://youtu.be/8AnhxB8Xh6w?si=iL0DoyQDcQdCiARY.
In my view, one of the critical components of these sort of golden-age low cost sports/muscle cars is hackability/repairability.
Nobody makes cars like that anymore. Even the ICE Mustang is a computer on wheels that requires professional dealer-provided software tools to work on. The concept of muscle cars accessible to the everyman for tinkering/souping up is basically dead now.
> Just because the vehicle carries the name and outsold the original Mustang still does not make it a “real Mustang”.
I just learned that this is an example of the "jingle" fallacy, one half of the jingle-jangle fallacy pair. The "jangle" half being: the fact that two things are given different names does not make them different.
It's interesting because the EV was made fun of relentlessly when it came out, with Ford fans saying that it would be a flop.
Also, I'm biased, but I have to disagree with the "impractical vanity car" part. The current Mustang coupe is super fun to drive and affordable - the trunk is huge and it is quite comfortable for two people (even 3). The coyote v8 is a marvel of engineering - 460 HP with instant torque, but you can get 29 MPG with it on the highway (if you drive calmly). The turbo 4 is even more efficient.
To get anything comparable from European or Japanese coupes, you have to pay twice as much.
I don't think that the torque and horsepower are relevant when you're talking about practicality. I think the Mustang is good value for what it is, IF you care about it's branding and that sort of thing is valued in your social circle. It is absolutely a vanity car and if you're buying a car based on performance there's no reason to get a Mustang, any second hand electric coupe will annihilate it on performance per dollar, and in a straight line. The only reason to get it is because of what it represents.
That all being said I don't get the Mustang. If I were buying a car to have fun there are so many that appeal to me more than it does. My ideal car has bugs on the side windows.
I don't think anyone buys a Mustang due to the brand...I mean it's a Ford.
Mustangs have a 4 second 0-60 and great handling (if you know what you're doing, they rival cars 3X the price on the famous tracks of the world).
Don't really get the comparison to a used EV - I guess you're right about straight line speed, but a used EV is pretty sketchy due to battery longevity and crappy reliability from the brands that can actually achieve this straight line speed.
For someone buying new, there isn't much left with comparable performance, considering the camaro no longer exists. Maybe the Nissan Z or the Supra, but those have had crazy dealer markups. If you know such a car in the 40-60k range, I'd love to know!
No apology needed. The current muscle/pony cars are amazing vehicles. Mustang and Camaro are both hugely reliable, modern, efficient cars wrapped up to look tough, and in their base models they are ridiculously good value.
Pretty much the only thing against them is, as you say, they are only practical for two people.
GenZ isnt interested in learning to drive AT ALL. I’m sure most young adults are most interested in a comfortable spacious box with lots of screens. Hence all cars tending towards SUVs.
Teslas are famous for their torque, which is expected with electric engines, but how are their handling and brakes — sports car like or more luxury SUV floating on a car? I grew up driving a Trans Am (dreamed of a KITT!), and the brakes and the grip on the road was awesome. I’ve never driven a BMW or Porsche, but I expect they are even more gripping. But I think most drivers today aren’t into that, and more interested in having the car drive for them.
As a middle of the road millenial I only learned to drive recently and drive only as much as I absolutely have to. I don’t find it enjoyable unless there’s practically no traffic on my route, which is often not the case.
My preferred type of car is a small, efficient, highly practical hatch like the Honda Fit but those largely aren’t sold in the US anymore.
To make it short, as a teenager my family was too poor to have a second vehicle for me to learn in without risking losing transportation, then I went to university in a city with a very good public transportation, and then entered the workforce right around the heyday of cheap VC-funded ridesharing which was wildly cheaper to make use of than owning/leasing a car was. Even for a while after ridesharing got expensive it still made more financial sense to use over car payment plus parking, insurance, tickets, gas, etc.
What finally pushed me over the edge was moving to a suburb during the pandemic to cut down on housing costs. It’s possible to get along without a car since my area is broken up by shopping centers (it’s not a house desert), but still clearly designed to be driven around with few sidewalks. There’s bike lanes which is nice, but a lot of them run right alongside 45mph+ traffic including big trucks which is not so nice.
I went two years without a car. Even in small European cities you can usually walk everywhere you need, or there is sufficient public transport once you get used to it, and as long as you are OK hanging out with the unwashed masses.
I just did a year in Chicago without a car and rental electric bikes are an absolute godsend when the weather isn't shit. I can get across the city way faster than any car.
I don't think the demographic for sports cars is shrinking. Mustangs have always filling a small niche, a subset of the sports car market. The statement in the title may be true but it is meaningless in terms of trends, especially as manufacturers are forced to produce and sell cars that are objectively worse for most people.
I’m a GenX and just about every high school student at least admired a Mustang, especially the 1st generation version and the retro inspired 4th gen in the mid 90s.
Nowadays I am pretty sure my kids have hardly ever seen a coupe let alone a sports car like that.
I think we are about the same age, and it was the kind of car that you'd get if you wanted to be recognized as you drove around. I only saw one regularly within several miles of my house and I knew who owned it.
Kids now might feel like they can't afford these cars, and that prices are out of control (they are). But a base model Mustang brand new is only about $32k and you can find them used. Meanwhile a base model Honda Civic is $25k (not the lowest economy model from Honda but close). So people in the market for a new car could probably afford a Mustang, and might choose to not buy them because of build quality or thinking it's too flashy.
Good riddance to people who think they “know how to drive”. If they did that stuff on private tracks, fine, but in my experience they prefer to use the public road network, which is obviously built and managed for transportation only.
I think there's two kinds of "knows how to drive."
- There's the people you're talking about, who treat public roads like their own playgrounds with little regard for public safety or road laws.
- There's also people who will keep an eye on their surroundings, understand how weather affects driving performance (acceleration, braking, cornering) and when to use or not use automation like adaptive cruise
As long as we've got a car-centric society in North America I'm more than fine with more drivers falling into that second bucket but having to deal with roads in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal very regularly, most people just don't pay attention on the road.
It's still fun to push it (a little) on back roads, where the primary danger is to yourself. Just don't cross the double yellows and don't overtake your braking zone, e.g. speeding around blind corners.
And I highly suggest a day of performance driving lessons from your local HPDE club. It will help you understand what is going on with the car that makes it lose traction, and to unlearn some bad habits when that happens.
only if your definition of "decades" is ~5 years? Otherwise the resurgence of the pony car was only like 20 years ago in the first place (5th gen mustang & charger 2005, Challenger 2008, camero zeta 2010).
> GenZ isnt interested in learning to drive AT ALL.
The statistics do not bear this out. In 2012 41% of people under 19 had a license. In 2022 49% of people under 19 had a license. However, it should be noted, that the total number of people under 19 has decreased since then, which is a normal population phenomenon. Failing to account for this can produce false trends in the analysis.
> Hence all cars tending towards SUVs.
I think government regulations and worldwide markets have more to do with this than the imputed preferences of a single generation in the US.
> But I think most drivers today aren’t into that
I think most drivers have never been into that, as I think most people see their car as a utility, and not a high performance entertainment option.
> Hence mustang was a goner no matter what.
I think producing a 315 horse power 10 speed "EcoBoost" compromise to get to a whopping 26mpg was the death knell. It's a car that has no practical value in today's market. I don't exactly know who it's made for other than ignorant first time buyers.
EDIT: Since the site thinks I am "posting too fast."
Well when you look at the cost of insurance, learning to drive, and cars themselves, when housing is more expensive than ever, and many jobs accessible to 19 year olds don't pay particularly well, is this surprising?
The assertion that it's "Gen Z don't want to learn to drive" might be wrong, could it instead be "Gen Z can't afford to drive"?
My 17 year old son just passed his test in the UK (in a manual, none of that automatic rubbish!) and the costs are astronomical, and out of reach to many.
Right, I wouldn’t agree that they necessarily aren’t interested, I was just clarifying that something is causing them to get less driver licenses, and this is reflected in statistics.
> I don't exactly know who it's made for other than ignorant first time buyers.
I've rented a couple Ecoboost Mustangs, and I see the appeal.
315 HP is enough. It's faster than a Mustang Cobra from the 1990s or Mustang GT from the early 2000s. With the premium interior, the car is a surprisingly nice place to be for two adults - about as nice as the last BMW I rented. The back seat is usable in a pinch, and cargo space is adequate for daily driving and road trips. Maybe the fuel economy could be a little better, but it's easy to do worse. If the steering feel wasn't nonexistent even on the hardest setting, I think I might want one.
Sales seem to be OK: 44000 cars a year for an an enthusiast-oriented car is a significant number.
Very few people got licenses during COVID (2021) then after COVID a lot of people did (2022) then the number of people getting licenses decreased.
If you are looking at a spike in 2022 as proof that the number of interested people isn't going down, I hope you have better evidence than comparing 2021 and 2022!
Your arguments to refute that gen-z drives less circles around this statement you made:
> In 2012 41% of people under 19 had a license. In 2022 49% of people under 19 had a license
I have already addressed why this is entirely predictable & the worst dumbest possible indicator one could use, because it looks specifically at and compares COVID and non-COVID years.
It looks like you are getting tripped up & confused with your reply here. It seems to be arguing something else entirely, and seems non-sequitorial.
Many car enthusiasts/gear heads used to be tinkerers & modifiers, used to have intimate knowledge of cars.
Cars of today are far more complicated systems, where there's no longer clear mechanical linkages connecting components together but instead opaque unobservable digital systems weaving the together.
The way cars are made has killed the ability to be a knowledgeable useful enthusiast. The car is just a commodity now. And sure, you can spend a lot of money to have your car modded for performance or looks, but there's so much less of a diy culture that genuinely knows cars. The industry has superficialized out its best fans.
I hope computing can a good similar fates, somehow (doesn't look great right now!). We don't even need material inputs to improve our machines; software gives us vast flexibility. If we can maintain some cultures beyond base consumerism.
I mean... it's not a Mustang. It has absolutely none of the Mustang ethos, and it was just an attempt by Ford to bolster the marketing of their new product. I think it was perfectly reasonable for people to object to that nonsense bit of branding.
Yeah see, I do not even desire to have a mustang but appreciate the few V6 models I have driven. They do not go anywhere particularly fast, but they do so with great noise and style.
The idea of an electric mustang is not a non-starter. Electric vehicles can be fast as hell, if not terribly noisy.
But the fact that the electric mustang looks more like a Nissan Rogue than a Mustang car always threw me.
I guess my big take-away hearing that the eMustang sold well is that most people do not care much about cars compared to car guys.
Otherwise known as "market feedback." If only the company processed it correctly they might have been able to convince people to fork over medium 5 figures to get one.
the increase in Mach-E sales didn’t really start until late February when it announced price cuts of up to $8,100 on leftover 2023 Mach-Es. When the discounts hit, demand skyrocketed. Since then sales of the electric crossover have nearly tripled.
Plus, 'regular' Mustang sales are down big time as well. Last year was the worst sales numbers in the history of the car (60 years)
I wrote one but never published it. I'm working on resurrecting the blog (writing an article right now) I appreciate the interest and I'll dig up the draft and publish it later this week.
Please do. I find Twitch to be a fascinating corner of the internet. From the shared lingo via third-party emotes to the depressing TTS messages of the chatters, it's all gold.
I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs).
Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in the browser (WebRTC data channels technically use UDP but that stack is an abomination wrapped in SCTP and DTLS)
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just issues I've dealt with recently. It's better than it was with WebGPU and WASM, some of the gap between a native app and a website is surmountable, but unless you're doing something extremely boring surmounting the gap is hard fucking work.
Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)
Yup, as I have found out over the last 5 hours. I managed to get a handshake but it's nowhere near the convenience of something like WebSockets. The security circus you have to go through to get even a handshake working is absolutely absurd, all sorts of extremely poorly documented certificate requirements and you'll be lucky to get an error message that helps you in any way. I'm getting ready to give up for the day, I will definitely make a top level HN post if I get a solution working and documented.
That’s usually a sign nobody uses it because it has at least one large issue. Personally I stopped falling for “there’s now X” advices long ago because if it worked, it would already be mainstream very much heard of by everyone. Sorry for your five hours.
> Personally I stopped falling for “there’s now X” advices long ago because if it worked, it would already be mainstream very much heard of by everyone
So you just never use anything new, always stuck with what has been? Because everything starts with just one person using it, then two, then four and so on, things can't just be popular from day 0.
I'd agree with that chasing the latest fads (no matter the popularity) is a fools errand, and you need to look beyond vanity metrics to evaluate if something is useful or not. Sometimes that means trying things and sometimes even making a hard bet on something that hasn't been demonstrated "right" yet.
I disagree at least a little bit, the fact that there's support on the browser side is much much more important than support on the server. I can write a server of arbitrary complexity given enough time, the scope of the problem is now one that I can fix.
I also found the following in my research yesterday, which looks like a very promising set of abstractions for WebRTC data channels.
> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen?
You've been able to add websites to the home screen going back at least to the iPhone 5 in 2012. Is it the "PWA" part you're questioning? iOS definitely does have PWA support, although with a few notable limitations that may be deal-breakers for certain apps. Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU.
> The need to remove the capability was informed by the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps to support alternative browser engines that would require building a new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and iPadOS.
This rationalization makes zero sense, it's just opening a standalone browser window from a convenient icon shortcut. They could even ignore the manifest.json entirely like Android does half the time anyway cause the implementation is buggy as all hell.
I think the real reason was some kind of retaliation worthy of a baby insanity wolf meme because they were forced to stop reskinning Safari for all other browsers on iOS which was absolutely ridiculous in the first place.
Shows why guessing and gut feel are bad basis for opinions.
In fact, Apple’s problem was that the PWA serviceworker runs as root, a bad decision made years ago. Enabling Chrome-hosted PWAs means Google gets root on those peoples’ phones.
We can still lambast Apple and go all ad hom, but let’s stay factual?
Sounds like something very fixable though. Why is it so difficult for apple to fix the "engineering mistake" and move the PWA process to a less privileged user or even a jail?
Service Workers do not require an installed PWA. Every regular website can have a PWA. I'm not sure who came up with this explanation for Apple trying to kill PWAs in Europe, but it makes zero sense.
It is really quite complicated to do. Since you get some interesting functionality I had considered it but writing the page how to add the website to the home screen I couldn't imagine users doing this.
My least favorite dark pattern is that you first have to change the share menu and add the option. That way it seems less inconvenient to people who've done it before.
To share a fun perspective: Desktop desktops and phone home screens are really revolutionary compared to the browser bookmark menus and app stores are really web directories that are both glamorous and horrible at the same time.
There is sabotage along the way but we are clearly moving forwards.
Imagine an AI starting a thread or a sub forum for each application it can find online. Then have it gather articles about the application and post them as replies or topics. Divide everything neatly over categories (like a web directory) and have it gather usable icons/logos for navigation. By default it only displays software for the users platform or browser but a few check boxes in advanced search settings can change the selection.
One big missing piece is the inability for me to put an "Install" button like I can on android. I don't want to have to teach old people how to add to desktop
In fact, home-screen web apps on iPhone OS predate third-party apps on the platform. Originally all third-party software was going to be installed this way.
> Originally all third-party software was going to be installed this way.
It's off topic, but I don't think this was true once the HTML Weather and Stocks 'widgets' failed on iOS. Anything Apple said publicly was just saving face until their SDK was ready for public consumption.
Point the author is trying to make is that there are certain usecases you really don't need to deliver it via app, it is cheaper and better to serve via web. For eg. The Itaki app mentioned in the article.
Of course there are use cases that you mentioned are better served via native app. For eg. Apps that need compute or location. That's not the argument author is making.
The downside of delivering everything via app is your device ends up with app sprawl that eats up the resources.
iPhones support PWAs on homescreen. However, there's no way to trigger the "install the PWA?" prompt. The user has to do it, which very few know about, and maybe that's what you were thinking of.
I haven't looked at this lately and so don't have a specific recommendation, but there are small libraries for helping iOS learn how to add PWAs using the standard Share → Add to Home Screen mechanism.
I've seen guides like this before. Would be nice if they showed what the share button looks like, cause that's not obvious to some people. Or, some file sharing websites show an arrow pointing to the downloads button in desktop Safari.
Part of the problem is that the websites need to "share" budget with the teams that build 2 separate native apps (or maybe they use something like React Native, but that still costs money that could've been used for a better mobile website).
Also, if a company has a mobile app, a bad mobile website is less of a problem. Take Takeaway.com. Their mobile site is terrible. But they have a pretty good mobile app, so why would they need to pour money into making the site any better?
But yes, (mobile) web also just needs to do better.
Ready to use (or buy/download) controls in appdev usually pack some ui wisdom into themselves for free, borrowing most of it from the base system.
Webdev is constant reinvention of a wheel in all sorts of wrong ways, with “components” on the same level of ui quality.
Many apps are just electron apps or vb-like (x,y,w,h) forms slapped together by someone barely familiar with a platform IDE. But the rest is absolutely superior to the “web”.
Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ for a variety of abusive business practices, including forcing all web browser apps on iOS to use the Safari browser engine, which limits the usefuleness of all web browsers on iOS, so that developers are forced to develop an app which Apple can then take a 30% cut of all revenue generated by the app. It's a pure money-grab by Apple, and they deserve this legal action against them.
That’s all the more reason good regulation is essential. If there were a dozen viable competitors then you could just step back and let the market decide.
Point taken about preferring Apple over Google. I buy Pixel phones and immediately install GrapheneOS, which does a pretty good job of keeping Google at arms' length. So I guess the answer to your question is that there is another alternative.
Agreed. But I would like to add that there are also numerous UX pitfalls that apps fall into that are trivially solvable on the web.
Broadly:
- deeplinking (while technically doable it is still a pita to set up cross platform and require just way too much engineering in the long run)
- branching out UX (it is interesting how many seemingly straightforward processes turn out to be better if you can branch out into something like a tab)
> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen?
They literally supported this since iPhone OS 1.0 (it wasn’t even called iOS yet). In fact, it was supposed to be the only way to add apps to the iPhone until people complained and started jailbreaking to install their own apps. Apple didn’t release the App Store and the iOS SDK until iPhone OS 2.0
I don’t think parent means the same or maybe he does. On chrome and edge on macOS one can choose to install the PWA as a native app. It gets an app icon and everything. It’s similar to a web bookmark on the HomeScreen. But it’s a sandboxed app. Don’t know if this is the exact same behavior though. PWAs are also a bit different to normal websites. They have a manifest and what not to describe the app in a standardized way.
PWAs on iOS get their own local storage, for example. And deleting the PWA from your Home Screen will delete its data, just like deleting an app would delete the data of the app.
I got a basic offline-capable TODO list (the hello world of web apps) working as a PWA for my iPhone. Almost all of it handed to me by ChatGPT.
If I exit the PWA, turn off WiFi and open the PWA again, the PWA still works.
The only annoying thing is that the way you add a PWA to your Home Screen on iOS is too convoluted to realistically get most people to do it, if you were to make a PWA that you actually wanted people to “install”. Although the JS solution that someone else posted ITT with a small pop-over that explains the steps is pretty near to ok. Certainly helps the situation a bit at least.
I know none of them are Edlin Ring, Skyrim, or Call of Duty. One issue with Web games is users's expect them to start quickly so no downloading 80gig of assets like 102gig for CoD Black Ops 6
Yes and no. UDP objectively performs better because it prioritizes sending relevant (in the context of real time application) data rather than retrying no longer relevant data (and all the overhead that entails).
https://nightpoint.io has been around for a long time, it's a fast-paced 2D shooter, uses web sockets and it does quite good actually.
I think the same dev created https://battledudes.io later on, again based on web sockets. It has/had (haven't played recently) a pretty big player community.
A website can work offline, too. Service workers are a feature that any website (installed or not) can use to (pre)cache assets, etc. On iOS, that data will get evicted if the user doesn't visit the site at least every 7 days, though. Other platforms keep the data for a lot longer, but will evict at some point, too.
I assume op means you should be compensated through a method other than pretending software is scarce and trying to assign value to it through a system that relies on equivocating scarcity with value.
A Hilbert curve is a mapping between 1D and 2D space that attempts to preserve locality. Two points that are close in 2D space tend to map to two points that are close in 1D space and vice versa.
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