I live in the suburbs of Kansas City where the World Cup is happening, and the only way it’s affected me is it’s really annoying to take my disabled kid to the children’s hospital downtown because there’s so much traffic.
I know exactly one person out of my friends that is going to one World Cup game, and he’s well known as the guy who likes soccer.
My wife has enjoyed the TikToks of Europeans coming to Kansas City and reacting to stuff that’s totally normal to us, like the Bass Pro Shop and Tornado Shelter signs.
> Relatively nobody in the US cares about soccer, much less travels for it.
Utahns travel to US states with World Cup games for reasons other than the World Cup. Its Summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Utahns do travel, for example, to the San Francisco Bay Area for graduation ceremonies, to visit family, and for sightseeing. These Utahns may mingle with foreign visitors.
I’m not making a case that transmission of measles from a Utahn to a foreign visitor is likely, but the failure to consider possible routes of transmission is exactly why vaccination is so important.
It was enough of a concern before the most contagious virus resurfaced (measles) that researchers have been looking at sporting events as mass vector events for years.
"The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) via DHS provided $625 million in grant funding to the 11 U.S. cities in hosting states to enhance security and preparedness efforts for the “safe execution” of tournament events"
The World Cup aspect is still incredibly important to point out. The World Cup appeals to a very large demographic and so many traveling around could spell disaster.
I wish the Soviets had focused more on developing an independent computer industry and their own distinct flavors of programming languages.
Imagine the thrill of studying languages built to run on completely separate hardware architectures, featuring entirely novel paradigms and structures.
This would be the closest thing to experience reverse-engineering a computer from an alien spaceship.
In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.
In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.
Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.
While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.
USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.
It's easy to judge them in the retrospective. But they had to make decisions, using the information the had at the moment, weighing risks as they saw them at that moment.
The comment you are replying to is correct. The Soviet Union had massive amounts of resources and capital (both human and economic) to be able to develop and support technical innovations. The wider-Soviet bloc itself was of such a scale as to be able to completely support their own divergent technologies and innovations. The higher education systems themselves were sufficient to provide and foster the talent, even if they were overly-politicized.
Of issue, especially as time went on, was the overly-centralized nature of national resource and economic strategy and planning. Especially ESPECIALLY constraining was the dual-circuit monetary system of its economy, which literally prevented half of its "capital" to follow innovation or market forces outside of centralized allocation.
I highly recommend the book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok
> overly-centralized nature of national resource and economic strategy and planning.
This is a common misconception. Supported by the Soviet Union government in the 80s.
The fact is, that the efforts to sabotage and disband central planning started as early as 1954.
In 1954 an executive order of 14 Oct 1954 reduced the amount of administrative personnel by 450 thousands.
The amount of metrics went down from 9 940 to 6 308 in 1954, to 3 081 in 1955, and to 1 780 in 1958.
Khrushchev moved most of the planning power from central planning institution to the regions and down to the factories and enterprises. What previously was strict targets from the center now became soft suggestions.
Imagine you are a CTO and your workforce is heavily reduces and the goals you set are considered to be a mere suggestions. Not a very efficient instrument indeed. But not because it is overly-centralized.
You are assuming the interest of people making those designs were aligned with the interests of consumers. They obviously were only to a very small degree since there were almost no incentives for Soviet companies to produce anything that wasn’t complete crap. Consumers had no choice since even the crap products they produced were hardly ever available to normal people anyway.
> USSR just wasn't rich enough
To an extent by choice. They really didn’t utilize the resources they had optimally.
> USSR just wasn't rich enough to afford experimentation and innovation. Resources (including human brain power) were quite limited. So they had to copy proven solutions. Simple as that.
I think the "anything computing was seen as state secrets thing" is also possibly easiest to see in any documentaries and books on the history of Tetris (including the 2023 movie on Apple TV+). It's weird to say that Tetris was one of the most innovative software programs in USSR history and that the USSR almost crushed it before it had a chance to soar in the minds and dreams of millions of players, but that's basically what it was.
Even accepting the counter-narrative that the story of Tetris was "evil" capitalists taking advantage of the USSR to "steal" Tetris from the people of the USSR and the output of their socialist labor, the USSR was never in the position to offer Tetris to every worker in the country as a gift for their hard work because it was a state secret and computing wasn't something everyone had access to.
It is interesting to ponder if the USSR had made different decisions on the usefulness of general computing for the masses rather than the military what would have happened to Tetris as one interesting microcosm of the USSR's relationship to computing.
It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation.
The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses:
Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw before being pulled out to work in a sharashka (a prison lab). Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was relentlessly persecuted and exiled later in life for pointing out systemic flaws.
Ideology Over Reality: The state actively banned the teaching of modern genetics for decades because Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist."
When you look at where the USSR did choose to spend its massive resources, it wasn't on pragmatic, cost-saving solutions. It was on hyper-expensive, top-down military prestige projects—many of which the West mathematically evaluated and discarded as impractical.
They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system. They spent fortunes building the "Caspian Sea Monster" (a giant ground-effect vehicle) and the Tsar Bomba.
The tragedy of the Soviet computer industry wasn't a lack of money or smart people. It was that any "von Neumann" or "Seymour Cray" born in the USSR who asked the wrong questions or challenged a party bureaucrat's stupid idea was far more likely to end up in a labor camp than heading an independent tech company.
Those born in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia were usually "asked" to leave country and they were working for the West ;-)
> They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system.
It was more that the RMBK was more designed around existing Soviet manufacturing capacity, they could and did build more conventional reactor designs as well but they required enormous pressure vessels the USSR only had one factory to produce. The RBMK on the other hand is not a monolithic pressure vessel, it's a collection of hundreds of individual pressurised tubes which were much easier for the Soviet manufacturing base to produce. It was actually a clever idea on the face of it, the problem was more it had inherently dangerous behaviour in certain regimes (the infamous positive void coefficient of reactivity) and the positive scram effect wasn't known until well into their deployment. The operators were also given contradictory operating instructions which failed to highlight the safety-critical nature of certain parameters.
> Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw
That's just a scary tale, that was created long after he died.
> Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist."
Not exactly. His "fraudulent" theories delivered real value, and saved millions of people from starving. But he didn't belong to fancy scientific establishment (which traveled to conferences abroad while studying things with no impact to the people). He was a regular man, with experience working on land and with an aim for a practical results. He was not from "the club". So said establishment hated him and seized the first opportunity to attack him. Said establishment in all forms and shapes still hates him and other talented outsiders.
Discussion between Trofim Lysenko and his challengers actually public - you can read it yourself, not distorted conclusion-ready version presented by his haters.
I'm not saying you are wrong on all counts, but at least with those two examples you seem to just follow the usual narrative.
One famous example is Jacek Karpiński [0]. Soviet pressure, opposition to the use of Western parts, and intense jealousy of the commie state bureaucracy which sought to hold a monopoly over computer production (e.g., through the state-owned companies Odra and Elwro) halted production.
Here's some English language documentation for one of his models (the K-202) which was exported to the UK [1]. (The state-produced Mera 400, a heavily modified version of the K-202, did achieve a great deal of success, however, despite high production costs.)
There was an article posted here about him about 10 years ago [2].
Exactly, and Jacek Karpiński is the perfect tragic example of this dynamic.
It's worth noting that Poland was actually one of the least ideologically rigid countries in the Eastern Bloc. While you couldn't openly oppose the regime, it was entirely possible to have a brilliant career in science or medicine (like Zbigniew Religa, who pioneered Poland's heart transplantation program) without strictly toeing the Party line.
Yet even in Poland's relatively relaxed climate, Karpiński’s revolutionary K-202 was strangled by bureaucratic jealousy, state monopolies (Elwro), and the paranoia of central planners.
If that was the fate of an innovator in Poland, imagine how much worse it was inside the borders of the USSR proper. The Soviet system operated on a near-literal interpretation of totalitarian control, where maintaining absolute party monopoly over every facet of life was prioritized above efficiency, wealth, or technological progress.
In that environment, independent thinkers weren't just seen as eccentric or inconvenient—they were viewed as a systemic security threat. When a system treats structural innovation as a form of ideological deviance, the safest thing for a genius to do was to keep quiet, escape to the West, or risk ending up neutralized by the state. You can't build an "alien spaceship" computing paradigm when the system's primary metric of success is total bureaucratic obedience.
My first PC was an Atari 800XL smuggled in from Krakow stuffed somewhere in my dad’s Volga’s chassis, circa ‘87, with cassette player and I joystick. I played The Revenge of Montezuma until I could play it just by sound on the hell settings. We did have some minis in my uni in Odessa, they had Fortran but I think we just played Pong on them.
I really wanted an MSX looking box though, that we played Karateka on in some precursors of Internet cafes, they looked the business, like high end Japanese hifi gear of the era.
The first is corruption. When the Iron Curtain fell, every country behind it suffered from corruption. The Russian word for how it worked was блат, pronounced blat. When the official way of doing things doesn't work, the way that works is informal favor trading. I have a friend, who knows a friend, etc. This acts as grit in the economic system, and makes everyone less productive.
The second was the pressure to not stand out too much. One proverb is Инициатива наказуема, pronounced initsiativa nakazuema. It translates to, "Initiative is punishable."
Why? Well, imagine that you're a middle manager. It's a dog eat dog world. You know that everyone below you, wants your job. Everyone above you, knows that you want their job. You got your role by sucking up to the people above you. Those below you, got theirs by sucking up to you. You don't want your employees to be utterly incompetent - then you won't be able to look good. But you also don't want any of them to shine - then your boss might think that they should have your job. This encourages bland mediocracy. Everyone strives to be just good enough for their job, while sucking up well enough to keep it.
The result is a kind of learned incompetence. But a nation filled with this kind of incompetence, will be unable to sustain innovation.
The third is alcoholism. Russia is basically a very large, very dysfunctional, alcoholic family. It is hard to overstate how true that is. The most popular vodka at the end of the Soviet era came in 750 ml bottles, that did not have a resealable cap. Because no true Russian would leave a bottle half-full. Anyone who didn't drink, was odd. A group that got together without drinking might be suspected of plotting revolution. This is yet another drag on Russian society.
When I first learned about ternary machines like SETUN [0] I was so excited! Forger bits, there are "trits", and instead of boring boolean logic you have +/0/- trits. As alien as it gets!
But then I read much more about the design, and it turns out that the reason machine was ternary is the designers had to minimize number of transistors, and leaned heavily into transformer-based logic - which naturally favors ternary values.
But for transistor/IC circuitry, there are no advantages in ternary - they key to reliability is margins, and margins require only two states. Any transistor-based ternary implementation would be forced to using a pair of bits and declare one of the four states invalid - a clear efficiency loss.
History confirmed it - even in MSU, once transistors became more available, they abandoned SETUN and started using those. Turns out at least that ternary branch was just a evolutionary dead end.
Their semiconductor manufacturing was 10-15 years behind the Western technology. They just didn’t have the capability. Despite that they had good brains and delivered efficiently with what they had.
There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it.
Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.
Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.
For previous models, it was the excessive "sportiness" that sometimes made them look like a car from a mecha anime.
Luce's is more of an underwhelmed look, especially with the outstanding interior design it was privileged to have that was (rightfully) overhype over the last few months.
A car with that kind of an interior deserved a much bolder design.
I even created a generator so people can configure it with their Telegram/Pushover settings and have it generate a static app easy to host on Netlify or Clouflare Pages/Workers.
I'd say that that's a feature of modern-ish newspapers with "advanced" layouting techniques from early to mid 20th century.
A news sheet from THE olden days (eg Victorian era), looks more like a wall of text, set as tightly -- an uniformly -- as possibly, which is not surprising considering the limitations imposed by the technology of the day.
As for story selection, I think the collective hivemind of hn-ers would be a worthy substitute for an editor in chief.
I lived through similar dynamics (though not at Ferrari, of course).
The management knows that they need something new and out of their comfort zone. Someone (from within or without) suggests an idea that would never been accepted in the olden days.
The management, for the sake of their company, would suppress every instinct they have built over the years, often over-correcting. This inevitably results in some questionable choices seeping in, in the name of openness to new paradigms.
And not every time this goes well.
I'm not saying this is what's happening here. These are world-class engineers and designers, but nobody is immune from a bad decision or two.
Exactly, I've experienced the same a few times, in different industries.
That's why I can imagine Ive's company wowing the management with an early interior concept pitch, but then demanding also exterior design ownership as part of the agreement because "it needs to be a coherent design, like an iPhone".
Sounds perfectly reasonable and easy to vouch for. Management feels like they are anyway in control because they decide whether to launch the product or not.
But if the product starts to shift over the course of the development, someone in management has to make the call. And that's a very expensive call to make.
I've personally been with companies which had such big-name collaborations that "deviated" from expectations in very advanced development-stages.
I've seen companies successfully intervening, but more often than that scale-down the project or cancelling the entire collaboration and ending the project, as no partial solution could be agreed on.
The latter was especially common with Design Companies (e.g. Porsche Design, Prada, the earlier LVMH), as their contracts were not phrased for collaboration but for creative control. I would assume Jony Ive sees himself in the same bracket...
honest question: is there any difference between this and the Pontiac Aztek? I guess time will answer that one...
>> the Aztek was to signal a design renaissance for GM, and to "make a statement about breaking from GM's instinct for caution. One designer said that during the design process, the Aztek was made "aggressive for the sake of being aggressive." Peters, the Chief Designer said "we wanted to do a bold, in-your-face vehicle that wasn't for everybody."
The Pontiac Aztek was at least bold, and like the Nissan Cube, people didn't like the looks, but those who bought it really seemed to love it inordinately.
This thing isn't even bold, it's just ... a generic car?
If they had made it outrageous (think: teardrop which is most efficient aerodynamically or something) it'd make more sense.
The Luce is stated to hit 190mph. I honestly doubt the reality of getting that speed on real track. Having battery in the floor helps stability of course. Yet it still looks to be too high for such performance. Look at similar EV - Porsche Taycan - top speed from 155 to 190mph for the top model. The 190mph model has similar horsepower, and much better aerodynamics and sits lower.
My cousin bought a brand new aztek off the lot for way way below sticker like 60% because they sold so poorly because of how ugly they were perceived to be. I think the people who love them probably love them because of how cheap they were.
When I first saw the third generation Nissan Primera [1] many years ago, this is the thought that occurred to me: some bold, enterprising designer somehow managed to convince the organization to push through a radical, risky departure from their usual aesthetic. The 2010 Nissan Juke too, felt similar (I owned one myself). In my view, both models worked out. I don't think Ferrari was that lucky.
To sports car enthusists, there is a certain flavor in each car produced by the major companies that one can recognize without seeing the badge. Even the SUVs carry over that recognizable design language like with the Cayenne and Urus. This doesn't look like a Ferrari, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with coloring outside the lines. But then again, this is not something Ferrari fans (with money to buy a Ferrari) would expect from the House of Pininfarina, it looks like an iPad. Maybe that doesnt matter, maybe Ferrari is more angling towards the kind of buyer that wants a Ferrari but also needs something he can take the kids to school in. Maybe the kind of person with Ferrari money but Tesla sensibilities.
Think of it like this: even the most expensive iPhone isn't that much more than the base model. There's a limit on what you can buy, anyone with a decent job can afford the same phone that billionaires use. But what if there was something even more premium? Something that's higher performance and looks better, would you buy it if money was no issue?
> Maybe that doesnt matter, maybe Ferrari is more angling towards the kind of buyer that wants a Ferrari but also needs something he can take the kids to school in.
If Ferrari wanted to build a Cayenne, I'm sure they could have just leaned on Porsche's expertise in slapping badges on beige SUVs for boring upper middle class suburbanites...
I wonder whether the mere-exposure effect [0] could also be at play here.
For me, the first reaction to the Ferrari Luce was utter shock, but after looking at it again several hours later I'm starting to see some of its exterior elements differently (although my brain finds it hard to call the car "beautiful" in the same way as some of the other recent Ferrari models).
It looks like a decision was made to depart from the "modern"-looking Ferraris, but the direction of that departure seems to be very different from what the competitors are doing and what the general public is looking for visually in such a car (but it's worth keeping in mind that members of the general public aren't really customers of this car).
Just to clarify: I'm not saying the car is ugly, it's a good looking design.
But it's not a Ferrari design, it dropped almost all of the brands' identity and design language in favor of becoming a more "uniform sportscar design".
To me personally this is quite on-brand for Jony Ive's past work, where the exterior design of the product is diluted to the "least-offending version of its kind", a vessel to the high-quality interior experience which is focused to "excite the user".
In the mobile phone space this was disruptive, because (accidentally) it created the "normalized mobile computing platform" needed to transform the industry into a Smartphone industry.
But I'd say the sports car industry is different, I don't see a benefit in having the "most normalized sports car"...
I've only ever sat in a Ferrari, never driven one, but the interior looks exactly like what I'd expect from a modern Ferrari.
As for the exterior, I really don't like the front - but I think that's because a tall Ferrari is just wrong (for example, I think the Purosangue looks incredibly generic too).
Is this a common thing? Sleeping without any sort of cover during the hot summer months (notably July and August) is the norm here (North Africa) and never heard of anyone who does it (AC or not).
Is this an American thing? Do people in warmer regions of the country (Texas, Florida, ...) also feel the same?
Speaking personally, I have the "must be covered" gene along with the "overheats easily at night" gene, so it's been a bit of a struggle hitting a balance. Right now a thin breathable quilt is the way to go, even in deep winter. Hard to explain really, but I feel anxious (and cold!) if my body is exposed, even if it's actually pretty hot in the room.
The best mitigation for this conflict seems to be those knitted blankets with the enormous holes. Terrible heat retention, and they're pretty heavy. That got the job done during a Texas summer on more than one occasion.
Here in India, when I was growing up it was normal to sleep without a cover in the summer (no ACs back then, only ceiling fans and perhaps an evaporation cooler in more luxurious circumstances). I remember when a friend and his cousin from Thailand was visiting and the power had just gone out. The temperature was in the early 40s (Celsius) but the Thai cousin who wanted to take a nap insisted on a thin cotton sheet as a cover. My friend and I were confused and kept telling him it's not a good idea but he couldn't fall asleep without it.
As someone who lives in the Northeast US but travels to Florida somewhat regularly it amazes me how low people keep the AC. It’s common for people and places, or at least those I visit, to keep the AC lower than I keep my heat in the winter(18c). So sometimes I’m so cold I have to ask for additional blankets or bring a jacket to a place like a movie theater.
I live in Phoenix. In summer AC is set to 84F, and in winter we heat to 78F.
Humidity does a lot.
As I've posted before:
115C with 10% humidity (71.66F wet bulb) here is hot, but as long as you have water, you're better off here than in Florida with 85F at 90% humidity (87.46F wet bulb).
Yes, it is totally a thing. We don't have a lot of hot nights in Denmark but when we do, we still sleep under a duvet, or maybe half under one and it is just as awful as it sounds.
Are you sure? That seems like the sort of thing people might just not do. It can't take that many brain cells for an uncomfortably warm person to work out that more blankets make you more hotter -> less blankets makes you less hotter.
The article seems to provide very limited evidence that people sleep under blankets on hot nights and it sounds like a silly thing to do in the abstract. A lot of people would just remove the blanket when they get hot.
Sleeping with blankets is very comfortable. If the comfort outweighs the discomfort from being mildly hot, it makes sense. Personally I just run fans and/or AC such that I am still comfortable under my blanket, because the price I pay for electricity is worth far less to me than the comfort of sleeping with a blanket.
I sleep with a blanket even when it's too hot. 90% of the year the temperature is low enough that I need it, and sleeping without it the other 10% of the year just feels wrong, and I feel exposed.
I'm born and raised in Sweden, now live in Spain, cannot fall asleep unless I have something covering me, but I can also not fall asleep while sweating... So in the hottest months (July and August), I tend to just use a bed sheet as the cover, does the trick.
It is a thing and not only in U.S. I live in Greece and my girlfriend can’t sleep if she’s not covered by something even if it’s in the middle of August and it’s scorching Earth outside. She says she feels vulnerable without a cover. I on the other hand can’t sleep with a cover during summer.
I must have my legs covered regardless of temperature, and will easily sleep naked but with legs covered. My partner must cover their shoulders at all costs, thus opting to sleep without covers except for a blanket over the upper torso.
There’s some videos out there of people in warm climates sleeping with no cover.
Can't help noticing how the interface and general mechanics of these old OSes were tightly coupled to the hardware. Both the makers and users of that era seemed to relish that vibe. I know I certainly do.
However, that paradigm made computers daunting for anyone who wasn't an enthusiast. While I’m nostalgic for that level of transparency, I recognize that those hurdles stood in the way of mass adoption.
We might lament how 'dull' or 'abstracted' modern software feels, but technology's primary purpose is utility, not just to be venerated as an artifact.
THAT SAID, I still believe that user-friendliness isn't an excuse to strip away agency.
Modern simplification shouldn't feel like a forced lobotomy of the OS (or any piece of software really). There’s no reason we can't have both: an interface that stays out of the way for the average user, while providing total control for power users.
What make TikTok, well TikTok, is the frictionless experience.
When I opened the link, I expected to directly be shown the target content. If there's a login screen or any explanation to do, it should either be postponed or integrated into the experience.
Football fans can get infected and spread the virus in their home countries if they get exposed.
reply