I wouldn't call it legacy as that implies something people inherited but didn't want. The common sentiment among kernel developers has always seemed to be that device trees are nicer to work with than the complicated PC abstractions, and that sentiment remains today. And IIRC Linux didn't always have device trees; it was an approach that came later as it was ported beyond x86, Alpha, and SPARC, and was welcomed.
I'm not a kernel developer, but it seems to be one of those things that's great when you're adding support for a particular device on a particular platform, but becomes a giant PITA in the aggregate for the downstream ecosystem. It's a mismatch of incentives and preferences.
You left out the important part, that Greek influence made it all the way to Japan, in some cases identifiably intact: "[The Greek wind god] Boreas became the Japanese wind god Fujin through the Greco-Buddhist Wardo/Oado and Chinese Feng Bo/Feng Po ("Uncle Wind"; among various other names). The mother deity Hariti [Kishimojin in Japan] was inspired by Tyche."
I once ate a dog meat stew in South Korea. It was tasty, not very different from any other red meat like beef, lamb, or horse, though the spiciness of the stew may have muted any unfamiliar tastes. However, I had to psyche myself up to eat it, and once I was full and my cultural taboos came flooding back I did start to get queasy. There's a significant mental component to what we find appetizing. Most people aren't that far removed from the stereotypical picky eater, myself included, despite having eaten balut, live shrimp, and many other "exotic" foods.
San Francisco receives over $3,000 per capita in property tax revenue alone. Dallas receives about $1,200 per capita. NYC is less than $1,000, though I gather NYC has their own property tax issues.
And California has an income tax, whereas Texas doesn't.
Prop 13 has it's problems, but I don't think they're as significant as the rhetoric claims. It makes for a great excuse, though. Politicians can blame Prop 13 for why they can't spend as much on services as people demand, and now it's become the common wisdom--but for Prop 13 California could afford to spend much more than it does, and the housing affordability crisis would end, too. It's just wishful thinking.
I remember when Prop 13 was on the ballot. The newspaper reported that if it passed, it would eviscerate the police and fire budgets. It passed, and nothing happened to the budgets.
I don’t think the housing affordability crisis ends and I don’t think that’s the right way to model it. SF has one of, if not the highest, $/sq ft in the US. And prop 13 is suppressing it - estimates indicate that property taxes revenues would double meaning that 2.5k/person would become 5k.
And remember that that 2.5k/person is only for residential properties. commercial properties still fall under prop 13 and that’s about 50-60 of the other tax. So a full repeal would make it closer to 10k/person instead of the current 5k.
I agree the story on rents and home prices would be unclear because ultimately the people might move and just rent out their homes with property taxes baling into the new rental price.
Also seems unlikely. It might depress housing prices and act as a natural counterbalance (but then rents and Col drops too). I think it’s really hard to model.
I don't think housing costs would drop that much, if at all. What matters is the monthly mortgage payment. Property prices drop when property taxes go up, but mortgage payments tends to stay similar.
In one sense that sounds like free money for the state. However, home equity constitutes the largest share of savings for people, and that's more true the lower down the income ladder you go. So you're taking money out of the working- and middle-class. In some circles home equity is considered a poor savings vehicle, but they don't seem to consider that it's the only secured loan most people can access for leveraged investment. It's the only investment available to most people that let's them leverage capital markets the way the very wealthy can.
And FWIW, residential rents also track monthly mortgage payments, so renters aren't likely to see any difference, either. On average renters pay roughly the same amount per month they'd pay as owners, just without building any equity. I suppose they might be slightly better off after accounting for transfer payments (i.e. public services, entitlements, etc), but they'd be even better off if they could become owners rather than renters.
"I don't think housing costs would drop that much, if at all."
That all depends on if people still want to live there, or can afford it. People tend to be sensitive to taxes, especially if they don't see it improving their lives. Businesses can be sensitive to this sort of thing too. And if they leave, people may leave too. California is already at a net negative when looking at joiners vs leavers. It's mostly been lower wage workers, but in recent years middle and high earners have also been leaving. The population is the same as it was 5 years ago.
"Property prices drop when property taxes go up, but mortgage payments tends to stay similar."
That might be roughly true for a person who just purchased and the federal property tax deduction is uncapped. A retiree who is getting a break on taxes is likely to see a big increase. Not to mention if the house is paid off, then there is no mortgage that could offset it.
Depends on where you live. In states like Connecticut, or certain areas of California (PG&E Bay Area customers), the ROI is very long or simply doesn't pencil out at all. I think for Connecticut, which has high electricity prices but low gas prices, it's just net negative. For me in SF, despite high gas prices the ROI is just too long (5-10 years?), and that's before factoring in the ~$5000+ required for updating my electrical box, which is a conservative estimate because now the city requires the meter to be outside the house, whereas it's currently in the garage.
I drive an EV because in every dimension I care about it’s a superior vehicle. They drive better, sound better, and use a fundamental force rather than flintstone fire smoke stink. It’s time to move on from pouring distilled dinosaur juice into your explosion mobile and join the Maxwell equation crowd. The upgrade of your electric is a one time cost that will enable you to use an EV until you move, and improves your home value, so hard to count it into the cost of the car.
Plus they last basically forever and require almost no maintenance. I like being able to never change oil, tune up, belts, whatever every few months. Every few years I get the cabin filter changed and that’s it. In 10 years the battery might be reduced by 20%, and I might replace the batteries around 15-20 years out, but I expect to literally drive it into the ground. (Mine is a Tesla with unlimited super charging for life, and I live next to a super charger)
I have family overseas and will likely buy them one of these EV Camrys. If they’re good, I might get one for my daughter. At $30k it’s fairly affordable.
I'll point out one area that EVs are inferior in lifespan - calendar life of the battery. I use a bicycle for day to day and take the car only on road trips so I only end up driving about 5k mi/yr or so, maybe 10k if I roam far. At that pace the 2% capacity loss per calendar year (even higher in hot climates) will total any EV I buy long before an ICE vehicle has age issues. ICE vehicles without defects do not creep towards engine failure or transmission failure little by little like EVs do, or at least do so at a pace far slower than EVs, as long as they are driven at least once a month to prevent issues ICE vehicles can get in storage.
Unfortunately EVs still have a ways to go to catch up to my use case of buying 10-15 yr old vehicles with 100k mi for $5k and taking them to remote trails where a 550mi range is useful for safety. Such vehicles can be screened for design defects and are therefore more reliable than new vehicles - see the Toyota V6 recall for an example that even a sterling reputation isn't as strong a guarantee as just waiting and seeing. Maybe the EV range will catch up in my life but I wouldn't expect the cost of those long range models to catch up for a long time, and by the time an EV is well-used and in my price range it will no longer be a long range EV what with the capacity degradation. See how this use case perfectly hits all the negatives of EVs? It's not that uncommon a use case in North America among us dirtbag wilderness enthusiasts. I don't doubt EVs are strictly better for many people though and am very interested to see how their long term reliability and cost fares as they trickle into the 10+ yr used market I participate in.
Btw my diy oil change takes 20 minutes and costs $20 all in and during that time I do an annual safety once-over which an EV would also require. So almost 0 net time involved and a negligible amount of money compared to things like tires which cost me 5x as much per year, a number that apparently is higher for EVs since they use tires more quickly afaik. Plus many EVs seem to be much harder (intentionally?) to do DIY repairs on - wrenchers probably won't move over for a long time either.
Most modern EVs have superior battery management systems and batteries, and are generally limited in loss by discharge and recharge not specifically calendar time. They’re not alkaline batteries. The time degradation comes from use primarily . Solid state batteries hope to improve that as well. Batteries also are almost entirely recyclable because the degradation isn’t wear per se as much as chemical changes. As a machine they are absurdly simple - copper coils; magnets, and electrical potential - while ICE are insane Rube Goldberg machines. An EV can probably operate 100+ years with the same mechanicals and electrical, and a swap of batteries periodically, and the battery swap need not be expensive - in fact one mode for fast charging proposed has been racking new battery racks at the charging stations because for the provider the batteries are all the same and can be recycled as needed in bulk at low cost.
Does that mean in 2026 that all ICE use cases are replaced? No, and with the aggressively anti science US administration it’s been set back by at least 8 years - the time it will take to rebuild momentum lost, research discarded, investment displaced. But there’s no reason beyond our lack of imagination to believe ICE will be on the road in 50 years in any use case.
I'm trying to disentangle that EVs wear out from both usage as well as calendar time, you say it's usage "primarily" but you're assuming a certain use case there and re-entangling them. With zero driving, top of the line battery management, and doing everything right it's something like 3% capacity loss per year in hot climates. My point is empirical - in a hot climate a light user will have to spend $10k to replace their battery in 15 years even if they rarely drive, while an ICE will not if the transmission and engine were designed well and maintained. Your point is theoretical and what use are theories that don't match observations? I don't dispute that EVs are simpler and more environmentally friendly but there are many cases (too hot climate, too cold climate, too little usage, need for range) where they are more expensive, more disposable and generally inferior.
Saying ICE will be off the road in 50 years assumes technological advances that have not yet arrived despite massive research investment and may require the government to force people to do it to their individual detriment. I am an environmentalist so I wouldn't even be mad in that scenario (the US government already significantly harms the individual in this industry by banning BYD anyway) but I also want to be clear eyed about it. What you say about easy recycling may be true but when it comes down to it we don't have cheap battery swaps yet despite your ideal theory and much industry effort. Don't get me wrong I hope for all our sake that happens, I'm just objecting to your initial comment having the vibe that EVs are a panacea and that saving on oil changes is superior on net - to me this reads as penny wise pound foolish as a single battery replacement is the same as 500 years of oil changes. There's a lot of nice ideas in this comment but it will take seeing for me to believe - specifically I need to see a 10 year old car for $5k that isn't coming up on an expensive new battery that costs more than the car is worth. People who shop for cars like this are a significant part of the market that is way underrepresented on HN.
I'm not anti EV. I would love to own an EV. I just can't justify the expense. In my case a big part of it is the cost of upgrading the electrical, otherwise I might be inclined to pay the premium.
However upgrading the electrical is a capital improvement process on your home isn’t it? That’s an investment that doesn’t deprecate like the car, no? It also increases the cost basis of the home which can have tax benefits in the long term.
This used to be true, but gas is $6.30/gallon in California now with no particular reason to think it is coming back down. I haven't actually re-done the numbers, but I have to imagine the ~40% increase in gas prices over the last year have significantly moved the needle in CA.
Until your current car dies, ges old or whatever happens, you decide you need a new one anyway. At that point the ROI is not the total cost of the car but the difference compared to your alternatives.
Yes, the difference. I'm not comparing keeping an ICE to purchasing a new EV. The premium for EVs is $5-10k or more relative to ICE models, and the $5-10k is being very charitable.
Non-peak electricity rate in some parts of California is $0.45/kWh or thereabouts, 2-3x what it is elsewhere in the country.
Wireguard with PQ won't be Wireguard, anymore. It'll just be a rehash of IKE+IPsec. What made Wireguard better was the very simple handshake and minimal state, but no PQ algorithms can support that simplicity because the keys are too large and/or not as simple to use as ECC.
Might as well switch to IPsec. Everything is already in place, including hardware acceleration. But most people won't, and we'll live in a world with duck-tape hacks built around a compromised Wireguard-ish layer.
IPSec suffers from the "it can do everything" syndrome.
Storytime: 15 years ago I co-founded a startup to build easy-to-use infrastructure management for AWS. At that time, it did not have cross-region VPC peering or routing, so you couldn't easily and safely have apps that communicate between regions.
So I started working on creating an overlay network. My idea was to use IPsec, it even has an RFC that documents its kernel interface. So that when a host wants to send a packet to the secure network, the kernel goes to my userspace daemon, that in turn goes to the central server that provides it the key for the given host pair.
And it turned out that the interface lacked a crucial part - on-demand key negotiation for incoming packets. It had this for _outgoing_ packets, but not incoming. The only sane way to make it work was to create a proactively updated database of all the hosts.
Well, I did that. It also did not work (tm). I found so many issues with broken MTU handling, broken NAT traversal, etc.
I eventually gave up on that idea and started working on a simple TUN/TAP-based overlay. I almost made everything work, but our startup got acquired by AWS, and this line of work was abandoned.
I don't think this really follows. Negotiation would be problematic, but you can just version the protocols and do WireGuard v1 and WireGuard v2, with v2 in a PQ configuration. As long as the configuration about which to use is static, you're not running up against the IPSEC problem.
I don't think there's anything necessarily complicated about MLKEM that would make this too difficult.
Switching to IPSEC loses you other WireGuard benefits; the wins don't end at "just one carefully curated set of cryptography primitives", but extend into things like DoS prevention and a design that admits to processing incoming frames without dynamic allocation.
(Tailscale cofounder) I’m a little more optimistic; wireguard was always going to need a v2 eventually, that’s just the nature of cryptography. It’ll always be simpler than IPsec as long as it avoids live negotiation (you need to specify your suite up front for each node you talk to; v1 and v2 are the only suites) and continues to go over UDP instead of IPsec’s “it’s a different transport protocol!” madness.
Things like Google’s PSP already achieve that while still being hardware acceleratable: https://github.com/google/psp
Post-quantum negotiation will kinda suck but you don’t have to sacrifice everything.
Considering how core Wireguard is to the whole Tailscale value proposition, are they funding the future of that V2 roadmap on the open source side? If the answer is "no", and because the security world isn't going to stay put (particularly with AI math advancements happening lately are accelerating medium term risk), then one has to assume Tailscale is working on it's own in-house "V2" equivalent protocol for post-quantum support to enable that vision? I doubt you're doing nothing.
IPsec is a terrible fit. Tailscale uses a control plane for peer & key distribution and renders almost all of the complexity in the IPsec protocol useless.
(Tailscale cofounder) Many years ago I made a VPN for experimental purposes that kept IPsec’s data plane but abandoned IKE. It’s actually a pretty good arrangement and might be applicable here.
My implementation relied on the extremely finicky Linux kernel IPsec and would never have worked in userspace macOS or windows. But yes, a Tailscale control plane with a per-node switchable data plane, one of which is IPsec with PQC, is a real option that would work.
By locking down the control plane it becomes incompatible with classic IPsec, but also avoids most of the security gotchas that plagued IPsec.
IIRC, the Navy stopped teaching officers traditional ship navigation methods for awhile, until the series of incredibly stupid incidents drew attention to the lack of basic navigation and piloting skills, then curriculums were partly reverted. Not sure if things have improved much; probably too early to tell.
I doubt officers or crew would ever have to resort to a sextant, but that's besides the point. It's the type of thing that's integral to learning navigation theory and building tacit knowledge that's fundamental to the job.
On modern systems, including Linux and OpenBSD, getentropy will return entropy seeded from not just rdrand/rdseed, but other entropy sources on the system, e.g. many Intel NICs, the AMD PSP, etc, and at least on Linux some well-vetted jitter hacks as a backstop for embedded devices without hardware RNGs. These sources are unavailable to user space. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by using getentropy as one source, among whatever else you're using, to seed your PRNG.
I'm not a kernel developer, but it seems to be one of those things that's great when you're adding support for a particular device on a particular platform, but becomes a giant PITA in the aggregate for the downstream ecosystem. It's a mismatch of incentives and preferences.
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