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Aqua_Geekon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

With cross-platform frameworks, you’re only paying once for tokens. As businesses’ AI costs continue to rise, that can be a huge decision factor.

Aqua_Geekon A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several big companies in tech is that they won’t significantly bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the minimum of the salary band for the new level.

In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.

Aqua_Geekon Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow

America has a long history of promoting “rugged individualism.” Community is hardly ever part of the conversation, unfortunately.

Aqua_Geekon Remembering the LAN (2020)

Warcraft 2 definitely used IPX for multiplayer. I remember struggling to get an IPX driver installed on our family computers so we could play.

Aqua_Geekon Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

I doubt much has changed. The Bay is lagging in terms of infrastructure — it’s hilariously sad.

My only options currently are Comcast or DSL. I’m anxiously waiting for Sonic to become available.

Aqua_Geekon Square Enix to record extraordinary loss of 22.1B yen

Block (fka Square) pays them for the redirect, IIRC.

Aqua_Geekon MM1: Methods, Analysis and Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training

Honest question: what do you (in the general sense, not specifically asking the parent) use Siri for? I think my main (only?) use case is setting a timer.

Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.

Aqua_Geekon FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor

The sensor typically goes on the back of your upper arm (your tricep). You can accidentally bump into things with it, but it was infrequent enough that it didn’t bother me.

The needle is only used in the application of the sensor. It’s spring-loaded and retracts after the sensor is attached. I hate needles, but I found that the tape on the sensor provided enough stimuli to overwhelm my brain and not really feel the needle when it went in.

Aqua_Geekon I bought the Apple Vision Pro and even though the tech is amazing I returned it

I imagine a not-insignificant number of those who preordered will return it. Anecdotally, everyone I know who bought one plans on doing just that. Sales numbers have been higher than expected, but I do wonder where they net out after returns.

Aqua_Geekon Nano-scale inks could lighten airliners by hundreds of kilograms

Do airlines that have a “bare metal” livery still coat the planes with something, then? (I assume there’s a clear coat.) Does that weigh less than white paint?

Aqua_Geekon Rethinking serverless with FLAME

Yep. Absolutely this. I get the frustration of people building fragile junk and bouncing before the house of cards falls, but I wouldn’t hold switching jobs every couple of years against a candidate when a significant difference in salary is potentially on the table. A 20% raise, compounded over a couple of switches, is massive.

I got way more by switching jobs (after 4 years) than I was ever going to get by staying.

Aqua_Geekon Out-braking the ABS myth [video]

> What's interesting to me is that in emergencies, apparently many people don't brake hard enough.

I did the Mini Stunt Driving Course the other week in Palm Springs. One of the first things they cover is emergency braking. Even in that situation — not an emergency; the whole point is to stop the car as fast as possible — I had trouble overcoming the urge to NOT brake as hard as I could. It took a few runs for me to get myself to stand on the brakes properly.

Aqua_Geekon Fake recruiter lured aerospace employee with trojanized coding challenge

Whenever I grade take-home assignments, the first thing I do is open the Xcode project file in vim and look for shady stuff. Admittedly, I don’t think most of my colleagues do the same due diligence.

Aqua_Geekon Marvel Visual Effects Workers Vote to Unionize

There are several unions in film/TV. Writers are usually part of the WGA. Directors have their own, as do editors, producers, cinematographers, etc.

Aqua_Geekon 25 Gbit/s at home, part 1

What Ubiquiti equipment are you using? Doesn’t their router top out at 3.5Gbps?

Aqua_Geekon A deep dive into Single Pair Ethernet

What kind of fiber? Did you run it in conduit? If so, what kind?

I’m about to start construction on my own outbuilding office and want to not screw this up.

Aqua_Geekon Ask HN: Resources to Learn macOS Development?

I would second this recommendation. This book is how I originally learned Objective-C and macOS development 20 years ago. It walks you through the fundamentals and provides a very good foundation for digesting the (archived) documentation from Apple.

Aqua_Geekon The curse of the corporate headshot

Remember when Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, and Dave Franco took some stock business photos to promote their movie? I think Uber even used some of those to promote Uber for Business when that first launched.

Aqua_Geekon Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

Good point. I forgot about that.

Aqua_Geekon Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

That’s a LONG time (in total) for employees to wait for liquidity. Yes, they likely provided some opportunities for early employees to liquidate some of their holdings, but it’s got to suck to sit on that much funny money for so long.

Aqua_Geekon Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

They’re options that are set to expire, not RSUs. Yes, the employees could exercise them to prevent them from expiring, but then Uncle Sam comes to collect his dues. And that’s where illiquidity burns you.

Aqua_Geekon Ask HN: Why can't I buy a phone charger with a 2-prong wall plug?

This was a huge problem with Apple’s laptop chargers several years ago. They would fray at the junction between the power adapter and the cable, resulting in another $129 out of your pocket and more e-waste. Granted, the power brick for a phone is much smaller, but the potential problem is the same.

Aqua_Geekon Remind HN: Heroku will delete all free dbs and shut down all free dynos Monday

I’ve just been going through and cloning the repos via their command line tool:

    heroku git:clone --a <app name>

If you have really old apps (e.g. on the bamboo stack or older), there is a plug-in that allows you to download the slug (as Git doesn’t work with those old stacks).

Aqua_Geekon A few tech startup CEOs in my country had started saying Elon's methods are fine

And for what benefit? A higher salary? Stock options in case Twitter somehow survives and goes public again?

Aqua_Geekon Meta Earning Results Q3 2022 [pdf]

Stock is getting hammered after-hours. Down 11% currently.

Aqua_Geekon Elixir – Phoenix LiveView Native

There’s the ElixirConf 2022 chat app: https://github.com/liveviewnative/elixirconf_chat

Aqua_Geekon Elixir Livebook now as a desktop app

You can have a look at the code: https://GitHub.com/livebook-dev/livebook/tree/main/app_bundl...

Aqua_Geekon Apple's feedback mechanism is broken

My laptop somehow overwrote its primary disk encryption keys (i.e. It basically crypto-shredded all my data). I filed an issue with Apple and was met with radio silence for a year. The response that came back was effectively, “do you still have that device, and is it still broken?”

Aqua_Geekon Electronic Catan LCD Tiles

SparkFun has some great tutorials to get you started. Read through their intro to embedded electronics: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/category/1