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TheJoeMan

1,774 karma · joined June 8, 2020

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TheJoeMan··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
The Red Delicious has been optimized for the growers, packers, and grocery stores, and not the consumer. The priorities are thick skin so they can be roughly handled, and bright red because they believed that's what would make people purchase them. "Cosmic Crisp" is their answer to the Honeycrisp, by trying to tweak the Red Delicious instead of abandoning it. I see it as the equivalent of "a faster horse" dilemma.
TheJoeMan··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
From a layman perspective, American fruit growers refused to change with the times. How long are they still trying to make the “Red Delicious” apple work? Another ex-major packer I know of made the peach fruit cups, which people have been catching on are just filled with corn syrup. But these have been long term purchasing trends, yet the growers seemed blindsided by the packers ceasing operations.
TheJoeMan··on I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB
Wow that’s fascinating thanks for sharing.
TheJoeMan··on I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB
In the great POSIX, Windows vs. Apple filesystems debate, and iPad "what is a file", the great AI Overlords propose: "what if the filesystem was soup?". Manufacturer instructions, public data, and user's instructions and data, all sort of swimming together.

Could also phrase it "What if the filesystem was SOUP?"

TheJoeMan··on Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes
Apple’s Developer Documentation is historically pretty terrible. So I’d be curious to see if they stepped it up for the agent instructions for the new API’s.
TheJoeMan··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
Unfortunately, during that time is when they screwed around with the gold confiscations. So the best option would have been to illegally hoard gold until they struck the statute down?
TheJoeMan··on Will there be a 7G?
My pessimistic take is it’s being optimized for the “numbers” users benchmark with. The 5G repeater towers that display on your phone as full-bars but the tower itself is constrained, to juicing the speedtests. Apple even changed how the RSSI translates to the bars. There are engineers doing great work, and the marketing teams muddle the waters (like ATT’s “5Ge”).
TheJoeMan··on Fuck Off as a Service (Foaas)
https://foaas.io/dalton/foaas/HN
TheJoeMan··on Launch HN: Nori Robotics (YC S26) – A low-cost humanoid robot for development
Is there a term for the design style of the plastic panels? I've been seeing it more often, for instance the robot wheeled base looks like an Amazon Delivery Van. Hidden screws, 45degree angles but with soft corner bends.
TheJoeMan··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
I took a peek into APFS a bit ago [1] because I (stupidly) yanked a usb SSD before it was unmounted and corrupted it. Reading the documentation, it seems to have many "cool" features which just aren't fully exposed/utilized in the OS, and there is a lack of API tooling.

For example: it is copy-on-write, and my corruption happened in the superblock checkpoint. There is no built-in command in Disk Utility to "mount" an older checkpoint (and accepting a small amount of dataloss). Also the "First Aid" command allegedly runs volume repair top-down when it is recommended to do it inside-out.

[1] https://www.ntfs.com/apfs-structure.htm

TheJoeMan··on Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar (2007)
In the world of 2TB SSD’s, it does seem silly to risk inadvertently deleting an important ~2kb word document.
TheJoeMan··on Google Aims to Boost AI with Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data
Ironically, these are a distillation of the collective intelligence and efforts of a business that has ultimately failed. Would you hire the previous COO of Spirit? Or the CTO? Instead you’ll have an agent that is influenced by the way this company did things, architecture and business decisions. Not trying to be negative, just makes for an interesting thought.
TheJoeMan··on The continuing "Q collar" scandal
“You can think of Q collar as a baby version of health scams promoted by wealthy and powerful medical-adjacent celebrities such as Dr. Oz, Andrew Huberman, and RFK Jr.”

This sentence seems unnecessary and perhaps inflammatory, I think it detracts from the article.

TheJoeMan··on Federal vendor with $50M in contracts leaves portal broken for a month
The author was involved and knowledgeable in the FOIA processes that existed, and had an understanding of navigating a quagmire of redundant government employees. A cost-reducing restructuring has been going on that seems to funnel all requests to a single place, the "Federal FOIA Portal". Once they submitted to the portal, their request was confirmed as entered. They also had an issue with the new portal, submitted the error, and it was escalated and fixed.

This article could just as well been written as "New FOIA Portal: Streamlined, but Still a Few Bumps".

TheJoeMan··on The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses
"The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure as many patients as possible" seems also like an extreme? They are businesses, after all, and there will be cases that would be unreasonable to pursue?
TheJoeMan··on Extreme 220GHz+Broadband Silicon Capacitor X2SC 0201M 22nF BV11
Did they build 5,000 airport scanners at once? MOQ is brutal!
TheJoeMan··on About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6
What I mean is that for “honest” software, built-in to the OS or otherwise, the programmer finds a situation where they take some user-supplied input and concatenate that into a path, and call something like OS.read(). If they want to prevent the user from causing havoc, they now find themselves dealing with path validation in their software instead of calling OS.safeOpen(), which would be a reduced subset of allowed chars?
TheJoeMan··on About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6
This may be a naive take, so if anyone has insight please feel free to share, but across Windows, Mac, and Linux OS's I see many cases of path parsing vulnerabilities resulting in sandbox escapes, code execution, or data access issues. When presenting the user with a file picker or command-line input, is it really needed that the software can handle the full POSIX spec?

I do not see a "typical" user needing to access a path with say a network storage but multiple ../.. and hard and soft symlinks simultaneously. I think "be liberal in what you accept" might need to be revisited for path parsing with some sort of OS-wide single-implementation as an optional feature.

TheJoeMan··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
If you look at these US high-tech consumer products, many companies started out much “simpler”. GoPro was a disposable film camera and a wrist-strap, and iteratively got to where it is today. The iPod came out much before the iPhone. As you say, the R&D is a hard sell when you have to go from 0 product to a fully featured state-of-the-art. Somehow, these Chinese companies can spend years copying and then once locked in go on a new-features blitz.
TheJoeMan··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
I never understood if I was supposed to turn it completely off on the ski lifts or leave it in “sleep” for best battery life, and like you say the battery in the cold was just disappointing. Some irony though with another HN commenter having an overheating issue.
TheJoeMan··on Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
As a counterpoint, why should a “metal finishing technique” be proprietary? Lying to the vendor that Apple said it’s ok is obviously wrong, but an employee taking that knowledge in their head doesn’t seem wrong to me. We have moved past the age of indentured apprentices and the freemasons.
TheJoeMan··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
I'm not quite understanding, sorry if what I said was misconstrued. You don't think the engineering team considered reflectivity from a moral perspective? I am saying there needs to be some standards set out so that future engineers at unscrupulous companies have something to point at as a requirement.
TheJoeMan··on US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
If I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line".

A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.

TheJoeMan··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
At present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.
TheJoeMan··on Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU
I also am curious about that statement. Seems something got mixed up between the quantity of the full run and the quantity for the probe.
TheJoeMan··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.
TheJoeMan··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
The ridiculous thing about profit margin, is that if RAM increases Apple's cost by $100, they have to increase the selling price by a multiple of that to maintain the same %. Same exact factory line, labor cost, shipping cost, but have to 1.5x everything at the shrine of the bean counters.
TheJoeMan··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.
TheJoeMan··on Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.

Perhaps a bad analogy, but it seems these battery systems attempt to stabilize by "pushing", whereas spinning mass can also work through "dragging" the phase. So eventually, you will have just a few rotating masses setting the freq and phase, with more and more systems tracking that and pushing, which seems like a recipe for chaotic equilibrium.

TheJoeMan··on Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
I’m more confused what they’re going to do with all the infra? What could all those GPU’s be doing? Just inference?
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