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acolumb

85 karma · joined May 9, 2019

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acolumb··on Coding Is Not Solved
As someone who's technical but not enough to the point of writing code, this has been my experience writing software 100% with LLMs.
acolumb··on Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
nice to see an article from my industry! st2110 is such a complex standard which a lot of the hardware mentioned has been molded to deal with.
acolumb··on The digital pound: A new form of money for households and businesses?
It costs $5 to open a bank account at most US credit unions.
acolumb··on Open Golf: A cross-platform minigolf game written in C
Not even for the average HN user.
acolumb··on Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
This is because Apple has barely updated the iTunes/Music App codebase and featureset since iCloud came out in 2011.
acolumb··on Facebook Container for Firefox
The only asterisk to that statement would be if OP was a Mac user. Using Firefox for reddit and youtube nets me 4 hours of battery life on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro, while safari will get my 6.5-8 hours with the same usage.
acolumb··on HomePod Mini
Ah. Then there really isn't any completely voice activated solution on the market that can sort your needs. They're all so cloud-focused.
acolumb··on HomePod Mini
You can use HomePods as dedicated outputs for your Apple TV 4th gen or newer. Can also work alongside your amp.

Also, as stated in earlier comments, you’ll be able to use AirPlay to stream anything from your NAS via an iOS/Mac device.

The only feature you’ll lose is the ability to say “hey Siri, play song x”

AirPlay is lossless, too.

acolumb··on HomePod Mini
Considering that the HomePod non-mini doesn’t do any on-device language processing, I don’t see a need for that much power.
acolumb··on Don’t pay for 95% (2016)
I also think that leasing or buying used negates the car-rental argument. The costs of owning a used sedan are very low, and the on-demand convenience imho beats renting a car for $8/hr. Leasing enables one to have a new car without taking the depreciation hit.

Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates.

acolumb··on Police are requesting data from smart speakers
I bought my HomePod mainly for its value as a speaker first -- at $199 I don't think any Sonos or Harman competitor can produce such high-fidelity sound.

I also put more trust into Apple/Siri than I do with Alexa or Google. Their differential privacy and anonymized Siri requests have limited the speaker to few features which in my experience work well with the latest 13.x OS.

acolumb··on Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak
There is a team taking advantage (jailbreaking on iOS) of the security flaw in all A-series chips up to A11 in the hardware-level bootloader. The T2 in your 2018 or newer Mac is a variant of the A10.

The bootROM flaw allows for an exploit that can only be executed with physical access, another Mac and DFU mode. It's not persistent.

The main use of this exploit was to install unsigned code on iOS devices (jailbreaking.) The team is doing it for free, however many contributors take advantage of Apple's bug bounty program for income, therefore making newer devices more secure.

acolumb··on Wikipedia is getting a new look
Making UXs for desktop that share design elements with touchscreens will always be a mess.

It's my biggest fear for the future of macOS development given the recent announcement of Big Sur and ARM.

acolumb··on Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
I find that funny when Among Us (indie) and Fall Guys (also indie) are some of the highest-trending games at the moment.
acolumb··on Apple Ending "Fortnite Save the World" Updates for Mac
This has nothing to do with human rights violations. Two very resourceful companies are fighting over money.
acolumb··on Firefox 80
As long as VSTs are native-only (which based on the low-latency nature of audio processing would probably never see a cloud implementation,) web-based DAWs will never replace locally-run ones. Most music studios airgap their systems anyway.
acolumb··on Firefox 80
That's why I use high-quality firefox forks like Waterfox, which keeps the most popular Firefox features and security while removing things like phoning home or Pocket.
acolumb··on Apple announces Apple Music radio
With the advent of Tunein and similar services, our family has taken WXRT with us everywhere since moving out of Chicago.

We appreciate their culture and it gives us a sense of home no matter where we are.

acolumb··on How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming?
No, but having a desktop client fully integrated with the popular desktop environments is a big creature comfort.
acolumb··on A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES in January
I was in Seattle (where it supposedly entered the US) in mid-December and got pretty much the same symptoms as you, a week and a half after!

Everyone else on the trip was sick, too.

I've never had the flu.

acolumb··on Surface Go 2, Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds
I have a Book v1, and let me tell you, that thing is riddled with issues.

The hinge is the biggest thing. Because it connects over PCIe to the base, the Book is very sensitive after a decent amount of time. If I adjust the screen, the hinge disconnects and reconnects.

Also, if I unplug my headphones while it's sleeping in laptop mode (which I use 99% of the time), the audio cuts out and I have to restart the machine.

That's why I'm typing this on a Dell Latitude with the same 6300u that's inside the book and with a worse screen -- at least it generally works even if I had to re-uninstall Candy Crush...

acolumb··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I think we are jaded to the point that we forget that 2 cores and 4 threads was the norm just five years ago.
acolumb··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
I was in my photography class and my magsafe cable was tripped about four times in one day. Crazy.
acolumb··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
Ripping DVDs is something that takes very little time.

Open the drive, put DVD in, click "go" on HandBrake. Rinse and repeat.

You have all the time in the world to work while your machine is encoding them. And Plex makes the organization brainless.

acolumb··on New 13-inch MacBook Pro
My friend had a Blade back in 2017 -- had to replace the charger 5 (!) times until he downgraded to a chromebook.
acolumb··on Bye, Amazon
I disagree. Lower middle class people can open businesses propped up on loans, in which their drive to hit their margin is even higher.
acolumb··on The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
I use Nextcloud[1], a self-hosted, platform-agnostic file sharing / personal cloud app. It's FOSS and is super easy to set up through Docker.

Whatever file I put onto it is available on iOS, Android, a browser and WebDAV. It also supports camera upload.

Germany recently switched to Nextcloud[2] to share data between agencies and as a privacy-respecting alternative to G Suite / MS.

When I upload a .doc to the platform my iPhone can open it within the app. Same for PDFs.

[1] https://nextcloud.com

[2] https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-rel...

acolumb··on Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
I do think that full self-driving cars will exist (meaning that you can put in the GPS coordinates of a location and it will drive itself there.)

What won't happen is cars without the ability to have a human take over. There are too many fringe cases to allow cars without steering wheels.

acolumb··on Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
FWIW most of the comments are debating the ratio of working to slacking and salaries across geographical regions, not gender differences.
acolumb··on Intel Has PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs Ready, but Nothing to Plug Them Into
CES starts tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if they released a PCIe 4-ready chipset there.
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