adolph

> Flickr was the coolest thing Yahoo had

From my point of view Yahoo destroyed Flickr. I was a happy user for many years and lost access to my photos due to authentication changes. At least Google had the decency to just shut down Reader as opposed to Yahoo's enshittification of a product that sparked joy.

As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind.

The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?"

I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?

I suppose what is "reasonable" might be different for different people. I already had pentalob bits although a fresh spudger is always welcome. But these are not exotic tools. The "glue" under the battery was a bit like "command strips" commonly used to hang things from walls.

It is interesting to think about the range of physical tool usage that is within a reasonable expectation. Is owning and being able to operate an implement to open and replace a battery in a simple watch like the Casio F91W reasonable?

I was curious if a newly naturalized citizen gets a new number when transferring from Individual Taxpayer Identification Number to a Social Security Number–apparently yes, that is the case, and it makes taxes on your year of naturalization more exciting.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/additional-itin-information

> The live update would add an extra element of terror to the system, of course.

Yes, I think I didn't do a good job of placing the question as from the perspective of someone who is not aware of the silos and firewalls within what might otherwise appear to be a monolithic government.

The terror to the system is from the perspective of having lived within the system and not understanding how to operate in the world outside of it. It is a classic sci-fi trope; Brazil and The Minority Report come to mind. It is also a feature of classical Athens where ostracism was a particularly severe punishment.

> the lobbyists managed to get a loophole in the law - exempting Apple & Co

But Apple batteries are already user replaceable? I've replaced my own and batteries come with kits that have all the tools and disposable glue strips and seals.

An interesting aspect to changes like this is that they demonstrate the silos and fissures between various government functions. There isn't already a standard intra-government API that for an identify returns the relationship person has to the US government (i.e. citizen, legal resident, visa like student or H1B?

I'm consistently impressed by Seeed Studio's support for various levels of DIY in their products. I realize that many of the products are not totally original, but what I find interesting and original about the company is their interest in diy-accessibility and partnering with companies like Trmnl [0]. It's somewhere in between Raspberry Co, Adafruit, Pimoroni, and the like.

0. https://www.hackster.io/news/seeed-partners-with-trmnl-s-rya...

just slap some tpms sensors inside the bags and bobs your uncle

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicAdvice/comments/11iau0t/tpm...

> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).

Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:

  The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots 
  crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned 
  into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons 
  and presidents.

https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...

> weight distribuiton. The truck has nothing for this

Could this be inferred from the air suspension controls?

https://www.airliftcompany.com/workshop/finding-correct-air-...

> A small number of jobs for tradesmen (electricians, plumbers, etc.).

Its no car dealership but probably a reliable source of work-orders. Seems like a "gigascale" datacenter would be a large job for a tradesman to be a subcontractor within and afterward its scale means continuous upgrades/maintenance.

Is there any literature of ongoing economic impact of similar facilities?

> If I want to find duplicates, it will be impossible if the filename changes.

Depends on what is meant by a "duplicate." It would be a good idea to get a checksum of the file, which can detect exact data duplicates, but not something where metadata is removed or if the image was rescaled. Perceptual hashing is more expensive but is better distinguish matches between rescaled or cropped images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing

The article is about browsers filtering EXIF metadata from image uploads and not about advising users when observable sun angle or other distinctive features may disclose the photograph's location.

  Suncalc models the relationship between the date, time of day, the geographic 
  location of a place, and the position of the sun in the sky, together with 
  the length & direction of the shadows it casts. [0]

0. https://bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/more/all-tools/suncalc

Was it the protective packaging of Dodge sports cars that people thought looked cool and thus retained?

https://www.hellcat.org/threads/this-is-what-happens-when-th...

Seems like a reasonable temporary measure for a state with poor infrastructure.

  ...temporarily blocking permits for any new data center requiring more than 20 
  megawatts. The measure runs until November 2027, buying time for a new Data 
  Center Coordination Council to study how these facilities strain Maine’s 
  aging electrical grid.

It is a surprise to me that anyone summiting has access to insurance at all. I suppose that if the fraud rate is as low as 3.5% and insurance is contracted specifically for the trip, then a rational payor will raise rates and carry on.

On the whole, there is finite capacity of certain assets, like helicopters. If the emergency carrying capacity is X and true emergencies are .6 X then there is spoiled capacity of .4 X, in which fraudulent emergencies are placed, keeping everyone in the system whole so that when true emergencies approach .9 X there is no need for fraud. This follows the "optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" and eliminating this fraud might remove the margin needed for the system to exist at all.

  An anecdote tells of the British government's bounty on dead Indian cobras 
  giving locals the perverse incentive to start breeding the snakes, to be able 
  to kill more of them and collect more bounty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I wonder how this relates to Linaro, a joint venture of ARM, IBM, and others started in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linaro

> Without that impact, it is assumed that almost no platinum-group metals and gold would have remained in the crust.

Wow, its wild to think of a counterfactual world without gold. Would those metals have emerged to the crust from volcanism or is that material not sourced deeply enough?

And a landing! S Padre is great for kids and rockets.

For the more adventurous and/or bilingual the beaches on the Mexican side seem to have awesome views too.

The video [0] that has a transcript provides a little more context.

A. Andreessen, I'd bet, enjoys a degree of controversy and nothing gets people activated so much as "being wrong on the Internet." [1]

B. In context, Andreessen's critique of "introspection" has to do with a particular variety, "I've just I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's it's just it's a real problem and it's it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home." Probably a better term for Andreessen to use is "rumination." But, given A., that would be less controversial.

C. More broadly, there is some criticism of how "know thyself" is interpreted today and perhaps in TFA, which is less than developed. In the Meaning Crisis lecture series Vervaeke [2] notes:

  That's not what "Know thyself" means. It doesn't mean that kind of stroking 
  of your autobiographical ego. Know thyself is much more a kind of direct 
  participatory knowing. It means understanding how you operate. It's not - if 
  I were to use a literary analogy - it's not like your autobiography, it's 
  more like your owner's manual. 

D. Criticism of Andreessen seems to have the generic perspective of public health in mind rather than the perspective of "I'm happy that works for you." Consider for a moment how hard it is for a person to realize that the minds of other people are drastically different from one's own, such as having an "inner monologue" or not [3] and how “Introspection reveals that one is frequently conscious of some form of inner speech, which may appear either in a condensed or expanded form.” [4] The inner experience of Andreessen may be very different from that of his critics.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA

1. https://xkcd.com/386/

2. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-4-socrates-and-the-ques...

3. https://ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com/2020/01/28/today-i-l...

4. https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt-heavey-2018.pdf

There is a nice Feynman children's lecture about this [0] from the series "Fun to Imagine" [1]

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITpDrdtGAmo

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0198zc1

This is a great read and unironically I want to subscribe to the substack, which is titled "Mars for the Rest of Us." The author is that Ceglowski of Pinboard and occasional space essays at idlewords.com, both of which make this self-recommending for me at least.

It's a cliche that space exploration creates discoveries that improve life back here on Earth. In the topics discussed in this essay, water reclamation and waste recycling especially, the future solutions developed I think will lead to improvements for terrestrial living.

Much of the discussion here is local versus remote. I like seeing things as "and" and "or." There will be small things I don't want to burn my Claude tokens on and other things that I want to access larger compute resources. And along the way checking results from both to understand comparative advantage on an ongoing basis.

> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java

Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C, transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came to Apple with the Next acquisition.

I don't get this pov, maybe b/c I'm not a heavy Claude Code user, just a dabbler. Any LLM tool that can selectively use part of a code base as part of the input prompt will be useful as an augmentation tool.

Note the word "any." Like cloud services there will be unique aspects of a tool, but just like cloud svc there is a shared basic value proposition allows for migration from one to another and competition among them. If Gemini or OpenAI or Ollama running locally becomes a better choice, I'll switch without a care.

Subscription sprawl is likely the more pressing issue (just remembered I should stop my GH CoPilot subscription since switching to Claude).

> The USA is either going for force a regime change or it's going to ruin Iran. Where will China get oil from then?

A positive story for China might be: a.) building port complexes and other industrial facilities is something China export as construction, engineering and financial services; b.) oil is a global commodity and a rising price everywhere doesn't create a relative disadvantage.

OpenWRT is great if it fits your use case. If one has reason to stray from the happy path a disadvantage is that the OpenWRT uses a single binary like Busybox and doesn't use glibc. This is great for embedded/low power machines like the OG WRT54G, but not as optimal for when you have an entire random PC. I don't recall the exact things I was looking for but I moved on to pfSense and didn't look back.

That is really neat:

  “By irradiating the paper with a CO laser, we create refusible, sugar-like 
  reaction products that we use instead of the synthetic materials or adhesives 
  that would otherwise be required to seal the paper by the heat sealing 
  process. In this way, we are essentially producing our own adhesive"