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alpaca128

8,699 karma · joined March 4, 2017

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alpaca128··on Ask HN: Would this eliminate bots for good?
One day the glove will have some connection problem and you won't be able to troubleshoot it because you can't use the internet.

This would always need some backup solution and now you're back on square one.

Edit: also you'd need accessibility, so a glove is out. And how do you handle game consoles? Voice assistants like Siri or Alexa?

alpaca128··on Please do not A/B test my workflow
> even early models interpreted the word "crashed" differently in "I crashed my car" and "I crashed my computer"

That has nothing to do with semantical understanding beyond word co-occurrence.

Those two phrases consistently appear in two completely different contexts with different meaning. That's how text embeddings can be created in an unsupervised way in the first place.

alpaca128··on Please do not A/B test my workflow
A/B test doesn't necessarily imply improvements for the user. It could be testing of future enshittification methods. See YouTube for an example.
alpaca128··on RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
Can't wait for people to buy two of these sets, take the real RAM sticks and refund the two fake ones in one package. There's no way the seller is going to manually check every returned stick.
alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> Macs overall are only 10% of Apple’s revenue

"Only" $43 billion in revenue is more than 95% of corporations achieved.

Apple is pretending to be eco-friendly and using that as excuse to ship fewer chargers, for example. If they can optimize the same Mac's packaging to use paper that's folded in all kinds of fancy ways, they can add a tiny bit of functionality to an existing port. You can't tell me Apple isn't able to care about small details, because they absolutely do when they want and not only when it's about revenue.

alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Using the mic requires the device to drop to a much older protocol for headsets designed for an old, obsolete Bluetooth generation.

Afaik that's one big reason why BT is such a mess. Many different use-cases are dictated by different protocols, many of which are outdated, and two paired devices can only use a protocol supported by both. So the headphone can't just reuse the same nice connection and add a mic, it has to start pretending like it's some Bluetooth 2.0 device from 2005 or something.

alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> you can connect to multiple devices simultaneously

I don't want to connect to multiple devices. I want to select one device and be 100% certain that it's switched to that device as a source. Even with 100% Apple devices this is not perfectly reliable with bluetooth.

Putting the cable in another audio jack makes it physically impossible that the audio comes from the wrong source or to the wrong output device. And it is a lot more convenient than untangling the mess once the bluetooth devices get confused about what to do and requiring you to manually disable bluetooth at some devices just so it gets the message.

alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> Here, you must use <NEW TECH> simply because we said so!

Because the integrated battery adds an expiration date to a device that could otherwise last decades if maintained properly.

Same as Apple tightly coupling the iMac screen with the Mac's software support cycle even though nothing would stop them from just adding, say, a USB-C port that can act as video input.

alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
Because that small audio jack converter cannot drive my wired headphones, so now it's not a small dongle but another smartphone-sized gadget with usually another rechargeable battery, and at that point I might as well use my laptop as portable music player.

And if you ever held e.g. Apple's adapter in your hand you'll know how incredibly flimsy its cable is, and how such adapters easily act as levers to mechanically strain the USB-C port. There's a reason headphone jacks are robust - they were actually designed for use with audio devices in mind.

alpaca128··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
> Using constrained mediums on purpose is often how the best artistic expression is achieved

Artistic expression is not technology. Vinyl is strictly inferior as technology. That doesn't imply that it cannot have any advantages at all, but that wasn't the point being made.

alpaca128··on Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe
You can not trade or sell the contents of lootboxes.
alpaca128··on Parallels confirms MacBook Neo can run Windows in a virtual machine
My Windows 7 laptop had 4GB RAM and I played Crysis 2 on it. 4GB was absolutely enough for a performant system.
alpaca128··on Hyperlinks in terminal emulators
> This feature doesn't introduce anything that's not already present while browsing the web. Therefore we believe this feature doesn't have security aspects to worry about.

Am I reading it wrong or is this seriously saying "this is secure because it's like web browsing"?

alpaca128··on Hyperlinks in terminal emulators
In a terminal I'd intuitively expect displayed text to not lie, especially if clicking it has consequences.

The use-cases provided seem to all just be more or less "it's convenient and looks good", which is the last thing I care about in a situation like that.

alpaca128··on Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting
> Why is it just "okay" that someone can call you up on the phone and convince you that your loved one is in mortal peril and you have to wire money to them right now?

It is not okay and is in fact a crime. Making it more illegal by forbidding access mainly hurts normal users of the network.

> Why is the party transiting that fraud or providing the wires connecting entire fraud offices to the global telephonic network not responsible for enabling that attack?

Same reason the electric grid is not responsible because it powered the phones, and water is not responsible for generating its electricity in a power plant. The phone network is a medium for communication, and so is the internet. And they can be abused just like air as a verbal communication medium between a scammer and a victim can.

> We do, in practice, impose all manner of limitation on free speech while still maintaining the sanctity of that right.

And we do impose legal limitations on online scams while still maintaining access to the internet. What more do you want?

alpaca128··on John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
> great artists steal.

That quote is about inspiration, not just using others' work or style.

T. S. Eliot's version from 1920 put it best imho:

> Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

alpaca128··on John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
It's not a requirement but it is so correlated that there's no need to react so strongly. I struggle to remember a single paid open source tool off the top of my head but could name dozens that you can just use for free.
alpaca128··on Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting
And a person using their pen can hack other people's brains, yet free speech is more important.

I think manufacturers being required to provide longer security update support against hacks etc would be more helpful than violating privacy and restricting access to "protect" people. The amazing protective walled garden of mobile devices has mostly caused people to even forget what filesystems are and normalized subscriptions for the most basic things. A license for internet access or whatever would be an incredibly bad idea for anyone but abusive governments and corporations.

alpaca128··on Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act
Luckily it was archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260313125244/https://old.reddi...
alpaca128··on Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting
Or they could all just agree to not cut prices so everyone profits more than with a race to the bottom. Not the first nor last time for this to happen.

Undercutting the competition pays off when they're much smaller and you can eliminate them that way and subsequently raise prices.

alpaca128··on Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting
> driving cars or flying airplanes started as just a hobby

Those still are hobbies, you just need a license for it now. Which makes sense since crashing an airplane is a bit more devastating than crashing a computer. But most hobbies don't need a license and aren't a danger to others.

alpaca128··on I mass-replaced FFmpeg's MJPEG decoder with Claude Code – 4K LOC, 8% the speed
> The interesting part isn't that it's slower — it's that

Could you please use your own words to write things?

alpaca128··on “This is not the computer for you”
In the middle of a gaming session one stops thinking about graphics once it's reached a certain level of fidelity, and that level is far below RTX. Not worth the money, especially today.
alpaca128··on “This is not the computer for you”
I'd say the low end is closer to a Raspberry Pi or perhaps a used old Thinkpad. A $600 machine with good single-core performance is only low end if you ignore everything outside the Apple product lines.

> trackpad is only incrementally better than what was available in Chromebooks and cheap PCs

Did you use a touchpad of an old cheap PC? Apple would not dare to use one comparable to that in their wildest nightmares.

alpaca128··on Shall I implement it? No
> it's aware that you could've just not responded

It's not aware of anything and doesn't know that a world outside the context window exists.

alpaca128··on Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them
Originally it was required to collect a signature from every tenant living in the building in order to be permitted to install a plug-in solar panel. As a result people living in rented apartments just did it without asking, but that meant more energy generation that the supplier doesn't know about which supposedly made it more difficult to manage the grid. So they decided to instead flip it around so anyone opposing installation of a panel has to submit a written statement.
alpaca128··on Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them
> So far, utilities have won over lawmakers in five states and convinced them to delay votes on plug-in solar bills

They'll change their mind once so many people use panels without permit that they cause difficulties with grid stability due to the unregistered solar panels making it less predictable. That was a reason they massively loosened the requirements where I live.

alpaca128··on Big data on the cheapest MacBook
I am talking from experience with an M1 & 8GB RAM. I had to restart either the browser or the YouTube browser processes at least once every couple days to stop the whole system from lagging.
alpaca128··on Big Data on the Cheapest MacBook
Imho 8GB RAM for productivity can quickly be restrictive. I used an M1 with 8GB and my current Macbook is M2 with 16GB, and to me the difference feels bigger than 2x. It seems not everyone here feels that way, but I'd say there's a reason Apple bumped the base models to 16 and makes that exclusive to non-Neo models.
alpaca128··on Big data on the cheapest MacBook
A couple YouTube tabs are enough if you leave them running for long enough. Just one YT browser process will easily take up 1-4GB sooner or later.
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