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bigallen

68 karma · joined June 9, 2023

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bigallen··on What does this button do? – My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch
Maybe it’s a prepaid annual membership and the owner forgot/died/didn’t cancel?
bigallen··on Send someone you appreciate an official 'Continue and Persist' Letter
It’s a play on words. It helps to break it down into syllables. Each group answers one of the patient’s questions

Cont In ue Per sist

bigallen··on What P vs. NP is about
This is one of the many comments I see on HN where I genuinely have no idea whether it’s satire or just high-level technical talk. I assume the latter, but I don’t know enough to disprove the former
bigallen··on Reverse engineering and dismantling Kekz headphones
If someone wants to do the hardware audit for free, or in exchange for some kind of promotional exchange, is that a bad thing? I’d breakdown a lot of devices if I could get a duplicate one intact, for free
bigallen··on The ambition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
For what it’s worth, I really really enjoy flying over places I did/will travel to. Last year, I had a backpacking trip of Yosemite valley planned I was very nervous about. I flew the route a few times (in an F-22) and it calmed me down, knowing when I’ll be climbing, when I’ll have the best views, etc. Probably not a standard use, just my $0.02
bigallen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2024)
I absolutely love the landing page of careers.reef.pl/ . Maybe I'm just a noob, but I've never seen a website look like a terminal emulator before.
bigallen··on Nomad, communicate off-grid mesh, forward secrecy and extreme privacy
Physics aside, I think the FCC is very, very slowly considering removing the "no encryption" aspect of ham radio. The arguments against encryption seem to be weak, and revolve around "if we don't know what people are saying, we won't know if they're trying to use it for commercial purposes" which is just simply not true. Oh well, here's to hoping the FCC will move into this century!
bigallen··on We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad
"maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have."

But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do something about it.

"The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."

This is exactly correct

bigallen··on Nomad, communicate off-grid mesh, forward secrecy and extreme privacy
Are you in USA? I'm seeing words like "private" and "cryptographic" in the github. What's the interaction with ham radio rules about no encryption?
bigallen··on USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation
I think the point they’re trying to make is that determining who is a criminal and what kind of punishment they deserve is a very difficult task that depends largely on perspective.
bigallen··on Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay
Dissenting opinions are Not Tolerated
bigallen··on Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today
Yikes. Chill out
bigallen··on Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice
This is so interesting. I have learned more from a years’s use of chatGPT than from two decades of googling. Yeah, AI has drawbacks. But AI has never displayed an ad to me and only once displayed a cookie banner, and that’s worth quite a bit to me
bigallen··on Why Isn't Taxpayer-Funded U.S. Broadband Mapping Data Owned by the Public?
Why are you roping Elon into it? Doesn’t SpaceX and other satellite broadband kind of make this map irrelevant?
bigallen··on Final images of Ingenuity reveal an entire blade broke off the helicopter
It’s probably better to repurpose the energy of the kick than to push off what has been kicked up
bigallen··on Noisy brain may underlie some of autism's sensory features
Who benefits from an autism diagnosis, and what are those benefits?
bigallen··on Mourning Google
I will be devastated when (hopefully if!) this happens. If I use a standard search engine to look up a question, I typically get endless “okay” results with piles of moneygrabbing shit mixed in. If I ask chatGPT, I get a contextually relevant, straightforward answer that is probably as accurate as anything else I could reasonably find. It’s like a breath of fresh air
bigallen··on Tell HN: How an elderly couple I know had their computer 'stop working'
Wait, are you saying you just trade the wireless functionality from the built in Bluetooth to an external Bluetooth dongle?
bigallen··on Resetting the timer in my toothbrush
That is a great risk that I, a conscious, responsible human being with agency, should be in charge of managing. Not my fridge
bigallen··on Cummins pickup truck engines tricked air quality controls, feds say
Wouldn’t the state emissions system throw an error if a vehicle’s O2 sensor was reading 0/null?
bigallen··on Beeper – Moving Forward
> if the large tech behemoths were broken down into smaller focused companies, they would create much more value for everyone.

Is this a “true right now” statement or a “true now and always” statement? I have a tough time seeing smaller, focused companies coming up with the original iPhone. And is there a good way all those small companies decide how to integrated their offerings? Xkcd’s “now there are 14 industry standards” comic comes to mind…

bigallen··on FCC votes to ban termination fees for cable and satellite services
Respectfully, I suggest that part of the purpose of Government Communications is to be formal. That is, to be explicitly separate from the mundane day-to-day work. Governmental rulings, especially at the Federal level, affect a lot of people. I want them to take their jobs seriously, and one of the ways they can convey that they’re being serious is by their non-standard, formal language.
bigallen··on Things I learned from teaching
Trades still include hard work and rule following for a long time. And many trades have a culture of crusty old assholes being in charge and then turning the young entrants into the crusty old assholes. I think there will still be a large segment of the population that will see gang and criminal activities (fraternity, high-reward, party lifestyle) as a more compelling career choice
bigallen··on Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers
How do you integrate the 48V system with the existing 12V system when doing aftermarket/DIY work? Do you add a 48V inverter? A buck-boost DC-DC converter? between the battery (or main fuse block) and the 48V system?
bigallen··on Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android
This is the coolest thing I have seen all day! I’ve been using Jared [1] running on a Mac VM to send and receive iMessages from my locally hosted AI. If I could just use a python library that would make my life significantly easier

[1] https://github.com/ZekeSnider/Jared

bigallen··on Human mobility networks reveal increased segregation in large cities
Are you saying evolution prefers a social caste system? And that our destiny is to become more stratified?
bigallen··on Stuxnet Source Code
Seems like it was a joint effort between USA and Israel https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/confirmed-us-isr...
bigallen··on A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
> When you talk to a client, a colleague or a loved one we’re on the verge of you conversing with a model that mostly represents their image and voice (you hope)

Wow, this threw me for a loop. There’s not much difference between talking to a heavily filtered image of a person and texting with them. Both the image and the words are merely representations of the person. Even eye-to-skin perceiving someone is a representation of their “person” to a degree. The important part is that “how” and “how much” the representation differs from reality is known to the observer

bigallen··on ARRL hails FCC action to remove symbol rate restrictions
Doesn’t this kind of rub you the wrong way? The government telling you “hey, private citizen, we decided we are going to manage the EM spectrum, so you'd better follow our rules if you want to transmit anything.” I understand it’s to help coordinate everything and make the space better for the largest amount of people, but referring to transmitting as a privilege, not a right, seems asinine
bigallen··on Low current around roots boosts plant growth
Ha! What’s the terminal velocity of an apple? Sounds like weaponized fruit to me
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