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blacksmith_tb

4,952 karma · joined December 28, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tobiasboyd; my proof: https://keybase.io/tobiasboyd/sigs/iX-9_2r3YbpyeqwkJt3XxYphjZ5_81_zDFvJHsH5niA ]
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blacksmith_tb··on Microsoft patents system to freeze games and inject ads during downtimes
Can we hope that they'll defend this patent, and no one else will be able to abuse their customers in the same way? (More likely the obvious prior art means it's dead in the water, but we can dream).
blacksmith_tb··on Sublime Text Build 4213
Different horses for different courses? I wouldn't open a 100MB logfile in VS Code, but ST or Zed handle that fine. I use all three, though my ST license was for a version or two back, so I have mostly switched to Zed for those giant-file-don't-need-any-bells-and-whistles tasks.
blacksmith_tb··on Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New
They played at my college freshman year (1989, cough, cough) and stayed in an empty room in my dorm, right next to mine. The show was great, though they were personally a little awkward (or just weren't sure what to make of a bunch of kids). Escape from Noise will always be my favorite as a result.
blacksmith_tb··on How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
I have had zero luck trying to get gMaps updated to remove an imaginary address they added for my garage. I might as well just put up extra address numbers and another mailbox.
blacksmith_tb··on Apple Unveils iPhone Duo
I gather that for many people, their smartphone is their only computing device. Doesn't have much appeal for me, but if that was the case, I could see that nudging people towards bigger devices, even if it makes them less practical as phones you carry around / try to grasp with one hand.
blacksmith_tb··on Unified Arabic
It's easy to see how it could simplify typesetting, I would think computers though have that mostly covered now. Making Arabic easier to read is interesting, it would help new learners potentially, but I am not surprised that existing readers and writers might not warm to the idea. I wonder if Simplified Mandarin isn't a little similar, mostly accepted, but with a little pushback.

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

blacksmith_tb··on 'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online
Or oleander [1], which people occasionally poison themselves with by burning its wood.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...

blacksmith_tb··on Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month
Now DO has to plow those loss-leading Marketing dollars into paying for memory I expect...
blacksmith_tb··on Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation
Except that the study is from France?
blacksmith_tb··on Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer
I have a fair number of badly designed / implemented usb-c devices with this problem (not all from fly-by-night companies, my Philips water flosser is a glaring example). I have a couple of small metal-enclosed male C to female C adapters (which don't have an exposed circuit board) that do the same thing as the Adafruit version.
blacksmith_tb··on Production Imminent: 40 Solar-Charging Aptera EVs Coming Soon
It also charges like any other EV, leve1 1 or 2 at home, and they say they intended to support faster DC charging in their FAQ[1]. I would be fairly skeptical of the 46mi / 74km a day from the built-in solar, that sounds optimistic given the small surface area.

For me the bigger problem is that it's classified as a motorcycle, which may mean wearing a helmet, and needing to have a class M license. Insurance may also be interesting. And of course sharing the road with giant heavy vehicles.

1: https://aptera.us/discovery-center/

blacksmith_tb··on The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You
The cynic in me says that the visible presence of people dying on the street is very much intended to send a message, "work hard or this will be your fate".
blacksmith_tb··on Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots
Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
blacksmith_tb··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
Which of course means they should use heat pumps, since the copper lines don't need nearly as much room (I suppose you'd still have to put a drywall wall in front of one brick wall potentially). Even just putting a bunch of mini-splits on the roof (instead of individual window AC units) would be an improvement, seems like.
blacksmith_tb··on An AL mother killed herself to fulfill a ChatGPT prophecy, lawsuit alleges
When AI sycophancy kills - "We ride not into darkness – but into the brilliant unknown."
blacksmith_tb··on Which streaming service was that on again?
But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.
blacksmith_tb··on Notable Knot Index (2016)
NASA uses knots instead of cable ties, for example on the Mars rovers [1] so they remain with us (I use a half dozen regularly myself)

1: https://www.planetary.org/articles/20120905-knots-on-mars

blacksmith_tb··on Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
Give it a generation, and readers will ask "what was a TV?" and/or "what is a channel?"

For us though, it's an evocative phrase - right place, right time.

blacksmith_tb··on Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel
That background is useful, though it seems more like "how" than "why" - my instinct is James C. Scott-style rebellious hinterlands[1] but I haven't gotten a sense if the bandits are the product of social dislocations, or just opportunists. My naive assumption would be all of the above, some conflicts along the edges of Sahel being ideological or about lack of resources or political participation, and others being just smash-and-grab (not that they're mutually exclusive).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...

blacksmith_tb··on President pardons 9 for Clean Air violations for 'fixing their car'
Ah, sorry to have imputed sarcasm then - and I agree that helping hundreds of monster-truck owners to roll coal is more serious and polluting than the individual yahoos doing it, so more deserving of doing time (eventually, maybe).
blacksmith_tb··on President pardons 9 for Clean Air violations for 'fixing their car'
Sarcasm, presumably, but unless they're caught rolling coal[1] again, they can't be re-arrested as they've been pardoned for the previous cases. It's a tacky crime, hardly the most serious, but that makes a presidential pardon seem especially absurd here.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

blacksmith_tb··on Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
Sagittarius A* is "merely" 26 thousand light years away (but we probably won't be imaging it, since there's a lot more in the way)
blacksmith_tb··on Africans Are Turning to Starlink
Africa isn't a country? There are 54 countries in Africa, and it has almost twice the area of all of North America, not just the USA [1]

1: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/continent-size-comparison/no...

blacksmith_tb··on Canyon HUD helmet for road riding
The idea would be more like the car, not the human behind the wheel, would realize that if it right-hooked me that would be bad (read insurance-increasing, citeable offense, etc.) and wait, where the driver would just keep flipping through their playlist and crush me.
blacksmith_tb··on Canyon HUD helmet for road riding
As someone who commutes in traffic daily, this is not what I need or want. First up, it looks heavy and badly-ventilated, and then there's the potential for distracting info blocking my view of the actual road in front of me. Even if it was really good info (which would take really good sensors, plus a lot of compute to cram onboard), I am skeptical it'd be better than, you know, paying attention to your surroundings. I like ADAS functionality in modern cars just fine, but it seems like a stretch to try and bring it to bikes. What we all could use is some kind of ad hoc network between all road users, so the car that was thinking about turning in front of me could ping my helmet / bike and understand that it should wait and turn behind me instead.
blacksmith_tb··on White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report
I have never heard that suggestion... if you can document it, the wiki entry would need an update[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring#History

blacksmith_tb··on Show HN: 3D print Z reinforcement via injected loops
Hmm, I wonder if a simpler room-temp alternative would be to fill a low-infill print with 2-part resin. In a way that would be a bit like casting, except you wouldn't ever remove "the mold".
blacksmith_tb··on USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits
I'm hoping we'll see most e-bikes at least use 240W usb-c pd charging (I figure I have about a decade until I will wish I had some assist and buy one, so probably by then, they'll have gotten there...)

I also have assorted products that won't charge c-to-c (some from respectable manufacturers even, like Philips), but I see you can get little adapters with 5.1K resistor you plug into said crappy devices to cover that, I will have to try some out.

blacksmith_tb··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
My personal fave RPi, the Zero W, is still $15 from Adafruit.
blacksmith_tb··on GoPro warned it may not survive
I bike commute with an old Hero 8 on my handlebars, and I never bother controlling or setting it up or anything: just power on, press record (which dismisses the nag dialog to connect it to your phone). That does mean the timestamps are always nonsense, but I am not too worried (I guess if I get run over again the lawyers can argue over if the one video on the card that shows me being run over is in fact from the day in question...)
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