devnulll

I base many of my purchases on how many hours per week I use them.

In terms of usage hours, my mobile phone comes out near the top. This makes the price almost immaterial.

The Assassin’s Creed Odyssey game, set in classical Greece, has a feature like this. It works really well as a teaching tool, and the immersion is excellent. Even today, the overall quality of the graphics and the game still holds up.

The “education mode” is officially called Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece. It removes all combat, enemies, and time pressure from the game and turns it into a large, interactive, open-air virtual museum.

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/discovery...

My kids have actually used this (without any prompting from me) in middle school history classes.

There’s also a Story Mode, which lets players build their own narratives and share them. It can be quite a lot of fun.

https://assassinscreed.ubisoft.com/story-creator-mode/en-us

Due to spending more time in a chair than being active I have a bit more interactions with Gravity than most. :) This has led to fairly significant sleep apnea, which is most easily tracked via monitoring of O2 saturation.

The Apple watch data isn't really useful for this at all as the frequency of monitoring is just too low. There are a bunch of ~$100 devices that you can get from Amazon that do a fantastic job monitoring O2 Sat for a night and have nice integrations into Apple/Android.

I do wish the CPAP's offered this type of integration - that is, they had a Bluetooth receiver to which I could pair an O2 sensor, and have the data coupled with my breathing analysis. This would be nice to have in OSCAR (the open-source analysis package) or even in Apple Health.

Instead, the manufactures like ResMed treat this data as a walled garden and try their hardest to require everything to go through a Sleep Doctor who pays them a non-trivial data subscription.

I'm with ya. I've owned 4 (Model S P100D, Model S Plaid, Model X, Model Y) over the past 10+ years. When the lease on my Plaid expired, I couldn't bring myself to get another one.

I took a long look at the Taycan as the used ones are "almost" sensibly priced but the first 2 generations are simply not great cars. The new 2025 (3rd Gen) is much nicer but the pricing is doesn't make sense.

Hopefully 2-3 years from now brings a much bigger diversity of performance electric cars. The BYD sports cars look very interesting.

The key engineering point here is about failure modes. If the failure mode is a brick, then the engineering and design team behind that switch has failed.

The failure mode for a smart switch needs to be a "classic" switch. This applies equally to garage door openers, showers, door locks, and the rest of the smart devices.

Note: I'll give a bit of a pass to smart window blinds as a selling point is lack of strings and cables and the therefore look cleaner.

This seems like the classic boom/bust cycle of capitalism and government. One upon a time, CA had things like free education through the UC and CSU system, and a tax rate that seemed similar to other states.

With the adoption of Prop 13 they eliminated much of the property tax revenue, and then ratcheted up the income and sales tax to pretty much max amounts while only collecting property tax from new(ish) home buyers. The Trump tax cuts then penalized upper-middle-class tech workers, all while continuing to reduce benefits. Utility deregulation has led to rolling blackouts during potential windstorms, and poor forest management has brought about some big fires.

Other states are also in on the zero-sum game that is bidding tax breaks to get companies to relocate.

This seems like a normal cycle of capitalism. If CA wants to change the game, they could consider options like the return of low-cost (free) schooling for CA residents, normalizing their property tax structures, or opening a single-payer healthcare system to CA residents.

These images all reenforce only one thing - that Reuben Wu is a fantastic photographer. For him the iPhone is just a tool, much as a knife for a chef or a keyboard & monitor for a developer.

You can - and this is almost as interesting - go down a waterslide from a 747 hanging from the ceiling!

Seems like a sunlight rich area such as the Nevada high desert is about as energy friendly as one could imagine. The main requirements seem to be water, sulfuric acid, and (of course) power.

> There's no one I can call to get help with my own yard because every landscaper knows nothing about ecology and uses loud and polluting gas-powered machinery.

For my own yard, in Washington State, I've interacted with a half dozen arborists and landscapers. Every one of them has been an expert in local species, has had concrete suggestions about what to plant and how to maintain, and is generally very excited to engage on the problem at the homeowner level.

There are any number family group chats that leave my sister out of things. She's the only Android user out of about 20 people. If she's on the threads then pictures, videos, and reactions are all broken. This is 100% deliberate by Apple, but the bias against Android users is real.

Qualified Immunity could be easily fixed by law. That congress has been unwilling to pass such a law tells you that both sides support.

I have 20k miles driving a Model S with a Yoke. While I'm not a huge fan, the yoke itself is only part of the problem. The bigger problems are:

1. The capacitive buttons for turn signals. They are dangerous. They require taking eyes from the road, offer no feedback, and are honestly dangerous.

2. The horn. It's not in the middle. It's off to the side as a no-feedback capacitive button. Every time I've needed to use the horn, I've been unable to find the button. I think recent S/X Updates have moved it back, but it's so dumb.

It's a feature set designed to look cool on Twitter. Not really for driving.

OKR's are great for one thing: They force writing, which in turn forces clarity of thought. It's the clarity and focus that's important.

> Ghana produces crude oil, but it has relied on imports for refined oil products since its only refinery shut down after an explosion in 2017

This seems like the core of the story. Nearly 6 years after that incident, Ghana has been unable to repair the factory and refine it's own oil. My assumption is the tale behind that is tragic and timeless corruption.

Great, next my car will be Tweeting all the real time telemetry (I405 North, by exit 18, lane #1, 81mph, throttle at 61%, 4 hands-off-steering-wheel events detected in the last hour, and 2 eye tracking sync failures due to checking out the sports car in lane #2".

Musk, being Musk, will find this amusing and start auto-tweeting "Kill" videos of Tesla's racing with other cars on the freeway."104 Z06 kills on the West Coast Today!".

The reasons are pretty clear: 1) Clearly better lenses for the first time in a generation. 2) Smaller, lighter camera's (to go with better and smaller/lighter glass), and 3) Your old glass works with an adapter, and 4) Focus is better than the DSLR World, even looking at a D6 or similar as the baseline.

"[...] In Mice."

I have high-end security camera's all over the exterior of my house. They all run a Linux 2.6 Kernel that is froom 2011. There are no firmware updates available from the manufacture, and even their new camera's run this kernel.

If I could find a brand that actually did regular maintenance and wasn't a walled garden (such as Ubiquity), I would replace all of my camera's.

Security comes from networking tricks (VLAN's, etc), which is far from ideal.

The wine... it's been deoxygenated. Once the glass is properly rimmed by a green sharpie, the tone it emits when stuck is exquisite. The aroma from the tincture of leaves swirls around the glass emitting a nutty flavor that perfectly compliments the 3rd harmonic.

If I were a large military that routinely sent pilots on missions around the world, research into drugs like this would be well funded.

As someone with serious sleep issues, I dream of the opposite - take a pill (or shot, or whatever) and fall into 8 hours of blissful REM sleep.

MSFT also allows arbitrary installation of software and development systems. They do force updates, scanning, and other common security best practices.

On the machines people use for Livesite support ("Secure Access Workstations") it's a different story. Those bad-boys are locked down from the supply chain through day-to-day use.

Why is crypto.com able to retrieve their funds in this case, but crypto hacks around the world result in customers being told there's no recourse? Doesn't appear crypto.com paid back the $34M that was stolen from customers in the hack a few months back.

The crypto crowd sure like regulations at the most unexpected times.

> Putting a motor on each wheel — or at least one on each axle — could translate into hair-raising EV driving performance.

I don't understand this. My Plaid Tesla has a motor on each of the rear axles, and it's direct coupled to the wheel. The already are doing torque vectoring.

Like all things in engineering, the trade-off's are critical. This article doesn't go at all into the pros/cons of the approach Tesla (and others) are doing as opposed to this approach.

As a general rule, if Tesla isn't doing it already I suspect it's either not economically feasible, difficult to manufacture, or otherwise has drawbacks they've judged signifigant.

... with that said, bring on the competition. The whole world wins with every improvement to transport and electrification!

Nobody who is at risk for this is doing iCloud backups. That's something you can already turn off.

> When I first started interviewing people I assumed everyone > wrote their resumes just like me: Honest, accurate, erring > on the side of humble, avoiding exaggeration of my abilities.

You may be missing the point of a resume.

There are really two goals: 1. Get you through the door, so you can get an Informational with the Hiring Manager. This means passing the Recruiter and (usually) the Hiring Manager's 30-60 second screen while looking at 50 candidates. Often an email or a Linked In Message is more effective than a CV at this.

2. Sufficiently and credibly explain your background to the interviewers who will be reading it 5 minutes before the interview.

The CV needs to present well and be credible.

> I do "readability" reviews at my company to make sure > people apply good coding standards and adhere to the > coding guidelines that we have.

Consider avoiding the entire formatting arguments as part of the code review process. There are excellent linters for every language that can run as part of the check-in process. GitHub + Actions can automate every aspect of this using all turkey stuff.

Automating where possible avoids all the arguments, actually enforces standards, and saves time for everyone. Using "Standard" linting rules (aka: The defaults) also help promote good practices for everyone.

I ran open-source teams for Microsoft for a number of years, all through GitHub. We had contribution policies, encouraged PRs, and would bend-over-backwards for external developers contributing code.

It's not an exaggeration, but I don't know how it could be better done.

> given an array of strings and a fixed width, can you format the text such that each line has exactly maxWidth characters and is fully justified

So many questions. What character encoding is the string? What is human language? Should I honor non-breaking spaces and other similar codepoints? Is the string full of 'simple' characters or 'complex' characters? Graphme's? Emoji's? What's the min and max limits on width? How long (or short) can each string me, and how large could the array be? On what system am I running, and does the array fit in memory or is it paged off a disk? Does the font we're using support all of the graphme's present in the string?

Amusingly, I had a variation of this problem as part of an Amazon L8 IC role interview, framed as a Prefix Tree. Solved the problem, didn't get the role. :(

I've used more Geometry & Trig working on my Model Train Set than I have as a professional software engineer. Figuring out table spacing, track radius, overhang from trains, is basic stuff.

I needed to buy a bunch of precisely cut curved wood for a 2nd level (laser cut wood! So Awesome!), and had to actually re-learn the basics of trig in order to provide the details to have everything made.