diggan

Yes, and I enjoying swimming in the ocean for example. But I don't like swimming just for the sake of "it's good for you", don't know why and doesn't really matter.

Point is that some people know what's good for you, but cannot force them to do it just because it's good, we need something more :) Just because something feels like a "chore" doesn't mean you should avoid it.

2mm QR codes according to the article:

> The protocol used at Fukushima is automated. Each bee is equipped with a 2-mm-wide QR Code which is read by a camera, activating the opening of the maze.

But yeah, doesn't look like a QR code at all, are there possibly different variations of QR codes? Haven't heard about that myself.

During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.

Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.

This is amazing, seems really detailed and leveraging official sources too, nice job!

Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona:

There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat

I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)

Therapy is a great way of doing that. Even if you just see it as another person to "bounce ideas against", it can help you zoom out a bit without feeling like you completely abandon the introspection hole for "living in the moment" or whatever. Takes some time to find the right therapist, but once you find the right person it feels worth it.

Some people want the benefit of an activity, but they don't like the activity itself, like me and physical workouts for the purpose of a physical workouts. Finding ways of making activities "more fun" so those people don't find it to be so much of a chore sounds like a neat contribution.

Thanks a bunch for describing it in more detail, actually very helpful!

And no worries, nothing discouraging, discussing the idea with others no matter their reaction tends to do the opposite for me, so thanks again for taking the time :)

Another anecdote: Started using a password manager in 2017 (8 years) and today I have 520 credentials, using it for everything from my normal accounts to environment variables, configuration and a bunch of other stuff. Only thing I handle myself outside of it is ssh and GPG keys.

Sounded nice, but I'm not sure what this actually adds. I'm currently using 1Password for doing "environments", but it's all using the existing `op` CLI.

So adding a new collaborator to the project would involve adding them to the vault, then there is a shell script in the project that uses the CLI to write a new `.env` depending on the values from `op`.

Seems like this new environment stuff wouldn't add anything compared to such setup, at least today, is that fair? Seems to be even more manual and require copy-pasting, unless I misunderstand what the feature actually is.

Which ones are the best for the anglophone world currently? I'm struggling to find traditional forums that are still "alive", general enough to cover a broad spectrum and well-moderated to remove all noise.

I was thinking more of the physical controls rather than the implementation details :) Most of the reasons I use hardware rather than software boils down to "feels great" and "is more fun" basically, because of the physical controls.

The precise and exact sound is less interesting, how you're able to conjure it at just the right moment and with precise controls tend to be more interesting for me personally.

Same thing is widespread on reddit, usually for pushing specific products/projects/organizations into the limelight. Landing on the frontpage of reddit/HN drives huge amount of traffic, so obviously "optimizers" learned this, and started priming accounts for future vote-rings and what not, but they need to mix in real-looking content between the pushes so the accounts don't get banned.

Paradoxical title, once you've read it fully, it becomes false.

Was kind of hoping it'd take people longer time to notice where the idea came from :) But also kind of cheating for you to bring it up, but understand it's hard to resist.

> The encoder issue was fixed with a firmware update,

No joke? I was sure it was a hardware issue, but guess I should give that a look, still have my Blofeld around here somewhere, thanks for sharing the "news" :)

> love the detentless encoders

I have no issues with them being detentless, makes a lot of sense. What I do have issues with, is using the smoothest material they could find for the knobs instead of something you can "grip", sometimes it just slipped between my fingers when trying to turn them, unless I make my fingers slightly humid first.

What's the point of giving constructive feedback when you can question people's motivation instead?

Do you think that making a VST is a realistic alternative to the linked instruments in the submission article? I'm guessing they're building hardware because they want something physical, it's pretty self-evident isn't it?

> Is Reddit not like a forum? What about HN?

Biggest difference for me betweeen HN/reddit and the forums of yore is how the ranking/sorting is done. On HN/reddit, "most popular" opinion or "best sounding" post usually "wins" and gets most discussed, as it's at the top of the page.

Meanwhile, forums doesn't re-order things like that (didn't used to at least), you made a post and it ended up after the message posted before you, and before messages posted after. Everyone's view and message was equal, so pile-ons or hive-mind "this is the right way of thinking" seemed less common.

Just because the forums you hanged around were like that, doesn't mean every forum was like that. Probably the web forum I hanged around the most on (which is where my HN username originally comes from) has strict rules about each individual post's quality (although enforced bit unevenly), and their contribution to the discussions, in one way or another. Make enough off-topic/shit posts and eventually you'll get banned because of it. The users with a lot of posts usually made well-argued posts.

Each started thread also needed a "basis for discussion" to remain open, and necrobumping was encouraged. The forum still has decade old threads actively being discussed in.

AFAIK, it's still the largest forum in the Nordics, although the moderation team (and voluntary) seem to unfortunately be shrinking rather than increasing, and the forum isn't without its controversies.

> Conversely, the likelihood of making it big just by making some good damn music was never lower than it is now.

Is that statement backed by any facts? Otherwise it sounds like a soundbite that sounds good, but I'm not sure how true it is. Maybe what "making it big" has changed more compared to how many people make their living making music, which for me would be enough to be considered "making it big".

> My Blofeld has taken far more abuse than any laptop or tablet will handle and still going strong 15 years later; three laptops and two tablets later.

On the other hand, my Blofeld had wonky unresponsive knobs after just a couple of months, not that they were very good at the first place, who thought having knobs with no tactile feeling of grip was good idea?!

Personally the biggest win for actual hardware is that it's just more fun to play and use. I've tried various music apps for mobile/tablets and while it's fun for some minutes, that's pretty much it. But then I feel the same with DAWs, it's just not as fun as playing with an hardware drum machine + synth + sampler all hooked together.

> One can hardly control one coding agent for correctness

Why not? I'm assuming we're not talking about "vibe coding" as it's not a serious workflow, it was suggested as a joke basically, and we're talking about working together with LLMs. Why would correctness be any harder to achieve than programming without them?

> In the discourse about social media, the term "algorithm" is exclusively used to refer to purposefully-maligned algorithms engineered to addict and abuse people.

But I feel like it misses the point. What about a service where you can design and use your own "algorithms", and it's built into the platform?

Such a platform would have thousands of algorithms, but none of them designed for chasing money or engagement, just different preferences. But Mastodon could still claim "We don't use The Algorithm and is therefore better than other places" while a platform with custom user-owned algorithms could get the best of both worlds.

> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.

We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.

> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature

Exactly how I feel about AI art today, and doesn't make me super hopeful for the future. Hopefully there been cases where that hasn't been true?

But then I remember seeing datamoshing as weird the first times I saw it used as a transition in the "Off the Air" TV series/anthology, nowadays I think it makes me fuzzy and almost nostalgic instead?

> You don’t need to be 18 to have a bank account, even in the UK (which just introduced age verification laws).

Yeah, I had one of those myself when I was under 18 too, I think it was called Maestro or something similar. However, it didn't work like a normal credit card (which I think only 18+ can have), platforms were clearly able to reject it, as most things I wanted to buy online didn't work at the time with it (this was early 2000s though), only with my mom's debit card.

Probably the same is true for those cards you linked, they're special "youth" cards that platforms could in theory block? Then requiring credit card "donation" of $N would still basically act as a age verification. I think debit cards might in general be available to people under 18, so filtering to only allow credit cards sounds like a start at least.

Newgrounds literally employed the same strategy for automatically validating a bunch of users, from https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1548205:

> 2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

Basically, filter by the card type, assume credit = 18+, any other might be under 18.

> One mitigation around that could be the gifting of accounts

Yeah, referrals ala Lobste.rs. I feel like they get lots of stuff right, from transparent moderation to trying to keep it small but high-quality. The judge is still out on if they got it right or not :)

Not to mention "sort by most recent from accounts I follow" is an algorithm too.

I feel like the wording needs a bit of rewording/rework. I agree chronological order facilitates better discussions, but just saying that "Mastodon lacks algorithms" doesn't really help people understand things better.

I'm fairly convinced that "upvotes" and all the similar strategies might have been great for growth and engagement, but it's horrible for actual human conversation where we want to actually understand each other's perspective, and for others to not chase cheap "points" by saying catching/sounds-true stuff.

I think it's less obvious when looking at Twitter, Facebook, HN or similar, where things are kind of sneakily re-ranked depending on "the algorithm", but when you look at reddit this effect is really visible and obvious. Doesn't matter how true/false something is, it sounds true or is easy to agree with it, so up to the top it goes.

> to me the difference is plain to see.

Agreed. HN isn't 100/0 signal/noise or even 100/0 politeness/rudeness, but I get the feeling most people discuss things with a relatively open mind here, and it's not uncommon for people to either be corrected by others and accepting it, or correcting themselves if they've found something out after submitting their comment. Just seeing that happening makes me hopeful overall.

It's a huge contrast from basically any mainstream social media, where the only time you'd see something like that is when you're talking with literal friends.

Ironically, searching "scape web app" today shows "Scape | AI-native CRM that captures all your conversations" which felt very on the nose.

I literally had the same experience as you word-by-word, and I think internet at the time (late 90s for me) really helped see that other stuff was possible and even accepted elsewhere. Ultimately I think it made me seek other physical places earlier, which made me move away from that island and eventually move away from the country completely.

Don't know what the solution is but I also miss the weird small stuff, especially discussions that felt like they were between two people wanting to talk with each other, not discussions between people who are trying to convince each other or others.

Sometimes I wake up and think the only reasonable solution is to try to start up a web forum myself, employ the moderation strategies I used to see working for those types of discussions and give it a shot to bring it back. Luckily, HN is probably the most similar place on the web today, but it's just one place, with its well-known drawbacks that comes with the focus/theme it has.