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focusedone

1,386 karma · joined December 6, 2021

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focusedone··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. My first time though this one and it's...well...a trip.
focusedone··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
If you are the photopea developer, you are a true hero. Thank you for your work!
focusedone··on Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon
I hope designs like this become easier to purchase soon. It'd be fun to experiment with cameras I've got access to and I'd totally wear it out places on the weekend.

Totally get that it's a cat-and-mouse thing, but I don't mind making more work for the people trying to force this on us all.

focusedone··on Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner
This is super cool!
focusedone··on The Telegarden (1995-2004)
What a wave of nostalgia!

The Telegarden was incredible! I read about it in a book about interesting places on the internet, which my dad bought for me shortly after we got our first home computer on the web, around 1996. I believe it was shortly after the Garden was moved from Berkeley to the AEC.

The incredible feeling of clicking a button in a webpage, waiting a few minutes, and then seeing the result of a robot's movement 5,000 miles away was just mindblowing.

The Telegarden was my first chat room, first 'social' account, and first human interaction online. Amazingly, tending the garden became less exciting than getting to know all of these interesting people from around the world. It was a unique community like I want to imagine still exists in tiny pockets of the old web.

Those robotic arms don't sell for tooooo terribly much used now. Someday I'd love to try replicating the site, though I don't know if it's possible to have that same social experience on the modern web.

focusedone··on Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
Yes and I believe they do regularly use them on the Russian side, at least.

They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23

focusedone··on Web Serial Support in Firefox
Sweet!
focusedone··on OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”
The shocking thing is that it's taken this long to happen, right?
focusedone··on We hid a free trip to Switzerland in our privacy policy
Smart PR move and motivation to read more privacy policies.

Looks like they only offer one plan, $99/month, which is pretty steep but must offset what other carriers make selling customer info. That's about double what I'm paying now but I do like the idea.

focusedone··on Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
I'm generally OK with this, but the 24 hour hang time does seem a bit onerous.

Most of the apps on my phone are installed from F-Droid. I guess the next time I get a new phone I'll have to wait at least 24 hours for it to become useful.

I'm seriously considering Graphene for a next personal device and whatever the cheapest iOS device is for work.

focusedone··on Acme Weather
Sweet! Looking forward to the android version. I was slightly bitter when apple yanked the website.
focusedone··on TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app
I hadn't read that Paul Graham article before, but it was extremely accurate at the time.

My degree is in Public Relations and I worked in political PR for a bit before moving to newspapers. The PR office worked so hard to word things in a way where news editors could lift our copy directly into print. It was a delicate balance to sell a point of view without sounding like a sales pitch.

Later, at the newspapers, I was shocked to learn how desperately editors would snag any text to fill the space between paid-for ads on a page. A minimal amount of actual journalism occurred above the fold. Past that we would publish absolutely anything in the English language without filtering.

This was all 20+ years ago. Now we've cut out the middle man, automatically publishing AI generated slop directly as if it were human-produced news. It's all very discouraging.

focusedone··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
wow
focusedone··on Ask HN: Do you still use physical calculators?
Yes! I keep a basic Casio MS-80s handy for sanity checks and a 30-year-old CFX-9850GB Plus for when things get serious.
focusedone··on LinkedIn Is Down
Good
focusedone··on Please Let Me Read – The Web Was Once Good:(
Oh, cool! How does this do with the intentionally obfuscated sites?
focusedone··on How to make a damn website (2024)
Don't worry, there's one for you too:

https://1mb.club/

focusedone··on Please Let Me Read – The Web Was Once Good:(
I agree with the premise and don't want to knock someone's project.

It does seem like a lot of computational effort to achieve what F9 / Reader View does in FF.

focusedone··on How to make a damn website (2024)
https://1kb.club/

Doesn't take much.

focusedone··on Postal Arbitrage
All of these items appear to have received the HN hug of death. They're all showing as unavailable for me, who just wanted to drop a friendly lime hello to a friend across town.
focusedone··on US Confirms Strike on 'Big Facility' Inside Venezuela
I'm not sure if this is a direct quote or a creatively written one but I'm afraid to find out.
focusedone··on Bitchat for Gaza – messaging without internet
Was thinking the same thing. This seems better suited for chatting with arbitrary people nearby, but with zero verification of who you're talking to. You don't have to set up an account at all, just install the app and start chatting as @anon<number> or change the username to whatever you want.
focusedone··on Making Every Windows 11 PC an AI PC
I work in a fairly quiet cube office. The nosiest thing is all of the mechanical keyboards (gloriously clicky).

The thought of people yammering to their computers in an office environment is deeply disturbing.

Imagine listening to someone trying to format a word document by dictating commands to their AI.

focusedone··on Tariffs Are Way Up. Interest on Debt Tops $1T. and Doge Didn't Do Much
Serious question - do cross-party things like this still happen?

It feels like everything is done along party lines now with no room for compromise or working together.

focusedone··on 2010 Photos Show Microsoft Throwing a Funeral for the iPhone
I wonder if they hosted a funeral for Google when Bing launched.
focusedone··on Hunter S Thompson's death to be reviewed more than 20 years later
Hunter S Thompson --> David Foster Wallace --> Caity Weaver / Others?
focusedone··on Alaska Seized a $95,000 Plane over Illicit Cargo: A Six-Pack of Beer
https://archive.is/OF4pe
focusedone··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
I wonder if Google actually makes a profit on Pixels, or if the idea is to sell at / below cost and make up for it through advertising the sale of user tracking data from the device.

If it's the latter, buying a pixel to run Graphene might be a particularly solid counter.

focusedone··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
Maybe not Signal in the immediate future, but for sure NewPipe, offline MP3 players and many ad blockers.
focusedone··on No adblocker detected
uBO's 'Click to Disable JavaScript' button is a very handy feature.
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