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gavinward

35 karma · joined March 6, 2014

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gavinward··on Dimethyl Mercury Exposure Incident at MIT
I think Hydrofluoric acid is probably the substance you're describing which leaches the calcium out of your bones. It will certainly burn you too though. It's a common byproduct from heating fluorinated gases and is sometimes used in its own right for wet etching.

As an aside, I love it when they tell you in the safety WBT what the highly toxic gas smells like.

gavinward··on Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off
Despite the name I would not have guessed you could pick up Atlantic 252 in the US. The quality of it wasn't great for listening to music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_252

"Although the transmitter was in Ireland, the signal's reach meant that it was often looked upon as a "UK national station". Reception reports were received from such locations as Berlin, Finland, Ibiza and Moscow."

gavinward··on Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
The endgame is getting corporate customers hooked on cloud-hosted subscription-model everything, then jacking the prices up.
gavinward··on Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
The same with the AI thing Meta added to Whatsapp. After spending a while trying to search for a message whose exact wording I couldn't remember, but whose content was easily described, I thought I'd give the bot a try. Turns out it doesn't have access to my messages.

I expect MS will get there long before Meta does given they don't have the encryption issue to contend with.

gavinward··on Why English doesn't use accents
I find it interesting that the Spanish consider the ñ to be a separate letter, in their 27 letter alphabet.
gavinward··on Why English doesn't use accents
> if you didn't know better

It's funny how The New Yorker clings to this given its readership is mostly people who absolutely do know better.

gavinward··on What3Words – The Algorithm
The author, if I remember correctly from twitter, was a thorn in the side of the people who developed this system for quite some time. Given his profession I expect he made sure he was on the right side of the law before publishing this.
gavinward··on At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
Agreed. I can't think of another area where AI could amplify the effect of my existing level of knowledge as it does with coding. It's far exceeding my expectations.
gavinward··on Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database
It must be heartening for a startup trying to build the best general search engine in the world to know that Google has absolutely no interest in competing with you.
gavinward··on Ask HN: Are You Polite to AI?
I asked it to phrase something in early modern English and then asked it a few unrelated questions without closing the window and it kept up the bit (doth this answer please thee?) and I felt obliged to keep laughing at it just like I would with an actual person.

I do find myself praising it as effusively as I would a human doing my bidding, and being slightly apologetic about asking for revisions.

No point in learning an entire new way of talking.

gavinward··on Ask HN: What are some of the better Hacker News apps?
Ironically I had to open this in a browser to make this comment (since no app supports that advanced feature) but FYI the mobile version of Firefox supports the queueing up of multiple links for later viewing, rather than immediately switching to the firefox app every time you open a link.

It's not perfectly analogous to "open in new tab" on a desktop but you might find it helpful.

I know nobody uses Firefox on mobile but it seems decent enough to me.

gavinward··on Ask HN: Digital Nomads: How do you manage taxes?
Indeed. In Europe Monaco is a popular place for very rich people to (pretend to) live due to the lack of income tax. You are restricted in how long you can spend in other countries before being deemed to be domiciled there for tax purposes. In Ireland and I think the UK also, it's 183 days a year. And they do occasionally check, if you're rich enough.
gavinward··on Samsung Demos Its First BGA SSD: 1500 MB/s Read Speed and Tiny Package
Place whatever value on this you like but I also had a Samsung 840 500GB SSD fail just last week that was almost exactly three years old. It came with a three year warranty so I guess that's the only upside.

It's maddening that not only can I not get back whatever data wasn't backed up (thankfully not much) but I have no way of wiping it before returning it under warranty.

The people who handle the returns for Samsung say returned drives will be "formatted". Given it's uunresponsive, this seems unlikely

It puzzles me why drive manufacturers don't offer data recovery for their own products as a value add service. Nobody could get the data off this drive as cheaply as Samsung themselves.

gavinward··on Samsung Galaxy Back-door
That anecdote appears to relate to Broadcom rather than Qualcomm.