jtuple

> Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads

Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.

Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.

AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).

Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.

> A series of 13 cameras, six radar sensors, and four lidar sensors dot the Ojai's exterior, and are fitted with onboard heaters to reduce ice buildup and small wipers and fluid to clear away dirt. These features will be critical as Waymo expands beyond warm-weather cities and into gnarlier climates in the northeast United States.

The whole point of this article is that the new vehicle is better suited to more climates.

All the cities above already have service, the expansion in the title refers to the new markets that should (hopefully) be unlocked with this new vehicle.

I believe the GP was referring to most quality rips originating from physical media (ie. 4K UHDs).

In a world without physical media, the best piracy can deliver is no better than the best encoding streamers have available (and that assumes DRM circumvention remains forever possible, otherwise we're gonna get worst quality from re-encoding decoded playbacks)

> the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source

"No worse than streamed" is a far cry from a quality high-bitrate 4k UHD physical release.

If it weren't for the S-Pen, I'd ditch Samsung in a heartbeat.

The day iPhone has a built-in EMR/AES stylus is the day I become a customer (despite being an Android lifer).

Don't think that will ever happen though, despite Apple shipping Pencil for iPads.

Samsung has definitely built a (small) moat being the only vendor with that offering.

> The US won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own. Want to try again?

190 nations have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This includes China, so the very US vs China premise here is misplaced.

[The US, UK, France, Russia, China and 185 other countries] won't allow south korea to enrich uranium on their own

I've done a few all-nighters in my 30s and 40s, and they generally feel the same as my 20s. Still get that clear headed, high focus second wind around 4am that carries through until noon or so.

But, I definitely crash harder than I did in my 20s and need longer to recover after. In my 20s, would be fine if the next night was a normal one, now it takes multiple days.

It's definitely something I try to avoid at this age, as opposed to just being standard procedure back in college.

> I am in my 30s

Now I'm kinda curious what age cohort is most likely to be Reddit memers

Do you think 30s is peak Reddit, yet you manged to be a lucky outlier? Or that peak Reddit skews older/younger and you're of a lucky age?

As an older Millennial in my 40s, I see this a lot in my 35-43 friend group. And always figured peak Reddit was younger Millennials (now in their 30s).

Might depend on what subs I suppose.

The Internet itself is the loophole in this analogy.

Minors shouldn't have unfettered + unsupervised access to the Internet, that's the solution.

The open Internet isn't a kid friendly place, isn't meant to be, and won't be no matter how many laws you pass.

Children grow up to become adults, and spend most of their lives as adults. It's important to weigh the lifetime cost of safety laws.

A child with unfettered access to the Internet at say 8 years (IMO, way too young should be 15+) is only protected for 10 years. Then goes on to spend ~60 years negatively impacted, fighting ever growing censorship and risking extortion/blackmail when data leaks. It just doesn't seem worth it in this case.

I'd much rather laws mandate special child-safe phones/laptops that could only access a subset of the Internet, rather than forcing every website/app to collect PII and inconsistently enforce age verification for all visitors for all time.

And all of this is besides the point anyway. Social media and cyberbullying are the real threats to minors online. Porn access isn't good, but it's not causing suicides and mental health crises left and right.

Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.

Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.

Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?

Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.

TBH, its not even middle/high-school era Internet I miss most either. While I have fond mid-90s memories, I think peak Internet is somewhere in 2008-2012 range.

The Internet was mostly additive up to that point. New tech, sites, services existed alongside what came before.

I can appreciate Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and even Twitter (it was huge for distributed systems/database community ~2009-15) at different points in time.

It was really the photo-first, later video-first, shift that happened mid-2010s + big tech dominance that strangled old Internet. No longer being additive, but shrinking the Internet into fewer properties, with everything just being "content".

> Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

I loathed my childhood, and have far more freedom as an adult then I ever did then.

School, homework, chores, strict bedtime, dial-up Internet, shared desktop computers...

Yes, I spent a ton of time playing games, compiling the Linux kernel, and screwing around on the Internet back then. But outside of summer vacation (which I do miss dearly), I spend just as much or more online today as then.

I absolutely do miss the old Internet, not just that time period.

But, there's bright spots in the modern Internet too. The rise of online D&D via Discord during the pandemic was amazing. I play far more D&D thesedays then I ever did since the 90s. Discord also scratches the MUD/IRC itch. But, not sure Discord will survive the next decade either.

This isn't really random behavior from some mentally unwell person. There's an entire Reddit community for element collectors:

https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/

And various companies that sell elements in nice display cases to support this hobby.

Sure, it's not your typical model car/train or card collecting hobby, but it's a harmless hobby nonetheless not a cry for help.

> I'm saying the market for what TRU provided had disappeared

The market still exists, doesn't it?

Kids still exist, kids still play with toys.

People simply buy toys from Amazon now, not TRU.

Just like people buy electronics from Amazon, not Best Buy/Circuit City.

And shoes from Amazon/Zappos, not Payless.

Seems like most retail markets still exist, they've just been cornered by the giant "Everything Store".

IMO, physical toy stores should be competitive to e-commerce with the right strategy. Simply going to the store could be an exciting adventure into itself, with higher fidelity discovery than a screen provides. Esp. post-COVID where people are opting more for analog/offline options after online/lockdown burnout.

Claiming TRU's market disappeared feels similar to claiming the bookstore market disappeared, yet Barnes and Noble had a well documented and surprising comeback by shifting strategy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34165960

Is "Measure of the Universe" the book you're thinking of?

Alternatively, chapter 8 of "Realm of Numbers" touches on logarithms, and "That's about the size of it" chapter from Assimov on Numbers" includes a log-scale table of animal weights (from blue whale at 8.08 to Rotifer at -8.22)

There's a hosted test instance with pre-existing test account:

https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs?tab=readme-ov-file#te...

Logging in just works. Easy to try it out there.

The official French hosted instance requiring some French-specific stuff seems pretty normal. Likely specific to that instance's authentication system, not the Docs software itself.

You should be able to emulate close to CRT beam scanout + phosphor decay given high enough refresh rates.

Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.

You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.

In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.

Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/6984

> Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you.

OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.

The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.

Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.

Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.

I know this is meant to be tounge-in-cheek and not serious, but still fun to mull over.

IMO, main issue is the assumption that GDP/capita is independent of population size.

I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.

While South Korea shrinking 1/4x each generation is bad, growing 4x would probably also be bad.

Seems like the best case would be hitting some optimal population size + age distribution then maintaining that each generation -- not shrinking but also not growing.

This really hits home and makes me happy to see on the HN front page.

Nearly 10 years later and I still consider my time working on Riak at Basho the highlight of my career.

After leaving, my original plan was to found "Basho 2.0" after my non-compete expired. But, unexpected personal/family hardships in 2015-2018 made big-tech money the better choice for awhile, and Cloud/competitors continued to chip away at the market.

Often stil regret not taking that path.

But, happy to see technology I'm very fond of still living on and providing value to the world.

TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing.

The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine.

(Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary author of strong consistency work, lead riak_core dev from 2011-2015)

I think another 18 months would have been enough too. But it just wasn't the right environment after the hostile take-over / leadership transition.

The "hacker" stereotype is certainly stale, but subbing "young person" (and implying not "old person") is equally silly.

I'm 41 and have been awake before 7am maybe 20 times in the past 10 years. Half the reason I still put up with computers is because it's one of the few professions where I can work a 11-7pm schedule most days and still excel.

There are morning people and night people. You are what you are, no judgements, but it isn't something you grow in/out of, nor should be expected to.

Build 600K houses a year?

The fact they aren't is the supply problem.

Outside of government policies and potential to tank housing prices, is there some reason you can't build 500K+ houses a year?

Canada already seems to have an impressive rate, something like 220-250k housing starts/year. The entire US is only 1300K-1500K/year for comparison.

Is it insurmountable to just 2.5-3x that rate?

I guess the main issue is that housing lags demand. And immigration rate could also 2x on a whim by policymakers.

It's about not leaking sensitive information.

If you have different messages for invalid username vs invalid password, you can exploit that to determine if a user has an account at a particular service.

"Invalid credentials" for either case solves this problem.

But sure, let's report infra failures different as "unexpected error"

Now, what happens if the unexpected error is only when checking passwords, but not usernames?

Do you report "invalid credentials" when given an invalid username, but "unexpected error" when given a valid name but invalid password?

If so, you're leaking information again and I can determine valid usernames.

So, safe approach is to report "invalid credentials" for either invalid data or partial unexpected errors.

Only time you could safely report "unexpected error" is if both username check and password check are failing, which is so rare that it's almost not worth handling. Esp. at the risk of doing wrong and leaking info again.

Fortnite generated $5.5B in 2023 alone and is estimated at over $20B in lifetime revenue

TBH, its only been 20 years that Nintendo has focused on cheap hardware.

SNES was more powerful than Genesis, N64 arguably more powerful than PS1/Saturn but lacking CDs (and thus unable to rely on prerendered FMVs that defined that generation), and Gamecube more powerful than Dreamcast/PS2 (Xbox wins, but was unexpected new entrant)

Nintendo definelty pushed graphics advancements as key selling points back then.

The Wii is when they stopped competing on graphics, and switched to innovating in other areas (motion controls, 3D, connected tablet, hybrid gaming, etc).

Kiss was a well known target of the satanic panic back in the day. Folks tried to ban them saying their music was demonic and KISS stood for "Knights In Satan's Service".

Now, their act is immortalized and will still be running long after they're dead.

Perhaps they did sell their soul to the devil afterall! /s

Netflix has been around since 1997. At that time, directly streaming movies to consumers was techincally impossible anywhere in the world. As a non-American, how were you watching movies in 1997?

And yeah TikTok/etc didn't exist then. No one hard smartphones and the Internet was text/GIF only.

That said, we used to have the America's Funniest Home Videos show. People mailed in VHS recordings of their kids/pets doing cute, funny, or cringe things. This aired on TV and people voted to pick a winner. People could win $10k-100k in prize money. So yeah, proto YT or whatever was a thing, just scaled to available tech at the time.

EDIT: Just realized AFHV is still around, and will outlive Netflix DVDs. *That* certainly feels like a joke. How does a network television meme show still exist in 2023???

I suppose GP is using clickbait in the looser sense that the title omits info (the professor's name) and thus invites a click; rather than the more common use of clickbait to label titles that are exaggerated, misleading, or "one-weird-trickey".

Granted, titles can't contain a full articles worth of facts, so omitted info is always expected; but omitting primary subject's name does lean somewhat reader-hostile (IMO).

It's a 10 minute limit on receiving, which needs manual intervention to reset.

That pretty much kills Airdrop as an open P2P communication channel (the "undesired" usage) while still enabling one off intentional file transfers (the primary Airdrop use case).

So a 10 minute limit easily kills 99% of "bad" usage without impacting common usage, leading to less resistance/complaints from average users. Killing Airdrop full stop would have greater push back/outrage, with only marginal improvement against the undesired usage.

Q: How does 10 min limit kill the P2P communciation usage?

A: Imagine your cell phone could only receive calls from non-contacts for 10 min. After which you had to remember to push a button to re-allow calls for another 10m, rinse/repeat. With that UX, the chance you ever successfully call or be called by a non-contact is near zero. People wouldn't opt-in frequently enough to have a reliable network.

The big difference between 2001 and now is that high compensation at top jobs enables greater savings.

Most people in 2001 had to find work quickly to keep surviving. Mid-career high performers from Meta, Twitter, Netflix, etc have millions in savings and assets.

Those people could sit out a few years if they wanted, or even just retire early if they were happy with the $60-100k/year income from interest/capital gains at a consevative withdrawl rate.

Most of these people still choose to work today because they have well paying jobs which they enjoy. High performers gonna perform, etc. But, if the only option was toxic jobs combined with low pay many would simply opt-out.

Many in this dev cohort have been extremely lucky and have the privilege to take a stand. 2022 isn't really a great time to be an asshole captialist banking on qualified employees having no other options.

Fresh graduates and early career individuals are a possibility. But, you still need experienced devs to mentor them and maintain the large complex systems/infrastructure that fresh hires can't yet handle without more experience. Attracting and retaining this senior talent is the hard part.