larvaetron

> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.

I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.

> The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.

That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.

Got it!

> Cars unlike aircraft don’t need to move forward to maintain safety.

They do if they're crossing railroad tracks.

> the exact same pitch would have been used with “big data” in the 2010s

I'm surprised I don't see this mentioned more often. The tech industry feels like a "more obvious than usual" case of déjà vu these past few years.

> You can't have RAM sync between hosts.

That's what FT is for, if the primary VM instance dies or becomes unresponsive, you failover to the mirror instance.

I guess I just don't share the sentiment that giving every child in a classroom unfettered access to content designed to distract them while a teacher is trying to teach the class is a good thing. I'm having difficulty understanding why you'd need to be convinced that it isn't.

I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.

> As of this moment 100% of comments have to do with “I guess other people have a lot of money”. Very weird thing to be concerned about.

This has to be the most out of touch statement I've seen on HN in a long time.

Can HN get rid of the light gray text on light background please? It is annoying and user-hostile. I shouldn't have to squint to read a comment just because I arrived here later than those who think they deserve a better reading experience than I do.

> Buy Brother printers.

Brother is going down the same path, sadly. They started pushing their EZ-Print subscription in a software update a few months ago.

> didn't allow

How would he even enforce this?

> STIR/SHAKEN is already required for VOIP providers

I'm not convinced that STIR/SHAKEN even works properly. Recently, I migrated a DID from one VOIP provider to another. I set the outbound caller ID on the new provider, and it was showing up Verified with a checkmark to mobile devices before I had even submitted the port request to the old provider.

That was my first thought, it sounds similar to what happened with Klarna[1] a few years ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27301219

> Text-only BIOS setup was the norm for a long time

I've had a GUI BIOS setup on almost every PC I've owned since the first 486 I built back in 1993.

I don't see anything "kinda weird" about that.

> bro what's the big deal bro just write the paper exactly the way we want you to bro

> There is no physical or mental disability preventing people using modern technology.

Judging by the amount of insufferable "Got it! Got it! Got it!" modals, pop ups and other bullshit in "modern" technology, the apps themselves are the disability - wasting time and getting in the way of doing the thing the user is actually trying to accomplish.

SPO: Subsequent Public Offering

> do better

Can we keep the kindergarten-teacher-scolding tier comments to reddit, please?

Heaven forbid someone should type out a comment to voice their disinterest about something.

> It's really odd seeing comments on HN upvoted like:

Not really. The HN user base has been taken over by big-corporation/big-government shills for years now.

"While being instructed to"

"Something went wrong. Try reloading."

If the Reddit admins don't want mods to have the ability to set a subreddit to private, then why did they even give them the option in the first place? Couldn't they just disable the "private" flag for all subs and be done with it?

I feel like I'm the only person who isn't a fan of Teenage Engineering's design. It's all a bit too uncanny valley for me.

> That doesn't quite work

How exactly does the fundamental difference between knowledge and intelligence "not work"? Humans have the ability to learn algorithms, therefore the algorithm being used by an AI (i.e. its intelligence) to apply knowledge from its data set "doesn't work"? I'm having difficulty following your thought process here.

The article has a fundamental flaw, much like those who confuse copyright and trademark: intelligence is the algorithm; knowledge is the data set.

> HN's userbase is that scared of poking at the edges/inconsistencies of authority, even in jest

It wasn't always like this, even just 5 years ago. I don't know where all the weirdos came from but they've fundamentally changed this site, and not in a good way.

I've been mostly a lurker on HN for over a decade. I never thought I'd see the day where a large portion of the userbase supports bringing back mental asylums and forced medication.