mmahemoff

I wish someone could solve the problem at the receiver end, i.e., invent noise-cancelling headphones/earplugs that actually cancel noise as effectively as eye-masks cancel light.

In addition to sleep needs, the world has gotten noisier now that people are habitually using speakerphones in public in the most obnoxious ways.

I think you'll still hear any relevant alarms. Earplugs are better than nothing, but really aren't fabulous at blocking noise the way eye-masks are.

For hearing-impaired people, there are alarms based on flashing and vibration which you could look into if it's a concern.

This is fun! I didn't immediately notice the time slider and thought it was just GeoGuessr with historical pictures, but the time element adds a whole new dimension.

I learned more from the reaction to Nate and 538’s forecasts than 538 itself. It helped me appreciate how journalists misunderstand and distort basic probability. If a model predicts A, B, and C as having 34%, 33%, and 33% likelihood respectively, the typical report is “538 predicts ‘A’ will win!” and they got it totally wrong when B or C is the victor. Interpretations of 538 were further fuelled by whatever political bias a pundit was coming from.

In a world where Kevin Rose can reboot Digg, Nate has every chance of acquiring and reviving 538. Good luck to Nate.

It shows how careless the industry is that these security questions persist. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account was handed by someone guessing easily accessible security questions. That was 17 years ago.

When backward systems force you to answer these questions, I agree it’s better to generate a random string just for this question and provider. Plus it’s a fun time on the odd occasion these extra questions are required in a phone call.

“To complete security, what was your first pet’s name?”

“I’ll never forget dear PMM&7Qhdcim6WdJ:2XaviMw”

They also asked her for permission in advance, which was never going to help their case.

Some Kindke books also have a checkbox to add the audio (for a fee) when you buy it. Sometimes I’ve seen books discounted to e.g. £0.99, but adding the audio might be £5.99. The upsell seems to be a good hack for adding some revenue when there’s a deep discount being used to drive interest.

But does it work?

This is the third report I’ve seen in recent days and none of them mention if the spoon delivers on its promise. Reporters may be reluctant to share a spoon with dozens of other attendees, but might they practice some journalism by surveying folks who did try it?

It doesn’t have to mean cutting people out of your life, but you’d have to be more organised in scheduling events. You’d also be unable to regularly attend recurring meetups.

I knew of a sysadmin who followed this schedule so he could monitor the system at different times of day. There’s probably the same upside for people who manage certain 24-7 operations (though the downsides outweigh them in most cases).

The new video and screen-share capabilities in ChatGPT and Gemini should make rubber-ducking smoother.

I feel like I've worn out my computer’s clipboard and alt-tab keys at this stage of the LLM experience.

Every Unix command eventually becomes a startup: https://matt-rickard.com/every-unix-command-becomes-a-startu...

Turns out not everyone wants to spend years learning *nix and sit on a desktop pc debugging shell commands to edit their video.

Instead of deleting anything, my scripts usually mv files to a timestamped folder under /tmp. In practical terms, it’s rarely a noticeable difference in performance or disk usage. Also makes scripts easier to debug when you can inspect transient artifacts.

I’d love to know if any of these were recovered or is it primarily a venting wall. Maybe also helps society members track which countries are riskiest to send from.

I’ve also been toying with a timer based app that incorporates some randomness, which I feel is usually missing or poorly handled in fitness apps. Some random exercises and variable-range durations should improve motivation and give your body a better workout.

To quote Arnie: “You have to shock the muscle, and you have to trick the muscle. The body will adapt to anything you do, so you have to keep it guessing. That’s how you grow.”

I was expecting a many-worlds reference, knowing the physicist Sean Carroll's research interests.

Related: Brian Cox meets Brian Cox https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jul/23/succession-a...

I've come across memoize gems before and thought, "do I really need to introduce a dependency when I can save results into a hash", but this makes a convincing argument to leverage a gem like memo_wise. Clean DSL syntax and the perf gains are much nicer than micromanaging it.

What's a good place to discover high-quality RSS feeds these days?

You’re right Apple has a playbook of changing port types every few years, but there are adaptors available. The devices themselves still work, just that Apple knows they can use this one trick to encourage some customers to upgrade.

With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.

Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.

Learning Vim early on had a high return on investment for this reason. Years later, I'm still able to benefit from the same muscle memory in modern tools, e.g. Obsidian.

It should be said, though, that most implementations are simplified rewrites of Vim's core functionality. When you use a tool to achieve a sense of "flow", it can be grating for the editor to behave in subtly different ways from expectation, or discover an important feature does not work at all. Also, there tends to be limited, if any, support for Vim plugins.

In the modern era of Vim and NeoVim, it's possible for such tools to use the real version via network protocol, but integration is easier said than done. So far it's mostly been Vim GUI wrappers that leverage the capability rather than independent editors.

I still use Vim mode where I can even if it's a shadow of the real Vim experience. It makes life easier to use the same muscle memory on every shell, editor, and command-line, and not have to worry about learning every new app's idiosyncracies.

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Australia (2022) and New Zealand (2023) flipped definitively too, in their respective post-Covid elections. The discontent looks like a general pattern regardless of whether the pandemic-era incumbent was nominally "left" or "right".

I do use that, but what I want is some idea of progress or pages remaining within the chapter.

I always find Kindle's "minutes left" too low for some reason, so I have to ignore it. I'd find it simpler - and easier to make progress - if it just showed pages read/remaining within the chapter. Absent that, I am often having to go through the distraction of using the overview feature to figure out where I am in the chapter.

Yes, probably better to get the LLM to write the script.

Example, I was trying out two podcast apps and wanted to get a diff of the feeds I had subscribed to. I initially asked the LLM to compare the two OPML files but it got the results wrong. I could have spent the next 30 minutes prompt engineering and manually verifying results, but instead I asked it to write a script to compare two LLMs, which turned out fine. It's fairly easy to inspect a script and be confident it's _probably_ accurate compared to the tedious process of checking a complex output.

The difference is UX and aesthetics. Planet eBook is a more pleasant experience if you're a casual consumer browsing around for a well-known book to read, while Gutenberg's site suits someone with more specific needs wanting to explore the long tail of public domain content.

To borrow a DevOps analogy, Gutenberg's website handles books as cattle, Planet eBook treats books a bit more like individual kittens insofar as they're hand-picked with (presumably) humans selecting the extracts and covers. The Gutenberg site has an early 2000s programmatically generated UI aesthetic that is similar to Internet Archive and the Wikipedia homepage. (At least in the case of Wikipedia, I've heard there's considerable community resistance to any significant UI changes - it's not just a budget constraint.)

A UX example. Search for "1984" on Gutenberg doesn't yield the book of that name. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=1984&submit_s.... Planet eBook site does: https://www.planetebook.com/?s=1984

To be clear, Gutenberg has been an incredible resource and gift to society. It's just that there's a need for custom front-ends to match different needs.

Goes to show it's not always about greed or malice. Sometimes overengineering is at least well-intentioned. (Following the money often helps you determine what caused it.)

My favourite part is no-one apparently discovered the source code sitting on the disk for an entire generation.

“Surprisingly, no one appeared to have noticed that this happened, not Sierra, not their competitors or their customers, and it was only discovered decades later, the first known discovery of it by online user NewRisingSun in October 2016.”

Reminds me of the recent breakthroughs in Tetris and Super Mario Bros. When I played these games as a kid, I would have thought they’d be forgotten relics decades later, impossible for anyone but the most dedicated hobbyist to stand up and run, let alone keep learning new things about them. The internet and emulators breathed new life into those earlier games and computing.

I thought it was going to be a home server that went into overdrive, heating the room your cat was in or knocking out the aircon.

Anyway, better experience than being woken up by a dozen SMS alerts.

And it's not even possible to enable this with Alexa routines, which should work as a "hobbyist/enthusiast" version of skills development, but are in reality extremely limited.

e.g. As a routine writer, you could include a command within a routine to turn on lights at 6am. However, it would be fixed at 6am whenever the routine runs, with no flexibility since there's no concept of variables or voice input available to routines. A more sophisticated platform would offer more flexible commands, i.e. "turn on lights at {voice_input}".

Cool idea but it's unfortunate the Chrome extension can read and change data on all sites you visit (as well as the intrinsic phishing risk for a DNS/search substitute). There's a history of such extensions ending up in the hands of bad actors.

Ironic that open-source extensions become obscenely dangerous once you install them from the Chrome store, a platform that's meant to improve security. The store should let you install directly from a repo and that should really be the default distribution mechanism, just as Obsidian does with plugins for example. The store could still monitor said repo for suspicious changes, cautiously roll out new updates, etc.

Not to claim open source is perfect (as recent events illustrate), but transparent code is far safer than opening the kimono to a black box.