nativeit

This seemed like a good read for New Year's Day. It's describing a concept that appears in Byung-Chul Han's 2009 book "A Scent of Time". It explores a cyclical, contemplative worldview, contrasting with today's fragmented, fast-paced life; it's an ideal state where humans experience time richly, finding meaning in lingering and connecting with the 'other', rather than just constant work, emphasizing reflection over hyperactivity. Han critiques modern society for losing this capacity, leading to emptiness and a crisis of love, where everything becomes self-reflection rather than true connection.

Happy New Year's HN!

I do subscribe to Nebula, where most (albeit not “all”) of the YouTube creators I follow can be found. I donate to Patreon for folks like Benn Jordan, whom I feel does work that’s important and beneficial for society. For all the rest, including streaming/broadcast/cable stations owned by Paramount, Disney, and precious few others at this point? To hell with them. I take the money I saved from unsubscribing to their flawed and exploitative platforms, and I donate it to a handful of organizations like Wikipedia, EFF, and Archive.org. During the Hollywood writer’s strike, I donated $5/month to charitable orgs recommended by their union. I see live music several times a year. I purchase music from Bandcamp. There are lots of ways to support artists and creative professionals that don’t involve funding their exploitation, it’s just not as tidy or simple.

In my experience (which is limited, personally, but I have several writers/editors/publishers in the family), writing a book is something one feels compelled to do, irregardless of financial incentives, or even tangential incentives like notoriety/influence. I would compare it to my own endeavors writing/recording music. I would do it even if I know for certain nobody else will ever appreciate it. Because the drive is internal. It’s what I do to make myself fulfilled. The fact that others may find some meaningful value within that work is a nice knock-on effect, but wasn’t involved in my choice to create it.

Between the people with invested and/conflicting interests, and the hordes of dogmatic zealots, I find discussions about AI to be the least productive or reliably informed on HN.

I don't think those figures are entirely relevant anymore, since they're all pre-trade war. Factories are pausing operations due to the decline in export sales.

You forgot to do your own research and read the article.

Did they require the methane be captured? I thought flare-offs were done because the methane gas is something like 1000x worse than the CO2.

What's the dollar-per-user figure between these two examples?

Perhaps they lived outside of the kingdom, with an evil Stepmother who moved very slow, struggled with complex dependency collisions, and took up a bunch of unnecessary space? Such an experience could leave one very traumatized towards Conda, even though their real problems are the unresolved issues with their stepmother…

Weird how “hugging face” is a heartwarming little smiley face, while “face hugger” is a terrifying alien xenomorph. Seems like there’s an analogy to be made there…

Now you get to graduate into the pedantry of defining the word “source”.

I bought a 2013 Passat TDI, one of the dieselgate models, after they completed the recall repairs. I thought I was getting a great deal at the time. Unfortunately, the “fix” seemed to cause some other issues, at least in my case. I religiously used Liqui Moly certified low-ash oil, and kept up with the maintenance schedules. Even still, the turbo wore out at around 100k miles and had to be replaced, and then the new one was exhibiting the same symptoms only ~20k miles later, and would likely have eventually given up as well if the car hadn’t been totaled before it got to that point. Cold weather would cause it to run like dogshit until everything got up to operating temps, and then it would usually run fine the rest of the day. The fuel economy was also never quite as good as I expected, it always struggled to get better than 35mpg.

My mechanic told me that engine was really poorly suited to city driving, which was a lot of my activity, and short trips caused an inordinate amount of carbon buildup, which he cited as the cause of my cold weather performance issues. Anyway, I think it’s probably a great car for folks with a lengthier commute. I learned my habits and routines were likely murder to a TDI engine, but especially those dieselgate models.

I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.

> Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?

Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.

Look for the USB hub that costs several times more than the rest, and that’s the correct one for your use case.

I think they probably would, with maybe the exception of Apple TV. It’s probably not a coincidence that Apple TVs are the only hardware in this space that isn’t sold at a loss (or near loss), the rest are simply Trojan horses to park in the living room and maximize profit elsewhere by leveraging its privileged access to your eyeballs and/or ears (really no orifice is safe from these companies anymore, watch out for Smart Bidets).

“House Project Managers”

You inevitably catch LexisNexis shitting in your herb garden and leaving squirrel carcasses lying about…

[ ] 231,846,239,211 “Messages related to wetland fauna migratory patterns and their impact on commodity spice markets, also Pepsi advertising”

It runs a hashing algorithm locally, I believe, rather than transmitting the entire image. pHash or something similar would work.

I’m not sure what relevance there is to other providers?

I work with a lot of small medical offices, and they do use consumer Smart TVs in some contexts. I typically limit their network access for other reasons, and displaying X-rays isn’t something I’ve personally facilitated, but it wouldn’t shock me to discover it’s being done in other clinics, and the popularity of cloud-based ePHR software has left a lot of smaller clinics with very limited internal I.T. services.

The destination isn’t relevant, if the image leaves the clinic at all without consent, that’s a HIPAA violation. Fortunately, I think it’s more likely that the images are sampled and/or hashed in a way that means the full image isn’t technically transmitted, but considering the consequences and costs of a data breach, I’d definitely be wary of it.

This is called a “replacement excuse”. It’s a hallmark of nihilists and utilitarians, but I tend to prefer the more prosaic group noun, “jerks”.

I’ve never understood why Firefox doesn’t just make an extension with first-party support, instead of bloating their browser with gimmicks that a large cohort of users don’t want, and that probably shouldn’t be included by default at this point anyway. Or, shit, they came up with “Focus” for a “privacy browser”, do that and leave Firefox alone. Better yet, implement any of the litany of fixes and features your users actually requested.

The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?

The Toshiba (!?) laptops that got sold to one of my clients at nearly $1100/ea are pathetic. Basically the same kit you can get for $600-700 at Best Buy. The equivalent MacBook would have been miles better, in terms of build quality and specs. Although, I’m using a ThinkPad E16v2 right now that I am quite pleased with that was $899 with 32GB/1TB. There are reports Apple is getting ready to launch a less expensive MacBook soon. I think the <$1000 options for laptops is about to get rather interesting.

I’m still disappointed to see the days of easy RAM/storage upgrades have largely gone. I was initially suspicious of the reasons offered for why soldering memory directly to the motherboard is necessary, but with a few years of academic engineering experience (I don’t use much of my EE education in my day job), it’s not illogical—as frequency increases, the circuit’s sensitivity to parasitic inductance and capacitance also increases, and connectors/interfaces are a big source of parasitic effects and general nonlinearity. That said, my desktop has traditional DIMM slots, and it’s technically running faster DDR5 than any of my other devices with soldered DDR4 modules.

I charitably assume the difference is laptop’s need for greater efficiencies, but either way it would be nice if the manufacturers hadn’t instantly taken advantage of this new “necessity” to jack up prices on memory and storage quite so aggressively. It’s probably also worth noting that Apple was first to really do this widely, as far as I’m aware, with the M1 chipset. Also worth noting the M1 was groundbreaking, and it’s seemingly magical memory management made it so an Apple M device with ~60% of the memory of its x86 equivalent can perform just as well (if not better). I have an 8GB M1 Mac Mini that’s still quite functional for routine work. 16GB still provides great performance.

But then, my AMD desktop that cost ~$1200 a year ago (with a capable GPU) is sporting 48GB because I could pay a reasonable price for DIMMs that I can plug-in myself. Similar specs on a mass-market machine probably would have run that price up to near $2000.

Thanks for reposting this. I missed it last year, and as an EE with a misspent youth (I originally got a BA in media), I have frequently struggled with the calculus. One of the few regrets is that I didn’t learn advanced math back when my brain was primed for it. Learning calculus in mid-life is tough.

They can’t afford Trump’s pardons. You don’t just give something like that away for free. Art of the deal.

Also, honestly, the build. That “genuine concern” they ignored was that the build was critically flawed. I don’t think anyone here would have these takes if a small group of curious engineers tried their hand at a composite submersible, it was when they kept doing it after all the qualified engineers had said, “This is crazy, I’m out.”

The build was kind of dumb, and I’m hardly an engineer. It’s common sense. Carbon fiber composites are interesting because they’re strong relative to their weight. Remove either of those features and they become pointless.

Who cares if a submarine is heavy?

There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.

I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.

But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.

I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.