phantasmish

If someone cracks “smart glasses” that’s the next smartphone-size market and revolution, guaranteed, no question about it.

VR headsets ain’t it but I’m convinced the reason every company is working on them and developing AR stuff for their traditional devices (which are terrible to use for AR) is because they don’t want to still be at the starting line if someone figures out smart glasses.

You mean the “roulette-wheel do-something-vaguely-backish” button?

Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.

There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.

I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?

This is like complaining all modern movies are superhero movies. It’s hard to think that unless you’re hardly looking at all, or have fairly narrow taste and aren’t counting most of the medium.

He’s announced having done more things I might have liked, than he’s actually done. Lots of crowing about crap that never happens.

New Jersey solved this: just put up signs saying “you’re on a toll road, go check what you owe and pay later”. No toll plaza!

Then when you forget, which you 100% will if you’re not dealing with it frequently, or just reasonably assume they’ll send you a bill—ta-da! First communication they send is a nastygram assessing an extra $50 for every toll you forgot to go beg to pay when you got home.

Ingenious way to screw non-locals, and no toll plazas needed!

One of the two things I mentioned is already happening, and it’ll be pretty surprising if the Republican army isn’t used for voter intimidation. Why even have it, if not for that kind of thing?

It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.

The usual way for this to happen doesn’t involve suspending elections. And I’d not bet on a guy that old and infirm winning again in 2028 even if he could legally run.

We’ll see how ICE at select polling places and iffy federal-run voter role purges go in 2026. Should set the tone for how far they try to go in 2028.

I tried to help them steelman this but the only couple examples of good things I could come up with, I’ve not seen liberals complain about. Hm. Coming up blank.

Try the Quad (or Quint) Cities if you want a dynamic with more than two cities. Three on the Illinois side, one (or two) on the Iowa side.

(It started as a “tri cities” so the bump to five isn’t the first it’s seen)

Bonus points: an OK native pizza style if you like tavern-ish pizza varieties.

Related to TFA, a “judgmental map” of Omaha and Council Bluffs:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/db/ea/0adbea3bcdffbcb4ccfe6ec10...

Warning that these are usually offensive, or at least have the potential to offend (but often super helpful when visiting a new city…)

Council Bluffs just gets a blanket “meth and casinos” label.

Yeah, a matter of preference I’m sure. I prefer not having to scrunch a little at the waist to reach e.g. “cargo” pockets, and there’s nothing like interior breast pockets on jackets, for pants (various sorts of hidden pants pocket exist, yes, but they’re hard to get at). No extra weight pulling pants downward, requiring a tighter belt (or suspenders—which, that part I’m on board with as long as the pants have actual suspender buttons!). Can take the jacket off and remove all burden, put it back on and be ready to go again. No sitting on things, having things pinch or poke your leg or hip when you sit.

It’s basically a looser way of wearing your stuff on you, than pants pockets. Less welded-to you. At some point I realized I disliked summer starting because coats and front-pocket/pouch hoodies went away and I had to start carrying things in my pants again. Later, I came to like the standard pocket systems on blazers & friends way more than hoodies and (modern casual) coats, and discovered that with the right fabric and (lack of) lining choices I could wear them in almost any weather if I wanted to (I don’t, every day, but weather’s no longer a major reason not to)

(I am not saying I’m right, just explaining what I get out of it over extra pants pockets)

Yeah suits are kinda ass. Again, the need to have trousers so closely matched they can pretty much only come from the same batch as the cloth in the jacket. Sucks. Looks nice, but man that blows.

Jackets are dope, though. Get some summer-weight ones and even in that season you don’t have to use trouser/jeans pockets. So nice.

One really appreciates the “pocket” label of this format if one wears suits, sport coats, or blazer jackets, or almost any of several styles of coat that fall under the category of “overcoat”: these books really were pocket size! For those pockets, that is. The thicker ones are pushing it, but the ones closer to 250 pages fit neatly in a blazer pocket. Thicker ones are fine in the cavernous pockets of many overcoats (though, hell, so are trade-size books)

(Phones work better in a jacket, too—I think we made a mistake running away from that clothing style, they’re like wearable purses that also make you look nicer. Sure suits are kinda wasteful with the way the jackets get downgraded if the pants are destroyed, but odd jackets we should have held on to!)

Yeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.

Big problem with modern LEGO for me is that so many modern sets are almost all teensy-tiny pieces, so they look good on the box—the adult-aimed ones have always been like this since they started targeting that market, but now it’s like 95% of all their sets; also, they seem to hate exposed nubs, which is silly if the set is for play.

Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare.

The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.

Can confirm that Magnatiles, specifically, were maybe the best value for the dollar we ever got out of toys for our kids. Idk if the quality has held up but our kids abused the hell out of the things and it took them years to finally break just a couple of them (the largest ones are the most vulnerable). They have incredible range, good for babies but still seeing use as a supporting toy up to their tweens. Kinda pricey but if the quality is still as good as it was years ago (can’t say, the ~3 sets we bought over a couple years held up so well we never bought any more) they’re easily worth it.

We have tons of Lego too but these were far better play-value for the dollar. Not even close. Can’t say if the knockoff brands are as good.

(Can’t vouch for any of the rest of these but those giant magnetic tiles look potentially like a much better investment than dedicated e.g. kitchen playsets, way more versatile)

I haaaaate the fake typing noises.

When we were making a long move and temporarily without a stable address I looked into getting a PO Box and it seemed impossible without a real address.

I ended up finding some kinda sketchy-feeling services aimed at people RV living, and not much else. I wasn’t able to find an official solution to the problem of “I need to receive mail but have no address” (there may be one, but in solid 60-90 minutes of searching I didn’t find it, but did find a lot of people complaining about the problem)

I’m in the US and was able to look straight up from where I’m sitting at a shelf of canned food and spot a store brand can labeled “kidney beans”. We call them that, too.

My work email is barely better. If it matters it reaches me in Teams (ugh, unfortunately). Email is full of spam, most of it company-internal (no I don’t give a shit about yet another “newsletter” that you probably had an LLM write anyway, because why wouldn’t you, because it’s fake work anyway)

> I have a family, a house, and just lots of other things that require email correspondence.

Weird how much this can differ. I have those things and sometimes go months without looking at my email. 99.99% of messages I care about are in one of two messaging apps, or some app or another reads what matters from email for me so I don’t actually read the email myself (mostly shipping updates).

It’s so easy to host, and I once implemented a partial in-browser client (using, basically, a web bridge that I also wrote on the other side) in no time, starting from not knowing a single thing about it aside from having used xmpp chat clients in the past. Like getting to the point of status online/offline indicators showing up and messages passing was so easy. I get that I was a far cry from supporting things like encryption extensions, but it’s a great sign when going from nothing to having at least some of a protocol working takes very little time.

The web platform’s still (for now) really good and fast at working with xml. Kinda wild we ended up with json everywhere.

I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.

The way we used to enforce those laws before the mid-70s was much closer to “big companies get broken up” than it is now.

The modern standard for how and when we intervene is not necessarily the correct one.

At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic.

Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy.

Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.

I never stopped calling “telemetry” spyware. It’s weird to me that others accepted the shift in terminology.

N-gate was by far the best thing about HN.

I dunno about Windows Explorer, but macOS’ finder seems to hash completed transfers over SMB (this must be something it can trigger the receiver to do in SMB itself, it doesn’t seem slow enough for the sender to be doing it on a remote file) and remove transferred files that don’t pass the check.

I could see that or other safety checks making one program slower than another that doesn’t bother. Or that sort of thing being an opportunity for a poor implementation that slows everything down a bunch.

They’d need to improve desktop Linux a lot to threaten Apple. It’s far more tolerable on their relatively tightly-controlled and stable hardware platforms than it is elsewhere, but it’s still a features-weak jankfest compared to macOS. I mean user facing features relevant to any desktop user, not “docker is native on it” or other developer-only stuff—and for the record Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade, so I’m far from unfamiliar with it, and I do own a Steam Deck and have used it extensively in desktop mode (and in console-alike mode).

I’d love someone to actually compete with Apple at the specific kind of thing they do, but I don’t see it in the cards for Valve. Too much distance, with things they don’t have to solve to hit other (apparent) targets of theirs.

As for Microsoft, what is Valve threatening? Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point, and the latter… I guess maybe, yeah, they could threaten that.

[edit] to soften this somewhat, I do love what Valve is doing and their micro-PC thing they’re releasing next year is likely going to be an instant purchase for me, provided supply issues don’t drive the price insanely high or otherwise mess with the release. I happen to be in the exact niche of people who are thrilled to have a good low-tinkering option that lets me ditch my last Windows machine, so this stuff’s my jam.