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presto8

257 karma · joined April 16, 2010

[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:3E467EF154AAA1D0C7DFA694E45CB17F1940CA52]

Please contact me at me@prestonhunt.com

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presto8··on Transit rewards
I wondered about that too. While correct in Spanish, I am not sure it's appropriate to refer to San Jose, CA with the accent. A positive indicator that AI wrote the article.
presto8··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
Companies with ecosystems would like their users locked into their ecosystems. There are many large companies that still do business with customers even if their customers do business with their competitors.
presto8··on KOReader
I love KOReader on Android, but unfortunately it requires granting permission to manage all files on the device. I would prefer if it used the approach most apps use, which is to select a folder on the device that it can access. Then I can move all my books into that directory and KOReader would not have access to all of the data on my phone.
presto8··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
Won't that be impossible as long as VPN is viable?
presto8··on Waymo in Portland
> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.

I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.

presto8··on Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX

Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.

The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.

IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.

presto8··on Statement from Jerome Powell
The Fed's interest rate goal (which is half of their dual mandate) is 2%.
presto8··on Chase to become new issuer of Apple Card
> There are still several 2% cards that don’t require Apple Pay, although I don’t know of any with no foreign exchange fee other than maybe the Fidelity one.

The Bread American Express is a 2% card and no FTF. Fidelity is still the best overall card, but sometimes the AmEx can be nice.

presto8··on Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e
I have a very similar setup, but using gnus, mbsync, notmuch, and afew. All mail stays on the servers (including a self-hosted dovecot server on my home network). I manage about 10 email accounts with very little effort. It's easy to get extremely customized behavior by overriding defaults with elisp. Previously I was using Thunderbird, but I feel my emacs setup is much more productive.
presto8··on Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?
+1 for emacs-bedrock! It helped me get started with reasonable defaults out-of-box. From there, I started adjusting it to my own needs.
presto8··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
Discovered Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC edition recently. It's great! It is supposed to get security updates through 2032. It doesn't have Cortana, OneDrive, CoPilot, Edge, etc. (Which is a good thing IMO.) Nor does it require a cloud account to use.
presto8··on "Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces
Overly-anthropomorphised dialog boxes (such as pop-up offers on web sites, not so much on operating system controls) bug me in the same way. Instead of "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" buttons, I would prefer simply "Yes" and "No". I'm giving orders to a machine not talking to a person!
presto8··on The Dollar Is Dead
With NIIT, it's an additional 3.8% on top of that (for the highest income filers). So 23.8%.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/questions-and-answers-on-the-ne...

presto8··on By default, Signal doesn't recall
gnus (on emacs) is pretty good. But it may require an entire lifestyle change :)

The beauty of gnus is that it's elisp all the way down. So if you don't like something, it's most likely configurable.

presto8··on High tariffs become 'real' with our first $36K bill
> My point is less about where the money goes and more about not subsidizing cheap Chinese shipping.

FWIW, most of the packages I've bought from AliExpress over the last 6 months have been delivered by private couriers (like OnTrac for packages from China or UPS for packages from the US).

I have a hunch that AliExpress hasn't been using USPS shipping for a while now.

presto8··on The many ways tarrifs will hit electronics
> Just to get the numbers right: [0] there is a $25 minimum, that becomes $50 June 1st, on all packages below or at $800.

Things are changing very quickly, so it's hard to keep up. But I believe this was revised on April 9th to $100 dollars a package from HK or PRC on May 2, and $200 a package starting June 1.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modi...

> (b) increase the per postal item containing goods duty in section 2(c)(ii) of Executive Order 14256, as modified by the Executive Order dated April 8, 2025, that is in effect on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on May 2, 2025, and before 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on June 1, 2025, from 75 dollars to 100 dollars; and

> (c) increase the per postal item containing goods duty in section 2(c)(ii) of Executive Order 14256, as modified by the Executive Order dated April 8, 2025, that is in effect on or after 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on June 1, 2025, from 150 dollars to 200 dollars.

presto8··on U.S. citizen in Arizona detained by immigration officials for 10 days
> On the one hand the guy in OP article didn’t have documentation and he illegally crossed the border, so what do you do as ICE? The guy claims he is a US citizen, but I bet you a lot of illegal immigrants without documentation claim they are a US citizen as well.

For what it's worth, OP article says that the court documents claim he admitted to entering the country illegal. Guy himself denies this.

> Court documents say a Border Patrol agent arrested Hermosillo “at or near Nogales, Arizona, without proper immigration documents” and that Hermosillo admitted to illegally entering the U.S.

> Hermosillo and his girlfriend, who have a 9-month-old child together, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and are visiting family in Tucson. He says he has never been to Nogales.

presto8··on Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America's Taxpayers
Did my taxes with taxes.cashapp.com this year. I recommend it. It's free to file both federal and state. It handled my complex tax return, including rental income with depreciation, RSUs, ESPP, section 1256 contracts, etc. And it can import last year's info from a TurboTax or other PDF.

Oh and it comes with 1-year of free audit defense as well.

I'm not sure what their long-term business stategy is, but I would rather pay them than TurboTax. I find Intuit's political lobbying distasteful.

presto8··on Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative
I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.
presto8··on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
Many B2B transactions are tax-exempt but it's complicated. And gets really complicated once international transactions are considered. And also whether the company has a physical nexus in the place the product is being purchased. All in all, I think it would be simpler if the US adopted VAT. But that seems very unlikely.
presto8··on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
Because VAT is collected at the border on imports, some people (wrongly) consider VATs a tariff. Considering that VAT is rebated on exports, VATs are trade neutral.

Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.

presto8··on PeerTube v7.1 Is Out
This bookmarklet will show the RSS feed URL in an alert window:

Original Source: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/116549

    javascript: (() => {

    for (var arrScripts = document.getElementsByTagName('script'), i = 0; i < arrScripts.length; i++) {
        if (arrScripts[i].textContent.indexOf('externalId') != -1) {
            var channelId = arrScripts[i].textContent.match(/\"externalId\"\s*\:\s*\"(.*?)\"/)[1];
            var channelRss = 'https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=' + channelId;
            var channelTitle = document.title.match(/\(?\d*\)?\s?(.*?)\s\-\sYouTube/)[1];
            alert('The rss feed of the channel \'' + channelTitle + '\' is:\n' + channelRss);
            break;
        }
    }

    })();
presto8··on The Future Is Niri
Would alttab meet your needs? I've been using it with xmonad and it works well. https://github.com/sagb/alttab
presto8··on Tesla shares plunge 14%, head for worst day in five years
> Tesla is still up compared to where it was a year ago.

$TSLA was $222 on 2020-12-29. Since Tesla does not pay a dividend, one could have made a lot more money investing in Treasuries over that time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/history/?period1=160678...

presto8··on Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers
Fidelity Cash Management has a 4.5% yield (which is also state-tax free for those in states with income tax, which could be a boost of up to 0.5% for some).
presto8··on Study shows N95 masks near-perfect at blocking escape of airborne Covid-19
I've been wearing the same N95 duckbill for about 3 years now. It is getting a bit dirty but structurally it's fine. I don't wear it every day though, only in what I deem high-risk situations. Its construction is much more robust than the around-the-ears N95s.

I think one could reasonably stretch out a box of 20 duckbills for a whole year even if worn daily. They are about $1 each. While I could see that there would be places that $20/year would be too much, I don't think money is the barrier here. People just don't like wearing masks (especially respirators, which are bulkier) for many reasons.

presto8··on Quickemu: Quickly run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines
Does virt-install automatically download the ISOs? When I try it, I get the following message:

    $ virt-install --name alma9 --memory 1536 --vcpus 1 --disk path=$PWD/alma9.img,size=20 --cdrom alma9.iso --unattended
    ERROR    Validating install media 'alma9.iso' failed: Must specify storage creation parameters for non-existent path '/home/foo/alma9.iso'.
presto8··on Nix Home Manager Option Search
man configuration.nix

Then use the search function of the pager.

presto8··on Emacs commands I got by with for years
Check out marginalia[1]. Whenever you press M-x, it will pop up a buffer showing all the commands (with most recent ones on top) along with their keybindings and a brief description of what they do.

Embark[2] is also cool. It will show all the possible commands relevant to where the cursor is at that moment. I bind it to C-c a.

[1] https://github.com/minad/marginalia [2] https://github.com/oantolin/embark

presto8··on Veritasium: The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong [video]
The video adds a lot of extra stuff beyond what is in the NY Times video: There is an interview with one of the test takers; a description of three possible correct answers (1, 3, or 4, depending on the perspective); a video demonstration of several ways to compute it; and an interesting discussion about sidereal time.

Not that you were implying otherwise, but in this case I feel the video adds quite a bit more material and a more complete story beyond the NY Times piece. In reading the NY Times piece, I would leave with the conclusion that the correct answer was not one of the options. After watching the video, I would leave with the conclusion that the question was ambiguously written leading to multiple possible answers, one of which was there, but two other valid answers were not there.

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