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radiorental

1,839 karma · joined July 25, 2013

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radiorental··on September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Are people more pessimistic now? While there are ebs and flows to the general state of various societies I feel that objectively the 2020s are no better or worse that any of the preceding post WW2 decades??

Is this an effect of social media and the 24 news cycle that has negative headlines on repeat?

radiorental··on Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'
This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.

Students need to understand what AI is and is not.

Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.

While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.

The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.

Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

radiorental··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
Complete guess but I wonder if it's the Merlin project?

https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/merlin/

radiorental··on Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT
I'd go darker than that. Think about how chatgpt is trying to position itself as a provider of medical advise.

Its easy to see how it will gently tune it's response from symptom to solution.

Cue rapid narrators voice "Chatgpt may cause death, seek real medical advice before buying what chatgpt recommends"

radiorental··on Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT
too soon.

I'll be honest though, when I first read the headline I was trying to reconcile that with the crash. Took me a moment.

radiorental··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
This might not solve the problem for you, when I get stuck in a captcha loop, I click the Audio option. I usually get past in 1 try.
radiorental··on Movie Scene Map – 13,312 films, series, games, anime and manga
Very cool, I've sent a couple of Star Wars fans out to Achill Island off the coast of Kerry as the location for the last Jedi. However due to very small footprint of the island and my zoom level another film was higher in the z-order, blocking out the other film pins, and it looked like there might be missing data.

That all said, it looks like they also filmed closer to my home which I probably would never have known about if not for this service. Nice work, nice design, slick UX and Interaction model. Well done!

https://moviescenemap.com/locations/malin-head/

radiorental··on San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing
I'm not seeing this example as unrelated.

E.g. If a seller knows I've been searching for flu remedies, I've made a social media post related to the illness. Then I go to the pharmacy and everything related to alleviating those symptoms is more expensive for me.

Put simply, if they know you absolutely need something, they will leverage that information.

radiorental··on An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener
This might be one of those cases where it solves for problem spaces that aren't being considered yet.

What I mean by that is in the case of soft robotics, it was developments in manufacturing techniques for the inflated leading edge of kitesurfing kites, that unlocked the capabilities to make soft robots more feasible.

radiorental··on Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting
It can be more subtle than that. For example...

I'm working on a challenging project where there's a delta between what the market and PM's are asking for, and what dev wants to commit to. I'm talking to both parties to try and build consensus.

In such situations I dont want either side to see the negotiations, reasoning and reconciliations. Its not that there are career limiting statements in these threads, it's just navigating politics and I dont want that content in the public square

radiorental··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
You are correct, I should have been more specific - SxS, MTB and Enduro/Dualsport motorcycling. I've tried to use smart phones but they often heat up running a gps app in direct sunlight. More importantly the touch response accuracy caused me to double check the phone while trying to pay attention to the trail.

In applications such as jeep rock crawling, car camping - yes, smartphones will work. In more extreme activities - nope.

radiorental··on Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology hasn't been to the island of Kauai
radiorental··on Meta's AI models are powering the first wave of Genesis Mission projects
Drunkleist?
radiorental··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
I'm not sure you are fully aware of the markets that Garmin is in. When it comes to marine, aviation and offroad, you simply cannot run a gps app on a phone. E.g.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/

radiorental··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
I have a love/hate relationship with Garmin.

As a motorcyclist and sailor, their hardware is second to none in terms of build quality and robustness. The ability to look down at my Zumo GPS on my motorcycle in a rain storm on a dirt road and have it respond to my wet dirty glove is a close to magic as you will get.

Then there's the watches, the Instinct range is ok but I have a button that doesn't pop back out, my wife's vivoactive suffered the well known touch failure.

However, as a UXer I will say that across all products the software interaction model sucks balls. "China" can and will produce hardware to meet a price point, its not that they can't build good products.

As soon as "China" figures out how to do good UX, the last moat western companies have will fall.

radiorental··on Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
>Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?

I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.

Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.

radiorental··on I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]
Another once great channel (the loam ranger) did a deep dive into the phenomenon of why mountain bike youtubers were struggling with the old format.

Its nuanced, part safety, partly that its a tonne of work to produce good content when you can simply switch to fluff pieces like Berm Peak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNiCtWoGonw

"The Algorithm" doesn't reward hard work, imho part of the math is our short attention spans... there's only so many time you can watch someone else vlog from a sprinter in Squamish.

radiorental··on I Fired Google
I'm curious what the tradeoffs are, I exclusively use FF and any time Chrome auto opens via a link I immediately baulk at the experience.
radiorental··on CT scans of BYD car parts
While true, imho its more complicated than that

* PE, on the whole, has extracted wealth from quality. This is true at both the consumer level and B2B. E.g. its impossible to trust any aftermarket car part manufacturer, and some OEM brands have turned to dogshit too.

* "most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon" I'd rephrase that to: most people either can't or are unwilling to pay the premium for quality in an increasingly disposable world.

So, I'd say that similar to post war Japan, while Chinese manufacturing has an image problem, they're just producing what we asked for.

radiorental··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
It's not a joke if it doesn't make any sense, what good is a snorkle on an electric car?
radiorental··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
More a comment on how HN has devolved in the past 2 years, if I want snark, this isn't the place I go to find it.
radiorental··on Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
Why?
radiorental··on Waymo in Portland
Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.

Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.

My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down

radiorental··on A Periodic Map of Cheese
I'm fairly certain at some point very early in your career you thought so! You may have even cried out for it in public!!
radiorental··on US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology
Firefox 149 + ublock origin did not display ads for me
radiorental··on Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
>I actually believe that software “could” be an engineering discipline but we have a long way to go

It certain mission critical applications, it is treated as engineering. One example - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B

radiorental··on Don't make me talk to your chatbot
You might be talking to a chatbot!!
radiorental··on X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
tbh, that's just what I read yesterday, it could be turned off again. I haven't looked at that cesspit in well over a year.
radiorental··on X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
Right, and the outcome changes little that wasn't already known.

The interesting part of this story is why was this switched on now, by whom? Why was it briefly turned off? Was that an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle?

radiorental··on Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre
To paraphrase Ricky Jervias (and probably Richard Dawkins before him)...

He just believes in one fewer gods now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGOGH5-SCA

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