red369

I agree with what you said about brakes overcoming the engine. I've seen tests which show it works on even monstrously over-powered cars, but it can feel like it's not working and if the driver reacts wrongly to that, then it may no longer work.

I think stopping the power from going to the wheels needs to be an easy option. I wish there was more importance given to being able to easily do this.

I think the two options are shifting to neutral, or turning off the engine. I tested in a late-00s automatic BMW, and you had to hold the start/stop button for what felt like a very long time to turn the engine off if the car was in Drive. In an emergency, I think most people would give up long before it turned off. In that car, it was easy to change to neutral though, so I don't have a criticism about that design. What concerns me is cars with the same approach for the start/stop button, but where it is hard to get to neutral. I think in the Toyotas which had unintended acceleration issues, it wasn't easy/intuitive.

Edit: Another comment reminded me of something I forgot to mention above. You don't want turning off the engine to be the first resort because you lose power steering, and eventually, power assisted brakes.

I was with a friend in a 5L V8 Mercedes, and we were doing a quick drive around the block after some sort of maintenance. He floored the accelerator - I can't remember why that was required, except I assume it wasn't. I assumed he was only going to do it momentarily, but the car rapidly reached, and passed, stupid speeds for that road. Just as I started to say something about preserving lives of us, and anyone else on the road, he suddenly shifted to neutral and brought the car to a stop with the engine screaming away at the redline. He then calmly reached down, unjammed the accelerator, and then continued driving back home.

That car was automatic, but he drove cars with manual transmissions a lot, so that would make it an obvious thing to do. I think in some of the famous unintended acceleration crashes, it has been unclear whether the person tried to change to neutral. A lot of newer cars have a much less intuitive method of doing so as well.

There's nothing as good in this regard as cars with manual transmissions though, in terms of having a dedicated pedal which disconnects the engine from the wheels, which you practice constantly during daily use.

I've had that recurring nightmare too - I forgot about that! I've only had a little real world experience with it. I'm curious if anyone has had the nightmare without having experienced it in real life.

I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster.

Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.

I think you're more likely talking about the growing divide between people's viewpoints, but the USA always made more sense to me when I viewed it as union of 50 different countries, with some over-arching laws over the top. More similar to the EU than to a single country.

In the US, Apple still release refurbished iPhone 13 Minis every now and again. In case you haven't heard, I believe they are new battery, new screen, new case. Basically a new phone, but with a plain white box. There are sites that allow you to receive notifications when they are available again. Apple may have finally stopped selling the 13 Mini - I don't follow it anymore. For a while, I keen enough to get one, I was going to use a freight-forwarder to ship one from the US, but they didn't come up while I was waiting and when my phone died, I was in a hurry so I bough a used iPhone 13 mini instead of waiting.

6 months ago, I submitted to HN thinking it would be helpful to the people holding out for one. The submission was flagged, so I haven't tried again - I suppose it just seemed like advertising. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43337518

If you're outside the US, it's a lot harder to get hold of those Apple refurbished phones. Actually, I heard something I found interesting when I was buying a different phone in one of the shops that refurbish themselves. They had an Apple-refurbished iPhone 11 - basically a new iPhone 11, around a year ago! The person at the shop said that when the devices get really old, Apple start selling their refurbished phones to those kind of shops, instead of selling them on their own website.

They thought it would be a year or two before iPhone 13s turned up that route. I don't know much about how accurate any of that was, but I've always wanted to buy a refurbished phone from Apple so I found it interesting.

I think there are still Nokia branded "dumb" phones being released. It seems they are now developed by HMD Global, another Finnish company who brought the Nokia mobile phone business. Seems like they still run the same software. They might only be widespread in some parts of the world though. Perhaps not available at all where you are.

Here's one, which is some sort of retro-revival. I've just chosen that because there is a Wikipedia page for it.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210_(2024)

There are quite a few other examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HMD_Global_products

Your comments, and your other reply to the parent post I was replying to, really resonated with me.

I think by default I imagine things the same way as you - not images, not words, but just knowing how something is. I think perhaps that is similar to what I called remembering. When I think of something that way, I can think of, for example, a whole house. But I don't see anything.

But, if I try to picture something instead, as an actual image, I can actually picture smaller specifics parts of something. I think when I do that I am actually doing what people are talking about when they say they are picturing something, or seeing something in their mind's eye. All I get then is like an outline, or faded details, and I can only do small details at a time. Between a 3 and 4 in the Wikipedia representation of aphantasia. It sounds to me like you aren't able to switch to seeing something at all.

A while ago, after reading about someone curing their aphantasia, I thought about this a lot, and I think at the time I suddenly remembered something that made me think I could picture things clearly when I was a child. I also know that I see things when I dream, so I decided I should be able to get the ability back.

I used to try quite often to picture things in my mind, and would do some of the tricks like having eyes open a crack, and just waiting to recognise things in the patterns on my eyelids, etc. Occasionally I would suddenly see something as if it were really there. Like a 2 on the scale. The one thing I remember now is that I saw an entire chair, well enough that I could have sketched it. Have you tried often, or I guess practiced?

Edit: I tried some of the things this person described. They took a Better Living Through Chemistry approach that I didn't want to try though, so I skipped all drugs/chemicals/teas:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/vrih14/how_...

Have you considered the iPhone 13 mini?

It's not the size of an iPhone 8 without the bezel, but it is smaller than the iPhone 8 (except that it is 1/3 of a mm thicker).

You probably already know, but the 3rd Gen SE (same size as iPhone 8) and the 13 mini are both still receiving the latest updates.

Not doubting your experience, but I can't see a single ad using Safari on iPhone.

I was really impressed with my setup, but after disabling content blockers (Firefox Focus), and turning off using Mullvad's free DNS proxy service, still nothing!

Perhaps the author turned the ads off since you visited?

I've been trying to work out for a while how much aphantasia I have, and I think it might help to give more detail to your instruction, and then your follow-up question.

If you said that to me, I would imagine the exterior of my house. But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different. I would think of, and sort of see different details of the house at different times. Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.

I've tried a few times to actually _see_ something in my mind, and there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly. So much more vividly than usual, that I remember thinking that if this is what other people can do easily, then sketching must be far easier than for me - you'd just copying down what you see in your head!

Edit: I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it. I picture things with less vividness/detail, so I'm not sure whether I really see them.

Ironically, the Wikipedia image is not loading for me right now, so I can't see that either :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

I frequently forget that the 2 nm naming has nothing to do with the physical size anymore. I hate that naming system.

From Wikipedia: Node name Gate pitch Metal pitch Year 5 nm 51 nm 30 nm 2020 3 nm 48 nm 24 nm 2022 2 nm 45 nm 20 nm 2025 1 nm 40 nm 16 nm 2027

All of the examples you gave (which I agree with, btw!), are generative AI, whereas I assume radiology would benefit more from the Machine Learning (ML), image in -> black-box ML decides whether it matches pattern -> verdict out, type of AI.

I suppose first of all, is that generally agreed? People aren't expecting a LLM to give a radiology opinion, the same as way that you can feed in a PDF or an image into ChatGPT and ask it something about it, are they?

I'm interested whether most people here have a higher opinion of ML than of the generative AIs, in terms of giving a reliably useful output. Or do a lot of you think that these also just create so much checking it would be easier to just have a human do the original work?

I think it's probably worth excluding self-driving from my above question, since that is a particularly difficult area to agree anything on.

These?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

The first photo in Wikipedia is great. I wonder how often foreigners bought them and then lugged them back home to have in their garden.

I'm going to expose my ignorance here, but I thought mAh/Ah was not a good measure for comparing storage of quite different devices, because it doesn't take into account voltage. This is fine for comparing Li-ion devices, because they use the same voltage, but I understood that using watt-hours was therefore more appropriate for apples-to-apples comparisons for devices with different wattages.

Am I missing something? Does the CPU/GPU/APU doing this calculation on servers/PCs run the same wattage as mobile devices?

This seems like the video that the GP post was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF2O4l1JprI

Linus is surprised that fast charging does not heat the battery as much as expected.

I interpreted that "length of charging doing more damage than fast charging" meant that slow charging was worse, because the battery spends more time charging, but I don't think this is stated in the video. In the video, Linus confirms that it is the high state of charge that does the damage and that trying to keep the state of charge as close to 50ish % is best. The conclusion that fast charging is better for the battery, is because you are more likely to do it when awake, and can stop the charging once it reaches whatever percentage you require (but the damage really starts to increase above 80%.

I really hate this! Long ago, I had a quarterlight window smashed because someone broke into my 20 year old Toyota Corolla to steal a 4L, but half empty bottle of engine oil and a street directory. Obviously the engine oil wasn't expensive, and no-one used street directories anymore, even back then.

This was in nice suburb in New Zealand, so it was a bit of a surprise. The replacement window cost many times the value of what they took, and I was finding small pieces of glass for a while afterwards despite careful vacuuming.

Since then I'm more careful that there is nothing removable visible at all through windows. Ideally, anyone looking through the window should think I am the kind of compulsive person that carries every single thing inside each night. Unfortunately, the trick to making that work almost requires it to be true.

Even if the internal USB-C ports which the expansion cards plug into fail, which to me also seems like a long time away, the mainboard is designed to be replaceable so I think you'd be in a better position than with another laptop with a failed power plug.

There are also clips that hold the expansion cards in place. My HDMI one started coming out when I unplug the cable even from really early on, even without pressing the button which should be required to remove the card. That is another way they could fail - in getting loose enough that they weren't securely held in place to be useable. The internal USB-C port would still apply some force in holding them in place though. In my case, this is not related to the socket, but to the card. I'll need to open it up and take a closer look, but hopefully they're designed so the cards fail long before whatever is in the chassis which holds them in. Plastic on the cards vs metal on the chassis would seem robust to me. Otherwise, if the mechanism fails on the chassis side, that would be a much bigger replacement.

Disclosure: I was a big supporter of Framework and bought an early 13 inch (11th gen Intel). I would no longer recommend them due to the mounting list of problems I've had, and despite their responses always being friendly and prompt, they are unable to send any replacement parts, because I've moved to a non-supported country and there is no way they can send anything to the maritime capital of the world. I try to be neutral in my comments, but sarcasm creeps into my disclosures.

I think I agree with the hacker new hivemind, but I think I formed the opinion separately. I did a few small transactions with bitcoin ages ago, and it was a huge pain. Buying the bitcoin was painful, and then I couldn't send an exact amount, it's better to receive change to a different address, and the fees weren't as cheap as I expected for small amounts.

I often hear this has been solved with additional layers, and I see that you mentioned Ethereum instead of bitcoin. Is that significantly easier? $0.25 is not bad for $10, so the fee seems fine. I'm accepting money in an envelope as a solution, and that costs more, but I'm keen to hear whether this would have been easier.

Hmm - I've just seen that postage is $1.55, so >15% of the amount. I'm not sure that is a reasonable fee. I'm deducting $2 from what I'm sending! Lucky there are $2 notes here.

Of course, if not stated I suppose it would be reasonable to assume international bets are are in USD, but it's close enough, and this feels like it's only just holding up anyway.

And most importantly, I think sending $8 is funnier than sending $10.

Ha! Fine, it will have to wait until I'm next near a post office with time to kill, otherwise it's not convenient. I think you'll allow that "not an unreasonable amount of effort" could imply "convenient".

I think the post offices where I am only sell the envelopes in bulk, and buying a pack will probably add an unreasonable 20% - 30% of the amount, but I'll concede that most people will probably have an envelope from a bank and a glue-stick lying around.

This is very off-topic, but sending something to an address which I can't tell is complete, without a name, has reminded me of something I find interesting.

A few years ago, my mother received a postcard from a friend who didn't have her address handy. She sent it with just my mother's name (first and last), the city, and country (New Zealand). It took some time, but it reached her! In NZ, "city" is used for some pretty small places - the population is only around 70,000. But I'm still very impressed with the effort to deliver that to her. Especially for a postcard - even internationally the postage on those is not a lot!

I thought the draw-a-circle level was even more solidly in the class of much, much easier for a bot than a human. Perhaps in rejects if you draw a circle that scores 100%.

Also, did people manage to draw a circle that passed without cheating in some way?

39 - I'm saving it for when I have time to cheat and show images from the net.

I'm quite surprised that for a moment I thought about genuinely doing it. I like neal.fun a lot! I think a few other people did show their face?

Level 38 reminded me of another fantastic item from the same creator:

https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/

My favourite so far is Level 38: Tough Decisions. I like the solution, but I also liked the dumbness it brought out in me along the way.

When there's no limit to tries, and iteration is quick, it seems I revert to "I'll just quickly try this dumb approach, and if that doesn't work then I'll use my brain...". Was that only me?

I've tried to be a bit vague in my example thought process below, to not ruin it for anyone who hasn't tried this particular captcha yet. It's probably (even more) unrelatable if you haven't tried this one yet.

"Perhaps I chose the wrong option at the beginning - I'll try the other..."

And then, even worse: "Maybe I need to back into the parking spot - that's dumb, but I'll try it first and then think afterwards. Oh, it's easiest to back into the spot if I go around the centre bush, but that means basically choosing both options. Anyway, I'll quickly try that first..."

Thanks for bringing up that LinusTechsTips video - I'll try and track it down. I would not have expected that conclusion. I've already said in another comment on this thread that I'd expect the opposite!

I suppose the previous comment was likely saying more compared to not charging overnight, and fast charging in the morning.

I would also have guessed the slow charging was better, but that is an uninformed opinion. I'd be quite interested in what people think.

An extra dilemma - often if I'm around the house or the office all day, I'll just plug in my phone every time I see it reach about 70%, and unplug when it reaches 80% (this is easier to spot if you have low-power mode on for an iPhone because the screen lights up at 80% when low-power mode is turned off). Is it worse to do that 2 or 3 times, compared to just charging to 100% and leaving it on the charger all day. Is being at 100% all day, but not using any (fractions of) charge cycles, worse than doing a few shallow discharges?

Of course, I don't think it really matters, but it's the kind of thing that I wonder and then do when I remember.

I think when companies found out that they had an issue with their Payroll software calculations, they mostly tried to solve it as quickly as possible, to put a line in the sand - from that point onwards at least, no additional errors were being made. But they still had many years in the past, of issues which needed to be fixed.

I think what you're proposing probably would have worked for reducing the communication issues in the future for any employees who left after that. I didn't hear of anyone who did that, but that definitely doesn't mean it didn't happen. Likely no one thought of it because I would guess most people didn't expect it to take as long as it did to fix. That the people who left while the recalculation was going on would just be a few more compared to everyone who had left in the previous 7 or 10 or 15 years (I think different companies came to different opinions for the time period they needed to retrospectively fix).

Thank you for doing God's work. I wish I'd bought a Firefox phone - I would have been burned, but some people need to be for us to get anywhere. I tried to make up for it by buying an early generation FrameWork laptop.

Edit: If you notice that this does not match with another comment I've made saying I wouldn't buy this because of the size, I can only offer as a defence that I'm also trying to vote with my wallet about the size of phones so I'm torn.

I think it's probably better on balance to have a small phone that does everything that it should perfectly, and live with the compromise of living with the walled garden, while still being small to easily hold and encourage me to go and use a more appropriate device than something I've pulled from my pocket for any task that requires staring at a screen.

> This is a Linux phone that actually works, running Debian. It has a battery that competes with the runtime of any modern phone. It has a snappy UI and can reliably make calls. Already it’s the best Linux phone in the world, just on that basis.

"Shut up and take my mo... 170mm x 76 mm, 201g? Sigh - never mind!"

Sorry for adding one more awful comment. If they make a mini version, I will absolutely put my money where my mouth is.

Having the displays on the outside when folded removes all the durability advantages of closing the phone with the screens inside.

I don't even know if that affects my opinion of whether you'll be right or not, because putting glass on the back is definitely more fragile than machining the phone out of a solid block of aluminium. Am I remembering this incorrectly? Was that the unibody MacBooks? Regardless, I found the aluminium backs a lot less fragile, but we all gave them up pretty easily for wireless charging.

Is there something equivalent to longbets.org, but for bets which are about matters that aren't important to society? I'd take you up on the bet - not because I think you're wrong, but because I think it's fun and fairly harmless gambling that is unlikely to lead to either of us developing a habit - but has easily sending small amounts of money internationally been solved yet?

I'll bet $10 it hasn't! That I can't send $10 from one country to another, without paying fees that are a significant proportion of that amount, or needing to put an unreasonable amount of effort into setting up an account with a 3rd party service or doing the transfer with that service.

And the two bets above are a bad look, so I'll also bet $20 that you can't get me doing any more gambling by the end of the day.