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rekabison How to buy a good car for $1000

I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.

With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.

Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.

Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.

Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.

rekabison What will our economic future look like?

I want a solarpunk future, even if it means fewer personal devices and a simpler Internet. A place where everyone has roughly equal economic potential (sub-10× between wealthiest and poorest) but everyone lives healthy, vibrant lives with plenty of resources to draw from. A post-scarcity world, if you want a label.

Unfortunately we are hurtling into a future where 80+% live lives of grinding poverty with no real viable future to hope for, while another 19% have actual options and resources, and that final 1% exist in unimaginable opulence and wealth that is built entirely upon the labour of the other 99%. As in, true parasites in every economic way.

rekabison Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

When punctuation can change the tone of an entire title.

“Why are we doing this again?” Is essentially “why are we doing this action a second time?”.

“Why are we doing this, again?” Is essentially “please repeat/re-state the reasoning for this path of action”.

A simple comma, but a significant difference.

rekabison Pixel Watch steps in if you stop breathing

I stop breathing all the time. At least once or twice a week.

Luckily I’m awake at the time, relaxed in a sitting position, and have no problem starting back up. I just get “petered out” on an exhale with my trachea fully open and unblocked, just no burning need to inhale at the moment.

Plus, I usually hit a mild panic at the 30-45s point, and force myself to inhale again.

And no, I don’t get sleep apnea. My GP has checked.

rekabison Resource Page for CCNA Preparators

On iOS, the footer obstructs the “start your journey” link with no ability to correct or bypass.

rekabison 40% of companies post fake job listings

It’s much, much higher in tech. It’s at least 60% of all job listings in general software and web development, and I have seen strong hints that it may be as much as 80% of all job ads in games development.

rekabison The Software Engineering War

It depends on the objective.

Make a graph with two axes.

Vertical is longevity. Throw-away apps at the bottom, software meant to last decades at the top.

Horizontal is how critical the software is. Ad-hoc or experimental or trivial stuff near the origin, financial, medical, or other important software that must never make a mistake to the far right.

AI can sit in the lower left. It is meant to do stuff in the lower left. Let it go nuts there, and have fun with it.

But AI cannot be allowed to touch the top right corner. Up there is the region of destroyed lives if something goes wrong. Sure, rubber-ducky things with AI, let it read the code in that corner, let it suggest optimal structures for you to build. But never let it touch code that’s sitting there.

As for the other two quadrants… “it depends” on your appetite for risk, of AI going so badly off-script that the company is destroyed trying to untangle that hairball. YMMV.

rekabison iPhone Duo has a large crease

I am cautiously optimistic, especially for people who need both a phone and a tablet in the same device, like my MiL. Certain apps like WeChat makes it extremely annoying to have more than one device.

Now if only they could make a senior’s device like this, geared to cheap price and low specs for large font sizes on a wide device with full traditional phone capabilities. Both my parents could use one, they just won’t at a premium price point.

rekabison iPhone Duo has a large crease

Get the second gen.

Either it’ll flop so hard that there will be no second gen, or a lot of issues will be corrected in that second gen.

rekabison Canadians should prepare for a 5 C hotter future, report warns

Not only that, but +4℃ is also when megafauna - any species over 45Kg (100lbs) - start to go extinct.

And that includes humans.

At that point, we’re looking at our global population free-fall cratering into the 1-2B range over 1-3 decades, at best. Worst-case is under 500M, with a full reversion back to the Bronze Age or earlier. And a continuing persistent (slower) decline down to a big fat zero.

rekabison Developer Hiring and the Market for Lemons

> I once joined a team where the TL was pretty strongly against using version control or having tests.

Not any time within the last decade, I hope. Because that’s borderline gross incompetence.

rekabison Rasora – import a recipe from any link, video, or photo

> Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid.

Now granted, it’s in-app Safari for the iOS Hack app, but still. Not great.

rekabison SK hynⅸ ru㎱ out of replacement SSDs and defaults to orig㏌al purc㏊se price refund

Am I seeing UTF-8 confusables in the title, so as to bypass janny scripts?

rekabison The Global Birth Crash

Good. Without a physical escape hatch off-planet, we are viruses that are overwhelming the little planetary Petri dish we are inhabiting, to massively deleterious effects on both ourselves as well as the global ecosystem.

While I would rather see a space elevator bringing most of humanity to offworld arcologies where we can flourish without poisoning ecosystems, we desperately need to get our on-planet population beneath 1B, and preferably beneath 500M.

And projections via the World3/2024 model show us dropping beneath 4B quite rapidly after civilization collapses in the 2040s, and suggesting a significantly non-zero probability of humanity being extinct by 2200. So we’ll get there without tech, just not in the most ideal manner.

rekabison The dementia vaccine some of us are taking without realising

In Canada, I was able to get both shots last year, when I was 52. I intend to take the Shingles vaccine again when I am in my 70s. Yes, there is a family history - my father is sliding into dementia in his late 80s.

If there is any chance, you should definitely get the vaccine when you hit 50. Earlier, if there is a risk of early-onset dementia.

rekabison I own 28,000 books – here's what I've learned

I use a nearly-abandoned piece of software called BookCrawler to track what I own so I don’t accidentally get second copies. I started using it in 2012 with my iPhone 4s, by 2017 it ran into something like a stack overflow error with the database and certain features like stats and search went titsup and never recovered.

My collection at the time was just shy of 3,000 entries. In the decade since, backups of the DB have more than doubled in size, so I know it’s grown appreciably.

What makes my collection an issue is that I collect hardcovers almost exclusively, not only for the larger print size and ease of handling, but also because hardcovers are more shelf stable. Let’s just say that I am planning to have stacks on rails - I think it’s called high density mobile shelving - in the basement, where a concrete foundation ought to be enough of a support.

rekabison The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here

Don’t know what you have been using, but my Kensington Expert Mouse is over 20 years old now, and is still going strong.

rekabison The 108-Degree Eviction

Poverty is horrifically expensive. It simultaneously extracts everything it can from you, and thus prevents you from escaping.

Almost everyone who has never been poor has no clue how violent poverty is.

rekabison Trump's flight switch indicates severity of assassination threat by Iran

The cheetoh’s paranoia is extensive.

rekabison Ask HN: Do You Feel Dehumanized?

The boogeyman du jour happens to be AI. I suspect that OP is simply not very clear, and is asking if AI adoption seems to be dehumanizing what you do.

rekabison Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?

This. In many cases, they cannot even properly articulate how AI will improve things beyond vague, meaningless, corporate-speak jargon. Most cannot even properly define AI’s place in the org in the first place. They just cannot be seen as someone who is “behind the times” or “a tech dinosaur”.

rekabison I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated

I think a single clock-output-only microcontroller would be nifty. Something where you can save settings, such as NTP servers and an all time change dates, but that’s it. Pair it with PoE Ethernet and you wouldn’t even need a power supply, only an Ethernet jack in the wall. With the right display you could make it super thin.

rekabison I Championed Prediction Markets. Look What They've Become

The only true winners in those prediction markets are the insider whales that already know what will happen.

Anyone who is not an insider is a loser.

rekabison What's True About AI

Every sentient being plays. Cats play. Dogs play. Even bees play.

And certain AI have been demonstrated to play spontaneously, albeit in limited ways.

On the flip side, only sapients demonstrate sufficient curiosity to ask questions. We’re asking questions as soon as we’re old enough to string words together, but in all the sign language experiments we have ever done, no great ape other than humans have ever asked a question.

AI has never demonstrated the curiosity that drives spontaneous question-asking.

And I think that this critical limitation - a lack of curiosity - is why current AI will never be able to exceed human creativity.

It can ape it, certainly, but it’s just the ultimate note-cribber. It imitates, it pattern-matches. It’s not actually being creative.

And that’s kind of sad.

rekabison Claude Opus 4.5 defied CEO, helped employee blow whistle about safety concerns

> “Even if the motivations were ethical, this is clearly an example of AI out of control,” lead researcher Aengus Lynch told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

For the first time ever I am frightened more by the company than by the AI.

Up until now I only saw the company as gangs of madmen looking to herd cats. Now it’s clear that they are less sane than their wildly hallucinating products.

rekabison Trump says generic drugs to face US tariffs 100% and 200% two year later

All this is going to do is eviscerate Trump’s poor and physically unhealthy voting base.

I mean, sucks to be those people. But I say let them have the day they voted for.

rekabison Are 128-bit symmetric keys secure against quantum computers?

As of the current time, our quantum computers are utilizing a hilariously low number of qBits, which severely limit the number of alternative universes that can be leveraged for calculations. As the number of qBits in use increases, the processing power expands appropriately.

As another commenter has said: it’s not if, it’s when.