rgovostes

A business analyst friend of mine and SQL novice was given a multi-tabbed editor like this (edit: apparently it was not this brand-new app). We found it difficult to track which query and results tabs are linked, whether they've been refreshed since the query was edited, whether queries in a script have been executed out of order, etc. Hopefully there are ways to address those usability issues.

I don't know if it exists in other models, but the Lincoln Nautilus steering wheel features thumb trackpads. On touch it pops up radial menus on a display in the driver's primary line of sight. Although I find the wrap-around display a bit much, the trackpads are an intuitive and thoughtful compromise to the matrix of physical buttons. (The infotainment screen suffers from the same problems as other vehicles, however.)

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2024-...

Amazingly, The New Yorker wrote an article about it: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thor...

Related: How Apple’s ad targetting works https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...

Hah, in California I used to have HX.

The short plate came back to bite me: Years after I had moved to another state, an automatic license plate reader on a toll road (91 Express Lanes) in Los Angeles misread someone else's plate as mine. It was kafkaesque: My public records request for photographic evidence was blocked because, if I was correct that the offending driver was not me, the law prohibits the release of records revealing others' driving patterns.

The other plates available when I did a similar search were BO and IR. In retrospect IR wasn't a bad choice.

This is the lord’s work. It’s ridiculous that in 2025 my $500 gaming PC GPU cannot tell the receiver to change inputs. Even my Apple TV, which is considered a model citizen here, steals the receiver’s input every few hours if I have another device active.

No: I did not say that they sell maps of anyone's home.

They floated the idea of "shar[ing] maps for free" with other companies in a Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-irobot-strategy-idUSKBN1A... I am skeptical it ever happened.

> [iRobot CEO] Angle said iRobot would not sharing data [sic] without its customers' permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.

The "sharing data" here meant sharing data with other brands' smart home devices but appears misinterpreted as "sharing data with advertisers/data brokers/etc." Say Sonos wanted to make a hi-fi system that optimized audio to your room layout based on Roomba's map.

Upon careful re-reading of the article, I think what the CEO was saying was that they were pursuing becoming the spatial backend for Alexa / Google Home / HomeKit, but the journalist wrote Amazon / Google / Apple, which makes it seem more about advertising data collection than about smart home technology.

(Evidence that this is the correct interpretation: Facebook, despite being a giant data harvesting and advertising operation, was not listed as a potential partner, because they do not have a smart home platform.)

A simpler signal: Did I buy the $250 Roomba 105 or the $900 Roomba Max 705?

One of the privacy fears stoked about iRobot years ago was about them "selling maps of your home to the highest bidder" for advertising purposes. E.g., https://gizmodo.com/roombas-next-big-step-is-selling-maps-of...

The premise still strikes me as a ridiculous one: Am I possibly a more affluent customer because there is a high pile rug under the coffee table? How much would Charmin pay to know I have two rooms with tiled floors?

What iRobot actually suggested was more mundane: that there could hypothetically exist a protocol for smart devices to share a spatial understanding of the home, and that their existing robot was in a favorable position to provide the map. The CEO talking about it like a business opportunity rather than a feature invited the negative reception.

It didn't help that a few years later, photos collected by development units in paid testers' homes for ML training purposes were leaked by Scale AI annotators (akin to Mechanical Turk workers). This again became "Roomba is filming you in the bathroom" in the mind of the public.

The privacy risk seemed entirely hypothetical—there was no actual consumer harm, only vague speculation about what the harm could be, and to my knowledge the relevant features never even existed. And yet the fear of Alexa having a floorplan of your home could have been great enough to play a role in torpedoing the Amazon acquisition.

Aside from having parts available, I was unexpectedly impressed that my RoboRock self-emptying dock (c. 2023) was clearly designed for painless serviceability. The ducts are easily accessed via removable panels, and you need only a Phillips screwdriver.

That said, the performance of the robot certainly degraded over time, and I haven't identified the cause to my satisfaction. Obstacle avoidance needs work (especially for charging cables left dangling off the couch), and the map is frustrating to edit and seems to degenerate over a 6 month period.

It seems he moved on to a different project instead:

> In 2017 I crossed the Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Europe (Iceland) with skis and a sled in 15 days.

Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?

Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:

> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah

Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.

I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.

I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)

They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...

A guest logged into Wi-Fi on a Vizio of mine and there was conveniently no way to disconnect/forget it without a factory reset back to motion smoothing hell.

Does the search feature work for you? Mine gives me about 2 seconds to enter a search term, but once it has fetched results for the partial input, it keeps reverting the search field as I try to enter more, even if I delete to try again.

I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.

Awesome. I refer to https://bourdain.greg.technology/#food-im-thinking-about about once a year. One of my favorite vacations was going to a different hawker stall on his list each night in Singapore. Unsurprisingly, his picks are all pretty good, and #1 is justified in crowning the list.

I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate <span style="transform: scale(<random>, <random>)">c</span>, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.

The technique applied is not randomly selecting a different typeface per paragraph, but tweaking the glyph shapes when a character is repeated. Glancing at the LibreOffice extension, it seems to slightly vary CharScaleWidth by 90–110% and CharEscapementHeight by 97–100% of the base height.

Emphasizing a central concept/theme is common with Japanese brands, restaurants, events, etc. The translation is often slightly peculiar.

For example the Osaka Expo theme is "Designing Future Society for Our Lives". Or the retail store f.k.a. Tokyu Hands says, "Our concept is 'Create your own life in your own way with what is available within reach.'"

I was working for a marine biologist applying computer vision to the task of counting migrating river herring. The data set was lousy, with background movement, poor foreground/background separation, inconsistent lighting, and slow exposures that created blurry streaks. Moreover, the researchers had posted the frames to some citizen science platform and asked volunteers to tag each fish with a single point—sufficient for counting by hand, but basically useless for object detection.

In desperation I turned to Mechanical Turk to have the labels redone as bounding boxes, with some amount of agreement between labelers. Even then, results were so-so, with many workers making essentially random labels. I had to take another pass, flipping rapidly through thousands of frames with low confidence scores, which gave me nausea not unlike seasickness.

Suppose you always want to be running the latest iOS release, but you want to replace your phone as infrequently as possible. You would "only" have to have purchased 4 iPhones since 2007:

    | Model     | Launch date        | Obsoleted by | Price 
    |-----------|--------------------|--------------|------
    | iPhone    | June 29, 2007      | iOS 4        | $399 (*price cut)
    | iPhone 4  | June 24, 2010      | iOS 8        | $599
    | iPhone 6  | September 19, 2014 | iOS 13       | $649
    | iPhone 11 | September 13, 2019 | -            | $699

Adjusted for inflation, the total for these phones is $3,287 excluding carrier contracts. Assuming the iPhone 11 will be obsoleted by iOS 27 in September 2026, this costs you about $14.29/mo.

> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.

This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.

The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).

The last code block scrolls, by the way. It's 166 kB.

Note that S and K are curried functions which take one argument at a time. Further reading: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36321/

I thought that, in light of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45621067, we're only a few days from seeing the solution. However, the auction now reads

> Upon being notified, the Smithsonian immediately sealed Sanborn's archives for 50 years to protect Sanborn's intellectual property rights.

Sanborn actually showed off some of his worksheets during a PBS interview years ago, which I assume are the same documents later given to the Smithsonian. At one point I looked into buying the B-roll footage to take a closer look at them, but I discovered enterprising Kryptos sleuths had already done so years before.

I encountered an interesting snag with the new UI while scrolling through Slack. Suddenly the glass Huddle button was glowing with a golden-yellow hue which drew my eye, but I wasn't sure why, it didn't seem like anyone had started a call...

It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control.

There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation.

Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)

There's also an open source implementation of the Riven game engine for modern macOS, https://github.com/jfroy/rivenx. Though the Myst series has since been re-released.

As a teenager I reached out to the authors of RoboWar and asked if I could have the source code to help port it to Mac OS X. A trifling detail I omitted was that I had no clue how to write C, whoops. How hard could it possibly be?

Nonetheless, I got it on SourceForge and it seems a later maintainer ported it to Windows. https://sourceforge.net/projects/robowar/files/Original%20Ro...

I also received the sources to Despair from Lloyd Burchill, which I was similarly unequipped to port. But unfortunately I didn't upload it anywhere.

There's also the game engine World Builder by Bill Appleton (of SuperCard fame), which Alexei Svitkine re-implemented in Java at https://github.com/asvitkine/wage-engine. This was used by several puzzle-adventure games. One I remember fondly is A Mess of Trouble by Ray Dunakin, which has been separately ported to modern macOS at http://www.amessotrouble.com/.

I'm hopeful this makes Nvidia take aarch64 seriously for Jetson development. For the past several years Mac-based developers have had to run the flashing tools in unsupported ways, in virtual machines with strange QEMU options.

How does the platform even allow a single tap on an ad to install an app?

Edit: Discussed somewhat here https://www.benedelman.org/applovin-permissions/. Seems like it's abetted by garbage from the carrier.

Something for iOS to look forward to?