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skc

1,828 karma · joined November 5, 2012

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skc··on How do traffic signals work? (2019)
Here's a surprising anecdote I've discovered living in South Africa wrt traffic lights.

When they're not working at a busy intersection in my area, the intersection effectively becomes a four way stop. And I've found that as long as everybody follows the rules, traffic actually seems to flow FASTER than when the traffic lights are actually operable.

I've timed this a few times.

skc··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 – Show and tell
Precisely what has effectively killed off the "building in public" trend that was all the rage just a two years ago.
skc··on DeepSeek Harness developer preview
Played around with it.

Does what it says on the tin. Great work.

skc··on Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
Chefs kiss would be this post having been written using AI.
skc··on Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
We're living in the golden age of the grifter
skc··on Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
My son (8 years old) is a bit of a unicorn in that he lives his devices and his books pretty much equally.

On any given day we're either telling him to put away his switch or his book because that's how engrossed he gets.

skc··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
So I've always thought what if each of our individual consciousnesses is like a radio frequency that is unique to each individual? This would explain why we regain consciousness when we wake up, because our physiology is locked to whatever that frequency happens to be.

Under this model, 'you' don't actually reside inside your skull. Instead, your brain is just biological hardware translating a non-local broadcast, meaning our core identity exists independently of the body.

That unique frequency "fingerprint" is close enough in pattern to every other human being that we're able to "understand" each other a process that might manifests in interesting but complex ways eg love and empathy

Bats might be a whole frequency band up!

skc··on Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone
Many years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.

A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing

skc··on Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
I was way too young when I read this book. Absolutely devoured it and had nightmares for a long time.
skc··on I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook
He could write the same exact post but swap the word "Mac" for "Windows" and the comment section here would be markedly different.
skc··on CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes
Battery and solar panel advancements have been the most interesting story in tech for going on a decade in my opinion.

Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.

skc··on Cloudflare Email Service
Yep, and I'm both a Cloudflare and Resend customer.

I like Resend, a lot, but this is probably something I can't pass up, especially if it does what it says on the tin

skc··on Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth
It's humbling to see this image. I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to see this from the perspective of those astronauts.
skc··on Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating
Because Windows works just fine for me.

I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.

Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.

skc··on Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem
That's actually pretty cool. What made you think of doing this in the first place?
skc··on Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform
As long as they keep using Macs, iPhones and Apple watches.

That'll show those pesky Americans.

skc··on Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
Really disappointing. A lot of us have always considered Ars Technica to be the last of a dying breed of ultra serious, no-nonsense professionalism.

Obviously, we were rocked by the DrPizza scandal years ago...and now this.

Sobering.

skc··on Bitcoin tumbles below $70K, heavy losses in cryptocurrencies in last three weeks
Hasn't wild volatility always proved to be the very nature of Bitcoin?
skc··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
The irony of building 'sovereign' software on top of Windows and MacOS.

Without a hardware or OS pivot, this feels less like independence and more like empty posturing.

skc··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
Apple have enough customer behaviour data at hand to fully understand that there is very little they can't get away with.

So why not maximize profit?

skc··on Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
Still think AI shines here. I find ffmpeg commands pretty arcane. Nowadays I just ask an LLM to generate the commands I need, test, and I'm done.
skc··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Bluesky still chugging along.

Just saying.

skc··on Mysterious drones have been spotted at airports across Europe
The fact that these drones are only appearing in NATO aligned countries makes it seem pretty obvious to me that it's one of two possibilities.

1) Russian sabre-rattling

2) NATO countries running "secret" drills in public in anticipation of 1)

The UFO community is of course running with a third option that doesn't warrant any seriousness.

skc··on What do we do if SETI is successful?
There's a wonderful scifi novel based on these themes, called "The Sparrow"

Pretty harrowing reading.

skc··on What do we do if SETI is successful?
If SETI is successful it would be a fascinating to sit back and observe the deeply religious.
skc··on Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agreeing new rules
Maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough but isn't this "just fine" for the current administration? From their perspective what exactly is the downside to this?
skc··on Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model
How likely is it that the end game becomes that we stop writing apps for actual human users and instead sites become massive walls of minified text against a black screen.
skc··on Samsung taking market share from Apple in U.S. as foldable phones gain momentum
I was sceptical about this for factor seeing as it seemed like a gimmicky throwback to the early to mid 2000s.

But honestly, now that I've played around with Samsungs offerings I get it. Back in the day phones had quite a bit of personality, and Samsung really nailed that aspect.

skc··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
I wonder how quickly the gunman will be found. I've always wondered if the authorities would ever be able to find someone who patterned themselves after a character like The Jackal.
skc··on Claude Code is all you need
Looks like the definition of boilerplate will continue to shift up the chain
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