steelframe

Or even an HN comment, for that matter.

No doubt it's anything but perfect, but I can give anecdata that my M1 just slept overnight while not plugged in, and I had 99% charge just now when I opened it up to check HN.

My daughter recently left me with her old M1 Macbook Air when she went to college. I decided to give Fedora Asahi Remix a try. It was great seeing that the install process was a simple "pipe curl to sh" from a domain I suppose I have to trust anyway. The most technical part of the install was making sure I waited long enough for the machine to shut down and then holding the power button until "Loading startup options…” appeared on the screen, popping in my local macOS username/password a handful of times along the way while the scripts did their thing.

To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.

That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.

I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.

This is why I pulled the fuse on the Data Communications Module (DCM) on my car. The device that transmits the telemetry simply doesn't get any juice.

What does "use it too much" even mean for someone who is sight-impaired and who needs to use it every time?

I own my own domain in the .us TLD, and I've been using it for my email for the past 20 years. When I applied for an "Electronic Travel Authorisation" (ETA) to enter Great Britain earlier this year the app flat-out rejected my email address as invalid.

Usually, when that sort of thing happens, I just choose to take my business elsewhere or use my time in a different way. However it really ups the ante when a nation-state refuses entry based on that category of technical incompetence.

> A quick search suggests that the most expensive education in the world is something like $100k.

I have a kid in an American university right now, and a quick search of my bank account statements confirms that there are far more expensive educations in the world.

Meanwhile Qwen3.8 27B got both the 'f's and the 'i's questions right.

Gastroenterologists generally categorize feces into ~7 categories. They can be indicators of a variety of dietary deficencies, including dehydration or insufficient fiber intake. Others can be indicators of a variety of medical issues, up to an including colon cancer. Ubiquitous smart toilets scanning and categorizing our feces would move the needle of overall public health and well-being.

I recently had to set up a new Android device for work. Since I keep all my personal accounts separate from my work accounts, I needed to create a new Google account on that phone. I ended up paying $8 for a month of the cheapest service I could find just to get a phone number so I could create that account.

This is exactly why Amazon has also been doing this acquisition and destructive scanning of millions of books for some time now.

Just like BSD is dying. Netcraft confirms it.

Apple isn't exactly competing with China.

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

I owned only EVs and PHEVs since 2012. The GR Corolla was so compelling that it pulled me back to an ICE. I had forgotten what it felt like to have FUN while driving. The biggest feature for me is that I could pull the DCM fuse and not get constantly spied on. The next-best feature is that I can disable the center screen. And I love my physical buttons.

I've heard it said that Oracle doesn't have customers. They have hostages.

I started on a faulty 1200 BAUD modem that would only connect at 300 BAUD. And I used to load my programs off a cassette tape.

If we keep this up, someone's bound to jump in with a brag about memory cores and punchcards.

I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.

For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.

Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).

With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.

The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.

Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.

This isn't really news to many people with multiple sclerosis (MS). In fact, neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) is often misdiagnosed as MS. I think it was 10 or so years ago that a movement swept over the MS community where people were flying overseas to get allogeneic haematopoietic stem-cell transplants (HSCT). Medical clinics in Israel, India, and Russia (among others) were actively treating foreign patients with MS with HSCT. The Multiple Sclerosis Society has had an info page on it for years now. The main reason you don't see people with MS lining up for HSCT these days is because of how effective the drugs released around the year 2020 that target B-cells have been. Clinical and symptomatic results from the new FDA-approved drugs tend to be about as good, and they're much, much safer. And you don't have to fly to some sketch practice in Moscow to get your bone marrow chemically burnt to a crisp followed by an attempt to re-seed it with your stem cells harvested before the chemo. All the while you're praying you don't get an infection while you wait to see if your immune system successfully reboots from the stem cells.

That said, for the very few people who don't respond to traditional drugs, HSCT is better than the alternative, which would be a horrific steady loss of function as your immune system chews up your central nervous system.

Makes me wonder what the value of a PhD is.

Volkswagon has no jurisdiction over how I manage my fob, which is the client for the vehicle's unlock and start API. Once you hand a bearer token to me that governs full access to the vehicle, including the accelerator and steering wheel, it's not your job to babysit whether I chose to use it while drunk or hand it over to someone else.

I can't even manually resolve the merge conflicts alone that happen between my code and that of everyone else submitting code at agent speed in my team's repo. So long as I have financial obligations toward my family, I cannot opt out. I must use these things.

The most plausible near-term path is probably micropayments embedded invisibly in AI agents. Your agent that has learned what you value and can make a reasonable decision to allow a micropayment for certain content pays on your behalf without requiring a conscious decision each time, eliminating the mental transaction cost problem entirely. It's the mental transaction cost that arguably led to the failure of the micro payment model back in the early 2000s.

Although the cynical part of me says that this will result in malicious actors trying to trick agents into giving out a bunch of micro payments. There are counter defenses that can help detect and compensate for that, but perhaps the best we will be able to do is prompt user with the default agent recommendation.

I had an eerily similar situation in a behavioral interview I had with a company where I had a very strong internal referral from a very senior person. I didn't have any time at all to prepare for the interview and was super stressed out that week because of a cascade of work and personal problems all hitting me at once. In hindsight I probably should have asked for the interview to be postponed by a couple of weeks.

In short, I hadn't prepared at all for the interview loop, so I didn't have any of the standard responses "ready to go" for the behavioral interview. We ended up meandering into a bunch of stuff from my personal life, and I didn't have the presence of mind to course-correct it myself. It didn't help that the interviewer actively encouraged me to keep talking about the personal non-work experiences. I got the impression that the interviewer was self-deluded into thinking that they could do some kind of psychological evaluation of me, even though they clearly (in hindsight) had no formal education or training in doing that sort of thing.

Anyway, same story. After a few days, generic rejection letter, and no more communications. I can only imagine my interview loop feedback must have been horrific to overcome what I am certain was a strong internal referral by a very senior and well-respected employee at said company who I had worked with closely for several years (and he'd sung my praises at our previous company many a time when giving perf feedback). I keep replaying the behavioral interview in my mind and realize I must have come across really awkwardly to the hiring manager. In the end I felt much like the author of this blog post did, personally rather than professionally rejected.

I'm resolved no longer suffering pseudo-psychological behavioral interviews. If I get any questions that I feel cross the line between professional and personal, I'll firmly respond that I do not feel comfortable discussing non-work-related issues in a job interview.

I like to ride my bicycle with my friends in rides organized by the (Pacific Northwest) Cascade Bicycle Club. They require that I solve a Google reCAPTCHA in order to register for a ride. Google is already completely locking me out from being able to do that. When I try to click on the squares to select whatever items it's asking, it indefinitely loops. When I try using the audio version, it completely blocks me from using it saying that there has been suspicious activity.

That means that I ride alone these days. I did not renew my membership this year.

The last time I experienced something like this was when Facebook starting being the only way to participate in certain events. Back when that happened, I simply counted myself as excluded and did other things with my time and money.

In my experience the overwhelming majority of services permit me to change my email address.

This guy just went to federal prison on a 25-year sentence: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Syonyk

https://www.idoc.idaho.gov/content/prisons/resident-client-s...

Some of his blog posts in the past several months also highlight the dismal state of prison tech, which I suppose is on-point for this thread:

https://www.sevarg.net/

> so how on Earth do you expect to realize any of these desires?

The same way this sort of thing has always been accomplished: Government regulation.

Vote, write reps, donate to the ACLU and EFF, socialize.

The last time I was in SF I used Waymo to get around town and Uber to get to the airport.

The Waymo rides were near-perfect. At one point when a delivery truck was blocking 3 lanes, the vehicle assertively merged over into the free lane to get around. A couple of people on e-bikes were all over the place, but at no point did I feel that the vehicle put them in any kind of danger. Starts, stops, and turns were all smooth. End-to-end time was good, the ride itself was comfortable, and the price was reasonable.

On the other hand the Uber driver picked me up in a Tesla that had regen cranked up. They continually accelerated and decelerated the entire way to the airport, rocking the car back and forth the whole time, as if it were a nervous habit to continually press and release the accelerator or something. I felt sick by the time we got to my terminal.

For me at this point, technology like Waymo can't carpet every metropolitan area quickly enough.

One caveat: I should be able to use it (and, hence, pay for it) anonymously.

Whenever I start feeling smug about how cagey I've been about data brokers in the past, I remind myself that enough of my relatives have handed over their DNA to operations like 23andMe so as to render my efforts futile.

It's not just those without smartphones who are penalized. It's those without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and spying imposed by Apple or Google on their devices.

I run GrapheneOS on an older Pixel. It does everything I need it to do: alarms, offline maps and navigation, end-to-end encrypted communications, podcasts, audiobooks, music, photos, weather, and even phone calls. All without any DRM or spying.

Now let's talk about the downsides in this article: shopping discounts, parking, entertainment, fast food, and banking.

Shopping discounts: The deal is that they get to track me and advertise to me, and they cut some percentage off a purchase here and there. No deal. I've discovered so many great products by moving away from big retail shops that engage in this kind of activity. I mostly shop at Trader Joe's, which has no coupon/discount/loyalty nonsense. For the occasional trip to another supermarket, I simply key in <local area code>-867-5309. Works every time.

Parking: I ride my bicycle or take public transportation almost everywhere, so parking is a moot point for me. But for the rare occasion when I drive to a place where I have to pay for parking, most everything accepts a credit card. If it doesn't, most everything else has a website that I can go to in Vanadium or Waterfox. It's actually very rare that I find I actually have no choice but to download and install a DRM'd app in order to park somewhere. In fact I don't recall that ever actually happening to me. Not to say that's not a possibility in the future.

Entertainment: I despise large crowds, and almost everything that's exclusively done through Ticketmaster et al. is of absolutely no interest to me. If I'm not sitting down in a cozy venue within 10-15 or so feet from the performers, I'm just not interested.

Fast food: I don't eat fast food. Discounted Big Macs isn't my idea of a good time.

Banking: My bank's web site works fine on Waterfox. But if I'm going to be managing my money I'd much prefer to do it on my computer. If I want a reasonable return on my deposits I simply park most of my cash in a money market ETF. It's plenty convenient and is simply not a big issue for me.

I'll add a few more.

Rideshare: I find traditional taxis are everywhere I've recently visited, tend to be driven by more interesting people, and they accept cash, no problem. I've had plenty of bad experiences with rideshares and have never had a bad experience since switching to traditional taxis. Knock on wood.

Audiobooks: I get ODM files from my local library. The audio files you download via ODM aren't DRM'd.

Ebooks: My offline Kobi reader works great. Kindles can be cracked with WinterBreak. Again, the library. DeDRM is your friend.

Email: Fastmail app from apkcure.com.

Chat: Signal.

Airlines: Check in on Waterfox, take a screenshot of the ticket/QR code. If that doesn't work, check in at the airport and get a printed boarding pass.