thedanbob

I thought it went without saying that she's on board with it, and that "need to get a hold of her" meant e.g. "I'm trying to call her but she's out in the shop". 99% of our communication during the day is asynchronous.

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like.

Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.

[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...

This is what I do, except the dynamic DNS service is just a script on my server that updates Cloudflare DNS with my current external IP. In practice my address is almost static, I've never seen it change except when my router is reset/reconfigured.

That sounds more like someone who was looking to be offended, not necessarily someone who finds "crap" offensive specifically.

> Why is this so frowned upon?

Maybe because while ad tech these days is no less shady than crypto mining, the concept of ads is something people understand. Most people don't really understand crypto so it gets lumped in with "hackers" and "viruses".

Alternatively, for those who do understand ad tech and crypto, crypto mining still subjectively feels (to me at least) more like you're being stolen from than ads. Same with Anubis, wasting power on PoW "feels" more acceptable to me than mining crypto. One of those quirks of the human psyche I guess.

Agreed. I get asked to repair electronics for people quite often and I charge drastically differently for labor depending on whether I will enjoy the job or not.

Fair enough. A favorite of mine is "sidewalk ends", which around where I live are so ridiculously over-the-top[0] I can only conclude someone sued once and now the state isn't taking any chances.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/NdoE22S

> Sometimes I play a game while driving, seeing how long I can go without seeing a sign or warning. If you had to hold your breath between each one you'd be in no danger; you could drive hours with no risk of passing out.

This struck me the last time I traveled in the UK: they seem to have about 3-4 times as many road signs as the US, to the point where it almost becomes a dangerous distraction. On the other hand, they don’t have the omnipresent billboards and other public advertising that the US has.

A few years ago I was helping run sound at a conference which involved recording and rebroadcasting multiple audio streams simultaneously. The provided equipment included a Linux computer running a real-time kernel and routing was handled by JACK.

It was a disaster. If the USB audio interface ever disconnected, JACK crashed and wiped my routing configuration. After the first day I ditched the Linux computer and ran the whole setup through my MBA, using Reaper for both recording and routing.

I don't know about other languages but Ruby is similar in that you can name a function with any string (though you might not be able to call it in the standard way) and the Rails default test framework takes advantage of that.

I used to never finish personal projects. Then I realized that the biggest thing preventing me from finishing them was (perversely) my sense of duty to get them finished. Once I decided that I was under no obligation to anyone to work on them, not even myself, I had no trouble finding the motivation to get them done. So now side projects are a strictly "just for fun" affair. I work on them when I feel like, no deadlines, and once they're "in production" I maintain them because I like tinkering.

The only problem with this approach is I've gone from hating the thought of programming after work to coming up with side projects at work.

> Hanover ... did agree, on the basis of the photos, to pay a reasonable amount for the damage to cargo.

> I’m still unhappy with Flat Rate: they charged me a good deal of money for services they failed to deliver, and never paid for damage to the house.

I just finished a small personal project: a self-hosted web app which stores and indexes my archived emails. None of the existing options I tried were very good so I made my own. A simple Rails app that ingests .eml files and stores the text in postgres for full-text search.

I learned a lot about text encodings, multipart emails, inline attachments, postgres' tsvector/tsquery, etc. I'm particularly proud of how I was able to use `WITH RECURSIVE` to get an email's entire thread, which seems basic but the other archive apps I tried didn't have that feature.

> It was actually just yesterday when I decided youtube shorts are no longer a fun way to kill time. There's a lot of amazing stuff to watch, but it's no fun any more, because anything you see that seems amazing is likely to be AI Generated which, for me, ruins it.

And the ones that aren't AI generated are badly clipped scenes from movies / TV shows with the same 5 royalty-free songs playing over them, which might as well have been produced by AI.

I've dabbled in microcontrollers and enjoy how the limitations force me to find creative solutions, but this is truly next level. I'm not great with a soldering iron but I'm seriously considering assembling one of these.

I hated high school chemistry but both this series and that book are among my favorite scientific reads.

Basically. The questions were easy enough that they were doing it in their heads. She figured it out when she made them show their work, and their "work" turned out to be just plugging the right number into the equation.

My wife teaches Algebra 1 and this is something she’s encountered with a few of her students. They’ve been able to get by more or less by using what we refer to as “advanced arithmetic” e.g. figuring out the variable in an equation by inspection rather than solving the equation. But of course that only gets you so far, and she’s worried they’ll bomb Algebra 2 next year. But no matter what she does they just can’t/won’t learn algebra.

Huh... TIL I've been pronouncing it wrong. Either the Fresnel equations never came up while I was studying physics or my professor(s) also mispronounced it lol

> Also sea hash turned out to be sea sharp.

This irked me when I learned it as I'm into both tech and music, but it never once occurred to me to apply the music convention to a tech name.

In my experience, browser extensions are more one-and-done than network-level ad blocking like pi-hole. I can’t think of any time I’ve had to override a UBO rule but many popular pi-hole blocklists have a fair number of false positives.

> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough.

This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code. Yes, they may be capable of ingesting your entire massive codebase and spitting back out relevant stuff, but they don't actually understand any of it. Vibe coding is just "copy/paste from StackOverflow until it works" on steroids.

9% is reasonable. I've got pretty strict filters on my home DNS and it's currently blocking 12%. I imagine that number would be much higher if I didn't have ad block extensions on all my browsers and IoT devices on a restricted VLAN.

I've encountered fewer show-stopping bugs in Linux than macOS lately. And of the software that I use on both, the macOS versions have more problems. Honestly, the main thing holding me back from replacing my M1 MBA with a linux laptop is the wonderful speed and battery life. If the software problems get bad enough to negate those I'm switching.

Not just proper nouns. Often it tries to autocorrect a real but less-commonly-used word to a more common but completely different word.

For the last 10 years or so I've pendulum swung between the positions "privacy at all cost!" and "what's the point, you can't win". Well, I'm tired now and the pendulum is stuck on the latter. All I care about now is blocking ads. Go ahead Mozilla, Google, Apple, whoever, if you can hoover up my worthless browsing data without me noticing, you can have it. I hope my reading HN and watching inane Youtube videos is worth something to you.

I'm getting really fed up with all the bugs in Sequoia in particular. I know the usual advice is to not upgrade macOS major versions until .1 or .2, but we're up to 15.3.1 now and it's still terrible.

That was my biggest criticism. Maybe I could have suspended my disbelief back when I was single, but now I'm thinking "my wife would be holding an intervention for me after the first day, if not sooner".

> Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast from my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that there's something playing back on the Chromecast (even though it's still connected to it), so I can't control playback at all. It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will successfully play the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to transcode it.

This might be more the Chromecast's fault as I've had a similar experience with Plex.

I tried KDE Wayland a few times over the years but always had to switch back immediately because something I needed was broken. Then just a week or two ago I tried it again and didn't have to switch back. Everything finally worked, or could be made to work without too much effort. And bonus, sleep/wake works much better in Wayland than it ever did in Xorg.