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ubermonkey

6,020 karma · joined March 14, 2017

Can be reached off HN at chet@nogators.com
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ubermonkey··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
It's funny you think that CBP has any real professional standards that any of their agents would possibly be held to if it were inconvenient for the agency, at least under this administration.
ubermonkey··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
I'm finding it quicker and more responsive than Tahoe, but I've run into a couple bugs that vex me. None are super troublesome, but I notice them.

The biggest one is that moving application stacks in Mission Control no longer works. In Tahoe and prior systems, if you invoked Mission Control with the "group windows by application" option turned on, windows belonging to a given app were "stacked" under an icon for that application.

This allows the user to move ALL of an app's windows from one display to another, or from one Space (Mac virtual desktop) to another, without having to drag them one at a time.

This broke in GG. I'm sure it'll get fixed in the .1 release, but it's annoying for now.

ubermonkey··on What About Rails?
You would be incorrect.

It's also wild that you are attempting to correct me while also admitting you don't "keep up with DHH (at all)." What was that thought process like? "I don't have any data with which to rebut this assertion, but it just FEELS false, so I'll go with that!"

ubermonkey··on You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner
I'm not sure how big a deal that really is in a broad sense.

My friend circle in our old city included both Falstaffian omnivores and vegans, and we entertained often. It's not hard to ensure there's food available for folks on a more restrictive diet, and even my friends with UCI racing licenses generally ate like normal people at social events.

Mileage varies, obviously.

(I will say, however, that after having made a vegan "bolognese" once, I have no need to do so again. It was much more effort than the already time-consuming genuine article.)

ubermonkey··on What About Rails?
>Calling DHH a fascist is allowed and encouraged because

...it's true, based on his own words.

ubermonkey··on What Sun got wrong
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,

We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.

They're awful.

ubermonkey··on What Sun got wrong
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?

We didn't think so.

I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.

ubermonkey··on Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster
This is going to get very entertainingly ugly, I suspect.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Hilariously, he already has -- but was downvoted to oblivion.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Look, a brand new account taking photomatt's side. Neat.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
This is a completely reasonable take and I'm stunned you're getting downvoted for it.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
A huge chunk of the web is WP.
ubermonkey··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.

I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.

ubermonkey··on AirPods 5
This is, in my experience, absolutely true.
ubermonkey··on AirPods 5
"It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today."

I'm trying very hard to understand what you mean specifically here.

The AirPods Pro I use every day for casual listening are far and away better headphones than the wired earbuds I used in that context in 2005.

The regular Airpods I bought my wife 3 months ago were a categorical improvement over the ones she'd lost in a move this summer, and they barely have ANC.

Even the first iteration of Airpods exceeded the quality of equivalent wired in-ear buds available at the time. I recently came across my old Etymotic in-ear headphones, which were at one point a gold standard. The sound from my AirPods Pro is better, and the Apple option is FAR more comfortable in my ears.

I'd argue that cost per unit of fidelity is lower now, in 2026, than it's ever been before. The level of playback a person can enjoy for, say, $500 today is wildly better than what was available for an inflation-adjusted equivalent amount of money in 2016 or 2006 or 1996.

I also have Headphone Acquisition Disorder, for which there is no known cure. As a result I've had a number of fancy wired setups over the years, sometimes requiring a headphone amp.

Owing to a lot of air travel, I bought the AirPods Max soon after they were introduced. I intended them to be airplane accessories for the most part, but the fact of the matter is that my $500 Sennheiser setup that required cables and an amp wasn't obviously superior to the Maxes. Once you factor in convenience, the Apple over-hear setup won the comparison in a walk. In the runup to our x-country move last summer, I sold off or gave away nearly all of the rest of my headphone horde; now, if I'm using headphones, it's one of the Apple options.

ubermonkey··on iPhone Duo
Your average HN reader is very very bad at understanding that they are NOT the mass market.
ubermonkey··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
Ha! I remember reading this in print.

In other news, I am old.

ubermonkey··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
You know why.
ubermonkey··on Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch
SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.
ubermonkey··on My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
"Southern Baptists officially teach that eternal damnation is a literal, conscious, and everlasting punishment in Hell for anyone who dies without personal faith and salvation in Jesus Christ. If the threat of eternal torment is not coercive control, I'm not sure what is."

You have to be careful with blanket statements like this. Southern Baptist churches are entirely self-run enterprises with no top-down doctrinal control from anyone else. Consequently, there are congregations who would qualify as high-control, culty organizations and there are congregations who welcome LGBTQ folks and such (although it's increasingly true that welcoming / progressive congregations are self-sorting into their own categories/groupings such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship).

I don't know of any SB churches that preach specifically that THEIR church is the One True Church, which is usually what that kind of control requires.

Certainly many folks in the SBC church of my youth moved from church to church, or even to other denominations, and nobody thought that was soul-risking behavior. A central tenet of MOST Baptist churches is the primacy of the adherent's personal relationship to the almighty, which is unknowable to others by default, so this tracks.

ubermonkey··on Omakase Computing
DHH means this is, for me, a hard pass.
ubermonkey··on Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union
These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.

Maybe iOS just isn't for you.

ubermonkey··on Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union
>Why would one computing platform be different from the other?

Are we really still having this discussion? I feel like you KNOW the answer, and why the market rewards Apple for its position here.

The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.

ubermonkey··on Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
I self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted.

I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).

ubermonkey··on In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years
I am 56. I have been married for almost 21 years. I will not be reading this link, but I am glad it exists.

Midlife brings many things, some good and some bad and some just part of life. One of these is the more visceral, serious understanding -- replacing the mere intellectual knowledge you had before -- that the ride you're on will end.

You will, in your middle years, have friends whose own rides were far shorter than any of you imagined.

You will see people's partners die, and the emotional wreckage that leaves behind. My friend D. is, right now, navigating his first summer alone after losing his wife of nearly 40 years last spring (fuck cancer).

You will realize it could be you, on either side of the sod.

May Elise's memory be a blessing. But I'm gonna go hug my wife now instead of reading Stephen's piece.

ubermonkey··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
My own gripe is that, at least in a good-sized city, the late "physical rental" era provided a more complete menu of available films for the consumer.

Now things flutter in and out of availability, and are fragmented between countless different services. In 1999, though, a visit to Blockbuster and/or my well-stocked film-geek local store would get me pretty much anything I wanted to watch.

ubermonkey··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
I'm still trying to figure out why you didn't see that coming.
ubermonkey··on IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats
The thing is: It's kind of irrelevant for most theatergoers, as there are only 24 IMAX 70mm venues in the whole country. And many of them don't even show theatrical releases.

For example, I used to live in Houston, and we tried to find a 70mm theater for OPPENHEIMER. There aren't any there despite being a city of nearly 8 million.

ubermonkey··on The first watch featuring computer functions
I want to be a civil as I can here, but you managed to post 3 sentences that are all completely wrong.

1. Seiko is huge. If you are snoozing on them, that's on you, not them. They have a HUGE presence in watches, from low-end affordable pieces to their gorgeous and expensive high-end watches under the Grand Seiko name. Jewelry stores where I live usually devote at least one of their window displays to Seiko (as you see with Rolex and Tag, for example).

2. Seiko is not owned by Epson. Epson do produce some of Seiko's watches, but they're not part of the company. Seiko are a public company primarily controlled, still, by the Hattori family.

3. In the 1980s Seiko was nowhere nearly as prestigious (or expensive) as Rolex or any other high-end Swiss maker. Then as now, the nicer watches were definitely nice watches, but they weren't jewelry like a Rolex or an Omega. The rise of Grand Seiko has leveled that playing field quite a bit, though. Today, at least among watch people, a spring-drive GS would be as fawned over as a Submariner or Explorer.

(edit: I left extraneous text while writing the post. That's now removed.)

ubermonkey··on The first watch featuring computer functions
I'm a watch nerd, but generally I'm only interested in mechanicals. Spring drive is the first quartz-driven movement I'm actually interested in.

If I won the lotto tomorrow, I'd buy a Grand Seiko with it.

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