ufmace

> Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.

I'm a subscriber, and I just tested that translate still works fine

Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.

I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.

I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

I'd summarize the concept as, this youtube video could have been a tweet

I tend to feel like, I start out with a rough idea of a program I want to write in my head. I find it easier to just write the code directly than to write a document with sufficient detail about how I want it to work for an LLM to actually write the right code, then have the LLM write the code. And the resulting documentation is about as likely to be useless or a burden as it is to be helpful in the future.

Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.

There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.

Good recruiters can fill this function. Yeah, there's a lot of sleazy ones out there. But the better ones only take work from real companies that intend to actually hire and real candidates that are actually looking for jobs, and have the information to screen out bad actors on both sides.

It's not like job searches are the only context where you can get ghosted. It happens often enough in friendships, social activities, finding romantic partners, etc.

One of the reasons is, you don't get really good data on how something works until you start running clinical trials for it. It's all very time-consuming - having to plan how the trial is going to work, getting approval for it, finding subjects who meet the criteria (here, a specific type of cancer at a specific stage probably) and sites near them willing to work with you, manufacturing and shipping the treatments, and only then can you start gathering data. If it didn't work, you gotta start over, And it all costs a boatload of money too.

I think there are 2 good and important points that make me re-think things some:

First is technological advancement. It seems solar and wind and the supporting technologies, including battery storage and grid firming, are advancing very fast to become cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. What was a reasonable argument ~15 years ago might actually be out of date today. To form a reasonable argument for today, you need to know the types of hardware, costs, and specs for what's on the market today.

Second is that the recent improvements are all independent capitalistic companies building things for their own profit. They're not going to do things that are unprofitable, and if they did, they'd go out of business pretty fast. It is fair to criticize pushes by Government and activists to build this stuff, since both of them have advocated for unprofitable things plenty of times and suffer no consequences if the things they push are a terrible or unworkable idea. When it's an independent company, though, it's none of our business. I'm for success and functional systems, not ideology; if you want to build this stuff, believe you can make a profit doing so, and take ownership of the consequences if you are wrong or fail, then by all means go to it, and I'll cheer if you succeed.

I would be delighted if they could get it smart enough to stop putting flights other people have booked to come see me onto my calendar and suggest that I leave on time to get to their home city to catch the flight! It's been doing that for decades, and nobody seems to notice or care.

I wonder if there's a class of people who managed to get CS degrees but really aren't that good. To them, it might feel more like either you remember the perfect and optimal but complex solution you were taught in a class, or you don't happen to remember it and are completely stuck and can't make any progress at all. I don't think I'd want to hire or work with somebody who can't come up with some sort of solution after thinking through it for a few minutes.

In fact, coming up with the CS-perfect solution immediately may be a bit of an anti-signal. I want the person who can think their way through to a solution to a problem that's new to them reasonably well. The fact that you happened to have memorized the best algorithm for this and can recite it on command doesn't tell me much useful, because nobody has the perfect algorithm for everything memorized.

The circle outlining one seems interesting to me. I definitely didn't read the algorithm ahead of time, and I'm probably not as smart as a revolutionary genius computer scientist, but I thought of 2 basic algorithms in a few minutes.

You could iterate over the degrees 0 to 360, use trig functions to figure out where the point at that angle is, and plot the closest point. Might need to be a bit tricky about the step size, but I bet you could compute a decent guess from the radius using more trig functions. Of course that probably doesn't work if you don't have floating point and trig functions.

You could also split it into four quadrants. Plot each of the top, bottom, right, and left points by direct computation of adding/subtracting the radius, then for each quadrant, you start from the computed point, check 3 specific points in the appropriate direction for which way you're going in that quadrant, plot whichever one is closest to the radius away from the center, then repeat from that plotted point until you reach the computed point for the next quadrant. It would be tedious and repetitive, but should be doable. You could probably also avoid computing square roots by comparing the squares instead. So I guess you'd want something based on that idea to do it fast on 90s hardware.

I wonder if it would be possible for a business to exist that was like super double ultra premium T1 diabetes support. Maybe it's really expensive and not many people can afford it, at least at first, but it'd be like you can call up an on-call desk any time, day or night, 24x7x365, and immediately talk to somebody who can pull up your full situation and history and do anything necessary to fix any possible problem. Get anything you need shipped to you anywhere next-day, get you premium service at any local pharmacies or hospitals, already set up to do exactly what you need before you even get there, sweet-talk the tiny local mom-and-pop pharmacy, produce all of the right papers and work the right angles at the huge national chain pharmacy, track down the one that actually has or can do what you need, etc. What would it be like if you were able to actually throw enough money at the problem to create a perfect worry-free experience for at least some people.

I think it's a few things:

They're already highly confident that if they have sufficient control over the booster trajectory they can execute the chopstick catch, so they don't particularly need to demonstrate that part more. Executing a pseudo-landing at sea lets them validate their booster flight controls perfectly fine without risking the launch tower and associated hardware. They can also do stuff like stretch the trajectory and control mechanisms to their limits to see how much they can handle, and not too big a deal if something goes wrong. Presumably any actual landings will be well within the known safe limits on all parameters.

I bet this first booster also has a lot of minor weird things associated with shaking out the manufacturing process, and they don't entirely mind testing to destruction the first one to get rid of it permanently and use the ones coming from a more proven manufacturing process for important work.

That's pretty much what I came into this thread to say. The thing I'd add is, DynamoDB is pretty nice if you understand how it's meant to be used - a relatively dumb key-value store with good persistence and table-size scaling to the sky. Definitely don't attempt to use it as a SQL database.

The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it like a SQL database with JOINs and GROUP BYs etc. Or similarly write code against it absent-mindedly with about as much understanding as a 2-year-old free AI tool.

Where it really shines is use-cases like I need like 1 or 2 simple relatively small tables of persistent storage and don't want to deal with a full RDBMS. Or I need 1 ridiculously huge table to be queried in a relatively simple way, and don't want to deal with fitting that data into a RDBMS.

What is it that you want to install on ChromeOS that you are unable to? All of the usual Linux and open-source stuff works fine on the built-in Linux environment on it. Possibly even a little better than MacOS in some cases, since you don't need to worry about Apple app signing. There's not literally nothing you can't do, but the list is a lot shorter than most people think, especially those who haven't really tried ChromeOS in a decade and think they're all a glorified web browser on $200 hardware.

Looks like they're UK based. I don't know, but apparently tariffs etc are factored into the shipping fees shown on their site.

If you're not sure if you want to go Linux yet, it's probably best to try a live USB stick of a few distros on your existing hardware. Get a feel for what the interface is like, how things work, how it works on your hardware, etc, without actually changing anything. Seems like a better bet to me than buying all-new hardware.

> Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.

That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!

It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.

Seems unlikely to me. I always thought the only engine that could actually accomplish transition was capitalism. We will transition at a time and to an extent that renewables are actually cheaper and better, no sooner and no later. Government action can encourage technological development, but it can't force the transition when the technology is not ready yet, and it can't stop it either once it's actually better. Note that we are actively building out a lot of that stuff now, even though the current administration is at best indifferent towards it. It all fits with the bottom line that we transition when the technology is ready, and the opinion of activists and Government officials isn't relevant.

You seem to be copy-pasting this around this thread a lot, what's the deal with that?

I would agree that electric is the future, but even if all that works as advertised and we keep making more progress, it's still going to take decades to manufacture the billions of them that will be needed to seriously displace oil. I believe oil will continue to be necessary and relevant for the lifetime of everybody old enough to write posts on this thread.

I believe that it's a physical plant thing. We have spent over a hundred years building hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure. Much of that is still out there. Wind and solar have made a ton of progress in the last 15 years or so, but it's only really become substantially better financially in the last 5 or so years maybe. It's still going to take decades to actually replace most of that stuff, just as a matter of how fast we can build and install hardware.

Note also that it's a worldwide chart, so it includes developing countries that may not be so quick to jump on projects that are expensive right now even though they'll save a bunch of money in the long term. Though to be fair, some may have a leapfrog effect when it comes to building brand new infrastructure.

Importantly IMO is the extra phishing protection that the UX is really nice if and only if the url matches what's expected. If you end up on a fake url somehow, it's a nice speed bump that it doesn't let you auto-fill to make you think, hold on, something is wrong here.

If you're used to the clunkier workflow of copy-pasting from a separate app, then it's much easier to absent-mindedly repeat it for a not-quite-right url.

I don't think that means anything as the author of the article almost certainly has no clue about anything but what the Government there told him. They're just quoting general knowledge and speculation by other equally-uninformed third parties.

The interesting thing to me is, it seems likely that whichever individual or small group actually is Satoshi must have planted at least a few misdirection false flags like that at some point. But how in the world would you ever tell which ones are that sort of misdirection and which are real?

It did make me think - if he seems nervous under this questioning, it could be because he's actually Satoshi. Or it could also be because he's thinking something like, oh god, if this jerkoff convinces a bunch of people I'm actually Satoshi, all of the businesses I've worked so hard to found will collapse, I might be convicted of crimes around lying about it while founding these businesses, I might get targeted by any number of criminal gangs or even nation-states who will do all kinds of torture to me and my loved ones and will never believe that I'm not actually Satoshi and don't really have a secret stash of a bazillion Bitcoins.

Naturally, this journalist doesn't seem to care much about any of that, or that it wouldn't really change anything at this point besides making the life of whoever it actually is hell.

I think they've been heading that way for a while, and it's only getting clearer.

I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.

In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.

Why should they? It's not the right time for that yet. Letting the price stay high despite renewable prices being lower means it's tremendously profitable to build new renewable sources, so there's lots of incentive for it to be done.

It's worth keeping in mind that the only practical "saving" for the OP will result in not doing the job at all, since this client most likely doesn't actually have the money and never will.

It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.