wanderingstan

This was just an acquaintance some years ago in SF, but I recall it was fancier with conveyor belts and a protocol for the robot to communicate the size and weights of the packages being delivered.

There are several “last meters” delivery robots developed.

Short range drones are being used in Australia.

And I heard of at least one company working with apartment architects to standardize a “port” on the building exterior to which a truck/robot would connect to “inject” packages to the inside.

More than that, I think the ride-hailing business is just the fist volley in the self driving vehicle space. It’s a short jump from there to self driving trucks, self driving package delivery, self driving private vehicles, and on and on.

This is it. All matrix codes are now commonly referred to as “QR Codes”. I’ve noticed this especially at airports where both passengers and gate agents refer to the “QR codes” on boarding passes. (Which are IIRC Aztec codes)

I’ve known many people caring more weight that speak without issues. Are you speculating?

This is a case for their being two slide decks. Or rather, that slides can be used as a shareable graphic-heavy document OR as an aid to giving a talk, but the same deck can’t be good at both purposes at the same time.

Yes. Log scale seems like a poor choice, given that the point is to show the relative size disparity.

To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.

> People hate small talk because it avoids [vulnerability]. The purpose of social conversation is to connect but talking about the weather or the latest sportz ball result reveals sh!t.

I’m a defender of small talk. It’s the MVP of connection; you are at least talking to another person, mutual acknowledgement. It’s where relationships begin. It’s where you and the other can safely feel out the space of shared values and what’s top of mind: sports? Work? Family?

Oversharing is perhaps defined as sharing too much too soon, when you should still be doing small talk.

Sometimes people say they hate small talk but complain of the difficulty of making friends. Start by learning how to have light conversations. Keep talking. Depth comes naturally with time.

Concur. I was a young programmer and could only afford the first book. (or maybe it was volumes 1-3 together?) In any case, there were features I left out of my programs simply because I didn’t have the documentation. It really was a different world!

I concur. Same thing in many UI frameworks where you’ll have a Boolean “isHidden” to control visibility. Makes it so hard to reason about.

This is a very clever hack, exactly the sort of thing that belongs on Hacker News.

My memory was that the weight API was made private because they didn’t want people using iPhones for drug deals.

Note that OP didn’t say anything about “close to no developers”, only that they could tell they had become more productive.

I too know I am being more productive. The most concrete examples for my work has come from the ease of prototyping: making a quick quasi-working version of an idea is now insanely easy, so we’ve been able to explore (and adopt) ideas that would not have been worth the effort previously.

Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.

I think you might be in agreement with me in the main, just quibbling on the timing?

The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.

This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.

“The Innovator's Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen described how big companies fail when against new startups because they can’t let go of their fat margins for a new technology that (at first) appears to be inferior, even a toy. (His examples are Japanese motorbikes and hard disks)

Seems the United States is now trapped in the same dilemma. It can’t let go of those fat oil profits to embrace the new —but rapidly improving— renewable tech, even if it’s clear that that’s where the market for energy is heading. I.E., the big company (or nation) must sabotage some of their current profit centers in order to remain long term competitive.

(Reposting a comment I made on nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china... )

Interesting! The z80 card in my family’s Apple 2 would render “^” as “↑” and I always wondered the connection. I guess they were using the original spec.

As with many areas, it’s easier to recognize “correct” than to generate “correct.” When I lived in Germany I would often use the early online translation tools to help refine my written German and it was useful to see how they corrected it, and it was usually a matter of “of course that’s the right way, I see it now!”

Feature request: option to select a year so you can get retro startup ideas from e.g. web 2 or crypto-mania eras!

Counter to Freakononics, my friend’s daycare in SF right now charges parents $2/minute for being late. So it seems to work for them. (Or it works because the cost is relatively high?)

The relevant scene: https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo

Not based on a true story, but anyone familiar with computing history will see how real-world events were turned into plot lines; e.g. Compaq’s reverse engineering of IBMs sdk, the competition between directory-based index of Yahoo and algorithms of Google.

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch)

These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

There is something sobering and humbling at “seeing” 2 people die every second.

To realize that entire lifetimes of memory and experiences are disappearing so quickly.

Though I’ve probably seen that stat before, the site does a good job of making it feel “live” with the updating population count and live stats on everything else.

Stack overflow never owned the content, it is and was Creative Commons: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

Negative only for Zuckerberg. The implication is that he was so arrogant and incompetent that he made a mistake (writing) that monopolists in other fields knew to avoid. Incriminating talk “should” happen only in person or on the phone if you don’t want to get busted.

There will also be Jevons Paradox happening: LLMs reduce the “cost” of writing code, so more code gets written.

I already find myself building prototypes that I never would have attempted previously; it’s just too easy to have the LLM whip one up. LLMs also make it easier to do “grunt work” coding of writing validation checking and unit tests on non-critical code where previously I wouldn’t have bothered.

The author left out my favorite example: that you are mathematically more likely to be the slow line at the grocery store (or the slow lane on the highway). It’s not just bad luck!

> you actually are, on the average, in the slower lane, because slow lanes are (on average) the ones that have more vehicles in. So you are more likely to be in these lanes than in the faster moving ones which more vehicles are in.

https://leightonvw.com/2019/04/04/the-slower-lane-paradox-in...

I hadn’t realized it, but you are right.

- Orbit height: 20,200 km

- Earths diameter: 12,760 km

https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/space/

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/facts/