CLARUS THE DOGCOW
Hello, old friend.
2,772 karma · joined January 8, 2014
Hello, old friend.
The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.
I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.
Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.
Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.
But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.
The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.
If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.
Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.
I wonder what the average interest rate is these days... I just saw a credit card with a usual (non-penalty) annual interest rate of 28%. Perhaps credit cards and car loans are not comparable. But it's an indication of where we are at with consumer debt.
These numbers don't make sense.
50 years.
The doctrine of cultural assimilation was at that time understood to be incorporation into a larger Russian society.
"The Singing Revolution" tells an Estonian side of this dynamic.
I'm trying to understand how they can role out occultation by ring systems but I haven't seen it yet.
It's been wild to reflect upon this story during this past decade.
Estonia emerged as a tech startup incubator in those first few years of independence, as a way of attracting capital and talent.
Now I need to learn about this game and book!
The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102
The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.
I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.
The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.
Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.
AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.
But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.
(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)
This made me remember that I've still got a G4 Mac Mini! I was bringing up a current Linux on it, last time I had it running. 2019, perhaps.
I need to fire it up...
https://bontechlabs.com/news/apple-is-reportedly-using-intel...
Given the risks involved in establishing Apple Silicon designs with a new fab, I would expect early M7 parts to be in test production right now.
The fundamental M7 design is already set in stone.
Mark Gurman's Bloomberg article does not mention fabrication partners or processes.
This is one of those hobby businesses that got out of hand and had to go full time.
But they seem to be selling old Macs, in 2026.
They were a great source for parts etc to keep my old Macs running.
(The Hitachi clone is also quite nice.)
I was really excited about this initiative at the time, just starting my computer science undergrad degree.
Hardware that ran Prolog as close to bare metal as possible.
Thanks for the reminder. 40 years ago.
I want to call such aliases "normal" files, as opposed to a link, but the path description is saved in the Resource Fork of the file, not the Data fork.
Resolving an alias can involve network path traversal. You can make an alias of a file on an AFP volume and save it locally, and the next time you use the alias the volume will be auto mounted if necessary. I think you can get similar behavior from other OS configurations.
I seem to recall that if you move or rename a file, the system will update the alias for you. It can't always figure this out. But it will try. That's something you might not see elsewhere...
I've forgotten why AppleScript returns alias objects instead of strings.
There exist societies that have made different choices.
The car dependency isn't an act of God.
Graduate research in the United States is often an exercise in exploitation of cheap labor.
China and India have a large pool of highly educated workers who can qualify for graduate research. Their visas specifically prohibit them for seeking alternative employment in the United States.
You can demand long hours and very low pay. The payoff to them is a chance at long-term employment in the US for more money than they could earn at home, and in any event increased status and employment opportunities when they return.
The payoff for native-born kids is not at all the same. Even for those who can afford graduate school, opportunity cost may be prohibitive.
The US has decided that creating new scientists out of its own citizens has no economic value.
Capitalism is duplication of effort.
I've never been particularly convinced by the crusade to eliminate alternatives to capitalism in the name of eliminating a society's wasteful behavior.
On the other hand, now they will have less competition.
(What's that? Just keep using an older version of Linux? What kind of retro troglodytes do you think I am?)
I can't tell what the writing or design are like, because the article renders as a blank page on my old iPad.
Also on my 2026 Kindle Paperwhite.
It's futile to be old man yelling at cloud on HN, but I'm still irritated by web pages that are essentially text, yet can't be bothered to actually display anything. A blank page.
Presumably ePub publications are easier to QA than web pages. They must conform to a subset of web standards.
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist
You'll have to remember to re-load this thing if you want the default behavior. Or if you encounter other unexpected situations, to restore the default insanity.
It might be easier to run this app instead; then you have an icon in your GUI desktop environment and an app you can simply quit to restore defaults. Plus this app allows you to assign any app to the "Play" media event.