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wintermutestwinon The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

>I've always wanted to try a real Toto, especially with the drying feature.

Drying was one of the features that I wished I hadn't paid extra for. It is a trickle of air and would take way too long to get you dry.

wintermutestwinon The Gmail app will now create AI summaries

I’d love to ditch the multiple google mail accounts that I setup for nonprofits, but I worry that google is better at catching spam and fishing than the competitors. I use outlook for another, but MS is insanely unfriendly to newb users and their spam filters don’t work as well. Any suggestions?

wintermutestwinon Show HN: Loodio 2 – A Simple Rechargable Bathroom Privacy Device

Pretty easy to test with a phone running mynoise set to white noise.

wintermutestwinon Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

I have a read later “service” called keeping a couple hundred tabs open at once (enabled with Sidebury vertical tabs and their panels). Works great for me.

wintermutestwinon Apple's Next-Gen Version of Siri Is 'On Par' with ChatGPT

The problem with Siri is not the lack of LLM level functionality, but rather a lack of programming Siri to do obvious things that users would expect it to do. Well, that, and worst in class speech recognition. They are one of the top valued megacorps in the world and they can't hire a product manager who understands basic UX??? My retired ass could write a fairly comprehensive set of user stories for Siri in a couple weeks.

wintermutestwinon New research reveals the strongest solar event ever detected, in 12350 BC

I’ve taken it for over 30 years now. It has indeed been a lifesaver and so much better than all the pills. One side effect is blurred vision and I have definitely noticed a slight blurring in the last couple of years. I gladly accept it as a small price to pay for decades of relief.

wintermutestwinon Spaced repetition systems have gotten way better

Cool idea. I’ll check it out. It would be cool to do something like this for single word highlights on an e reader. If I have highlighted a singe word it is because I want to add it to my vocabulary.

wintermutestwinon The Problem with Teens Isn't Smartphones–It's Their Families

In 1988, California enacted a mental health parity law which private insurers to provide equal coverage for mental health and substance use disorder treatments, including services for children. There was a resultant explosion of rehab centers for kids opening in CA. Kids (mostly mid-upper class white kids) got put into rehab centers en masse. Suddenly, every parent in a dysfunctional family could point their fingers at the ubiquitous use of drugs (mostly alcohol and cannabis) among teens and thus absolve themselves of their personal failings as a parent.

Of course I am not arguing that kegger parties and smoking weed were positive things for kids, and certainly some small % of these kids were doing worse drugs, but I am quite certain from my own (fairly broad) annecdata that the root cause of these kids' self destructive behavior was their fucked up families.

And now parents can point their fingers at social media. History repeats, but the difference this time is that kids aren't put into rehabs away from the family dysfunction and in an environment where some degree of self examination and self work is promoted.

When I was very young, I thought that my family dysfunction was an outlier, but my experiences in life lead me to believe that it is the norm and that healthy families are the outlier. Of course, that's my own experience, but I am a greybeard now and have interacted with a large number of individuals across the full spectrum of social strata so the assessment of my anecdata sure seems more poignant with each passing year...

wintermutestwinon Let's Talk About the Bidet, the Bathroom's Best-Kept Secret

If you have any issues talking family member into a bidet, I used this on my teenagers with much success:

"If you got poop on your arm, would you just wipe it off with paper?"

wintermutestwinon Let's Talk About the Bidet, the Bathroom's Best-Kept Secret

Features I have and think aren't worth paying more for:

1. Dryer. None of them push anywhere near enough air to do anything useful. I use a hair blow dryer.

2. Hot water. Although it is a bit of a shock, I prefer cold water as it helps shrink the hemorrhoidal tissues. Wife disagrees with this one so we set it on the lowest heat and I keep spraying until it gets cold.

Japan has these everywhere and 95% of them are Toto brand so that's what I went with and it has been great.

wintermutestwinon AI is draining water from areas that need it most

Of course! But what about all of the agriculture that gets exported? In CA, it is over half of almonds and ~15% of alfalfa (cattle feed).

wintermutestwinon It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle

https://kindlemodding.org/

I appreciate finding that site as well, but I thought it strange that I couldn't find a "why jailbreak" section. Does anyone here know?

I don't want Amazon's spying on me so I have just kept it in Airplane mode since I bought it 9 years ago. It seems to work fine ¯\(ツ)/¯

wintermutestwinon Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over

I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.

wintermutestwinon Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over

Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.

wintermutestwinon Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over

I never load the homepage. Feeds>friends in a firefox container with FBPurity is the only way I’ll touch that abomination.

I also find that I have to mute a lot of over sharers. I feel for those people because I know they are like rats pushing the social lever for some imaginary sense of connection.

wintermutestwinon Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

IMO using a streaming service’s recommendations is a way to filter out bands that labels aren’t promoting. The services have to be getting paid for pushing - right?

If everyone is this lazy about music discovery, then music suffers. I am not using “lazy” as a pejorative. There are people who just couldn’t be bothered and that’s fine. Music just isn’t that important to you. But if the people who deeply love music are corrupted by the ease and dopamine, it will deeply wound music as a whole.

My problem isn’t discovering new music, it is “discovering” my massive library. I love AM, but the fact that 3 of the five large icons taking up precious screen real estate are devoted to discovering music that Apple is paid to promote is infuriating.

wintermutestwinon Audiobooks vs. Printed Books: a debate as a reader and an author

Why is there no Spotify for audiobooks? Audible’s pricing model is stupid. I guess the bean counters know better than I, but I imagine there are a lot of people like me who just shrug and listen to what I can get for free through my library’s Libby access. I would gladly pay 15$ a month for unlimited.

wintermutestwinon What if we made advertising illegal?

I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)

wintermutestwinon The Curse of Ayn Rand's Heir

Great post! I think it all comes down to self awareness. The more you are aware of your conscious and unconscious biases, you are the more empowered to mitigate the resultant rational failures.

wintermutestwinon Plex no Longer Offers Free Remote Playback for Personal Media

I am using infuse to play directly from a samba share - what do I get from adding plex / jellyfin?

wintermutestwinon A look at Firefox forks

Manual URL editing is unbelievably painful on mobile and all the kids only use their phones these days - I guess this includes all the cool kid engineers making browsers.

wintermutestwinon What We've Learned from 150 Years of Stock Market Crashes

It sounds to me like you are specifically calling out the one crash where equities and bonds both went down at the same time? And that you are saying because this happened, we are now in totally uncharted territory where nothing from the past can be assumed to happen in the future?

>risk-party isn't diversification

??? Diversification is the underlying principle behind a risk parity portfolio. https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/asset-correlations?s=y&s...

You do realize that a risk parity portfolio is made up of other allocations than stocks/bonds?

wintermutestwinon uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store

That's a useful app for people who use different browsers for different tasks -thanks!

wintermutestwinon What We've Learned from 150 Years of Stock Market Crashes

They are cheaper than most for sure, but still more than buying individual ETFs.

Here are 4 common funds that are used in risk parity portfolios:

VTI = .03% VXUS = .06% VGLT = .03% GLDM = .1%

(edit) I am not arguing that that investing in TDFs is inferior solely due to expense ratio cost - the biggest issue is that they lock you in to a specific allocation and re-balancing strategy that might not align with your specific situation.

wintermutestwinon What We've Learned from 150 Years of Stock Market Crashes

>There is a premium on mental health and market volatility.

I find that, as soon as I pick up the crystal ball and try to play the prediction game, my mental health suffers greatly. What helps my stress levels the most is to have a portfolio that is well diversified (e.g. a risk parity style portfolio) and stay the course because the portfolio has elements that go up when equities go down.

At the end of the day, the markets can be blatantly irrational (see TSLA) for wildly variable time spans - this means that market timing is inherently gambling. Gambling with your retirement portfolio is incredibly stressful.

wintermutestwinon What We've Learned from 150 Years of Stock Market Crashes

>Target day funds exist for a reason.

Yes - to make a lot of money on the expense ratio.

I guess if you really didn't want to learn a damn thing about modern portfolio construction a taget date fund is your best bet. However, it is incredibly easy to buy 4-6 ETFs that give you the same thing at a lower cost. Yes, you have to do a little work to re-balance these funds, but that is also an advantage to this approach as you have control over the re-balancing and can do it in a way that is more tailored to your specific situation.

I highly recommend the Risk Parity Radio podcast.

wintermutestwinon When software updates improve–instead of ruin–our favorite devices

A better example than the ones in the article: https://www.fractalaudio.com/

Their flagship device has a constant flow of firmware updates that each add significant new functionality and improvements of existing elements. All SW updates are free.

As a guitar playing geek, I am confused by my fellow geek who has a massive pedalboard. This device can replace 99% of all those pedals (not to mention tube amps) in a 3U rackspace with a foot controller and all of it is insanely programmable. I get it that old school analog gear has a certain charm, but it is like using your Apple 2E to run a spreadsheet today. Sure, it can do the basic functionality, but it is obnoxiously limiting and requires much convolution to fit many use cases.

wintermutestwinon Minimum effective dose

IME, when I take long breaks from lifting, keeping my protein intake high means I lose muscle much more slowly. One gram of protein per pound of body weight daily has been a major game changer in losing weight and gaining muscle. Gray beard BTW.

wintermutestwinon Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

Haha. discord is the only social app that would be worse for this purpose than facecrook.

That said, your main point is solid.

wintermutestwinon LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters

I am an “everything is custom tailored to my players” DM and I use LLMs quite a lot as an assistant. Speeding up prep time is always welcome. Using an LLM directly as a DM? Oh hell no.

Also, I ran a session over Zoom and their AI summary was so useful!