Eric_WVGG

it would be such a blessing to America if the cool-midlife-crisis-move went back to sports cars and got more of those SUV urban assault vehicles off the road

This is a thing about Sanders that gets lost in the discourse. He’s famously soft on guns for a Democrat, for example, because that’s what his voters want from him.

This isn’t to suggest he’s some kind of empty mouthpiece for Vermont — they’re obviously electing him for his beliefs — but he’s also very cognizant of whom he answers to.

It’s a shmup, they can’t all be Ikaruga.

The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I pull it up on Youtube once a year or so just for kicks.

Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card. The MT-32 version blew my twelve-year-old mind.

This is what the Bluesky “AT Protocol” is meant to solve, though I fear it might be a bit too late.

I’ll tell you an easy way to get away with absolutely no exercise: design your life in such a way that moving around is a normal part of it.

Live in a "fifteen minute city." Work someplace that’s either a thirty minute walk or thirty minute bike ride from home. Carry your groceries.

If you get your minimal daily requirement of exercise by just living your normal life, any additional exercise you do is bonus, icing on your cake.

Fortunately, an even better location for a barrier existed: the Darien Gap, on the border of Colombia and Panama. At this narrow stretch of land, the barrier would need to be just 60 miles wide.

btw this is that terrifying jungle zone of Panama from the TV show Pluribus. Yes, it is real, and so are those trees.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darién_Gap - https://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/2904

The Southwest Animal Health Research Foundation (SWAHRF), an organization formed by a small group of Texas livestock producers… broke the logjam by raising millions of dollars in voluntary donations from Texas ranchers for screwworm eradication.

That can’t be right. The Texas Department of Agriculture published a piece titled “Dollars Don’t Kill Screwworms” just two years ago.

https://texasagriculture.gov/News-Events/Article/10239/OPINI...

Listen, dollars don’t kill screwworms. Sterile flies do. Detection systems do. We already have the tools to manage this issue because we’ve been doing it successfully for decades.

See? We don't need big government programs to get this under control, we just need farmers to… I dunno… raise and breed their own own sterile flies, or buy them from Walmart.

punishing customers for not using BitTorrent seems like a weird strategy but I’m not an MBA so what do I know

yeah I concur

Great little arcade game. Not a rogue-like.

I haven’t seen a new product with USB-A in years. It’s long past time to move on.

Okay, but Windows isn't cross-platform.

Adobe is but they have a ginormous multi-decade codebase that mastered cross-platform UI ages, an LLM coding assistant ought to be able to "add a range input here using our standard UI library" much more easily than "rebuild this with Electron."

1Password at least has a decent excuse for a rotten decision.

hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!)

My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it.

My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it.

So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?

Yup. It’s exactly like the dismal state of CSS frameworks we're mired in.

All these new kids walk in and learn the CSS framework du jour first, then find themselves stranded when things move on. If they had just learned CSS the first time, they'd be set for life.

Nobody should learn React before learning HTML and vanilla javascript.

HN last week: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347483

I mostly agree with you, but I do think they’re highly skilled at taking advantage of whatever messes they cause. “Chaos is a ladder” might as well be the theme of this decade.

My two favorite Apple products are the iPhone Mini and the iPad Mini. This foldable iPhone looks like it might give me both?

Personally, I think it's nice that companies make products that appeal to different kinds of people.

Funny, I don’t think the screen is small enough.

I was hoping that this would be a return of the 2015 12" Macbook, but good. I’d love to have a sporty little alternative to my 16" Tankbook for sunny, light work days.

Also I wonder how long the keyboard lasts and how does one replace it.

Apple has been using a single keyboard across their entire line going back at least 25 years. This one is the same as every other current model, and the teardowns report that replacing it is a breeze.

with blue LEDs, an instant demerit on any consumer electronic

t's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes.

There’s two ways to look at “that person picking tomatoes,” though. One is, “they’d be happier doing nothing”, funemployment, whatever. The other is, “they’d be happier doing something fulfilling.”

I think the author would agree that drudgery is an effective distraction from existential malaise. Despair, in a sense, is a luxury that the desperate cannot afford.

I’m of the (possibly unpopular) opinion that ~80% of these new data centers are never going to see the light of day.

None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...

I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.

also treaties I imagine?

Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...

Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.

One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.”

We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.

Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)

The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.

plants plants plants. Most of these are dummy easy to care for, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study#List_of_p...

Looks sick.

I think we're at the point where the inclusion of USB-A is a demerit.

Also the x86 processor… that's like two toes in the past… still looks like a heck of a machine. I’d take this over a Framework any day.

Doesn’t have to be a profit-making venture though, just needs to cover the cost of flights — which are not money losers.

If they can build a model similar to REI, count me in.

and why the people most prone to praising it are ones who mostly write emails all day.

“Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”

Speaking of “worse on purpose,” I immediately tried to subscribe to this site’s RSS feed — none. Unthinkable on any blogging platform for most of the past twenty years.

Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time.

Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space.

Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market would eclipse laptops, so “Windows CE already won” wasn’t an absurd statement at all.

similar, but I got the 486 DX2-66.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these inflation-adjusted prices due to the big Apple Computer anniversary — an Apple // cost $5000 in 2026 dollars, meanwhile a $600 Macbook Neo cost $150 in 1980 cash!

What helped me reconcile this was an observation that we’ve inverted the prices of necessities and luxury goods. Rent and mortgage in particular were a much smaller slice of income back then, but luxury goods were very expensive, so one would save up for a year or two to buy a new TV or a computer for the kids.

Now the necessities take a much larger slice of our income, but TVs and computers are incredibly cheap. It takes very little money to get a nice computer, and not-buying it barely makes a dent in the bills. This isn’t a good thing.

I do disagree a little with your observation regarding the industry “squeezing every ounce of power out of hardware”. Beyond local LLM stuff, there’s basically nothing a modern computer can comfortably do that any laptop since the mainstreaming of SSDs can’t.