alden5

Am I the only person increasingly paranoid about the inevitability of having to give my fingerprints to the government? Once they're out there you can't exactly change them and in the future i'm sure imaging technology will become significantly advanced enough that a portable device could be made that identify everyone who touched a scanned surface. Maybe it's just a phobia I've had since I was super young but fingerprints feel like a really sensitive piece of biometrics to give up. I live in the US and have traveled to europe a few times but have never been fingerprinted as far as I'm aware.

The thing that's also not grasped is because of the low earth orbit nature of these satellites they eventually succumb to drag and only have a useful lifespan of ~5 years. Using that and 100,000 satellites that means the constellation will take ~54 satellites/day to maintain, they're also quoted as being 2 tons which about the weight of a Sedan/SUV. Reframing it it's like if Comcast had to crash 54 supercars into a brick wall everyday to keep their infrastructure up and all that material also got dispersed throughout the atmosphere. SpaceX is already making/launching ~10 satellites a day and metaphorically crashing them into a brick wall, the wall is just ~5 years away.

Humans have been around for a long time but also don't live very long, but to sustain this internet infrastructure for an average person's lifespan it'd take ~16 replacement cycles. In terms of human civilization timescales this infrastructure cant/won't be sustainable for very long. Personal opinion but I think we should figure out how to run network cables to remote places better, we managed to do it with gas and electricity.

Unless I know I’m making a ton of variations of a model I’ll usually start from scratch every time. Maybe I’m blinded by my own experience but describing unique geometry with just words seems so much harder than just using regular cad. I design fixtures on a manufacturing line for a living and so I spend most of my time turning people’s ideas into 3d models and nobody can explain what they need with just words. People definitely try to explain what’s in their head but words aren’t enough for anything more complex than the examples on the page above. I always need to see a physical demonstration in person or a napkin sketch.

The fact the campaign is run on crowdsupply makes me a lot more hopeful it'll get to market vs a site like kickstarter. Crowdsupply requires a working prototype before launching and they provide all the expertise to actually get projects to market, off the top of my head I don't believe any crowdsupply project has failed to deliver.

I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.

So insane to me that these ai companies are perfectly fine trying their absolute best to automate as much knowledge work as possible but as soon as this capability can be turned on them they start implementing hidden interventions to sabotage anyone trying to beat them at their own game.

God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.

Having public investors forces companies to try their best to make a profit with the threat that you could get sued if you don’t. Sacrificing short term gains for long term goals is something public companies aren’t really good at. One good example where not having public investors has drastically helped a company is spacex. Almost every one of their programs has had really bad failures that public investors could’ve investigated and shut down. As someone who worked for them I really don’t want them to become public, forcing a company to do that seems crazy.

on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia

This talk was given at crowd supply’s 2025 teardown convention which after going for the first time last year I highly recommend it to anyone interested in hardware development. Met a lot of super cool people and managed to get my ticket price back 4x in the amount of free dev boards I got lol

The app isn't accurate at all, magic 8-ball of scales, anything you put on the trackpad it'll settle on a weight and give you a number but it'll be random. The app will accurately tell you how much force you're applying with a finger but when putting something else on it'll settle on a random number

It goes in gram increments and my laptop was able to read 7300g pressing as hard as i could, which I was surprised it would be designed to read that high, might go up to 10kg but I don't want to crack my trackpad lol. The actual measurements though are extremely unreliable. I've found it can't reliably measure anything, measuring a roll of tape gave me measurements from 70g to 700g, it always settled on a number but was different every time. Maybe the underlying data is more accurate but this API is definitely just designed for outputting the force of a finger. M1 MBP for reference

That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains

apple actually didn't release any 'pro' airpods at this event, the feature is for the pro 2's which have been out for over two years now, was glad it wasn't made a feature only for a new version

that's not a source, could you link the report?

apple already sells a device for taking care of kids, just get them an ipad and it'll keep them entertained all day long! /s

What never made sense to me with their go stores was why a store that only needed 1-2 people max to operate had such bad hours. Hearing now that getting the bill is a mainly manual process i guess their hours had to line up with their data entry team in india so people could get their recipes quickly. insane to think about

the trick is lots of amplification on both ends is able to compensate for a wide beam spread, edfa's allow you to optically amplify the sent signal and allows the faint received signal to also be amplified

Years ago when gpu power was basically free through google colab I used that to my advantage by racking up sheepit credits rendering other people's projects on google's dime. I still have about 10 million credits right now and I don't think I'll be able to use them all.

If you're using a pi you're already in a pinch, putting a dac on a pi seems alot like putting lipstick on a pig, the only scenario where it wouldn't be overkill is music streaming and i highly doubt thats even a majority of pi projects with audio

procreate doesn't have any in app purchases, there is alot of 3rd parties that sell brushes for procreate

It really depends on your definition, pretty much every car for the past 50 years has been computerized. If what you're really after is an ev with no lockouts there are plenty of ev's where the only lockouts are to ensure you don't do anything stupid (no over-discharge destroying the battery for slightly more range, etc) But if you're after complete control you'll find that in ev conversions with dedicated speed controllers will give you complete control, so you can shoot yourself in the foot if need be.

A while ago there was an issue that when replacing a camera on an iphone 12 it would cause the camera to become unresponsive. The problem was later solved with a software update without much fanfare; Backing up the fact that it was a glitch, the problem never occurred on the 12 pro. but yea i definitely hate the serialization, especially considering it looks like their hardware design is becoming more repairable with the 14's back glass becoming removable, it makes their software lockdowns make even less sense.

Starlink satellites only last about 5 years before they run out of gas and are decommissioned with an end of life maneuver which sets them on course to burn up in the earth's atmosphere. I doubt many others besides maybe amazon will want to launch satellites at the same height as spacex's, especially considering how insanely expensive and complicated launching something like the starlink network is. Another point to consider is how small they are compared to the area they occupy, they have plenty of room to spread out and they're constantly monitored to calculate the probability that they might collide.

My local credit union did the same exact thing, after the class action lawsuit i got a $20 settlement for about $120 they stole from me. Absolutely insane how they were still able to keep some of the stolen money, meanwhile there are people behind bars for using counterfeit 20$ bills.

thank you! signed up to be notified about the next round, there's a part of me which really hates that i'll barely made the age cutoff, where is my youth going :(

Woah those look really useful! bookmarks the link thinking "ill do that later"

It's such a dumb feature too, i don't think there's a single person who wants all the photos on the web "enhanced" it's adding features for the sake of adding features. What people actually want from edge is ads and tabloids not being plastered everywhere, but apparently that's asking too much.

looking more into this i guess it's called emoji kitchen by google and there's over 20,000 combinations, its crazy using this tool and seeing how specific they can get, they're not lazily copy pasted either, need a hedgehog wearing headphones? google got you covered i guess

Safari has a nice feature in the 'develop' menu that allows you to spoof a user agent, i just switch it to 'Microsoft Edge - MacOS' and bing chat works perfectly fine