creeble

Source needed: .com domains never cost more than $100/2 years, IIRC.

The movement isn't part of the brand. It's not part of the signal. The case/dial/sometimes band are the brand. And if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them.

So the only thing distinguishing one top brand from another was the name printed on the dial

Respectfully disagree.

Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.

Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.

I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.

I doubt your 450w gpu runs at that wattage 24 hrs, unless you're mining with it.

My (admittedly old) gpu+CPU idles around 50-75w.

For US-made dishwashers, this series (totaling almost two hours!) is educational:

https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

Which reminds me of another "there, problem solved!" pet peeve of mine. I call it the Default Trap.

In many cases (Norman Doors are an example), there are two or more equally valid ways to do something. By "equally valid", I mean there is no clear standard for whether it should operate one way or the other, and if you ask 100 people which way it should work (which no one ever does), you get something approaching 50%.

So the product manager or perhaps developer simply says "make it a setting", and everyone agrees and declares the problem solved.

But the problem is, you have to choose a default. And 90% of the time, no one is going to change that default, or even discover how to. So you have to be very correct about assuming which value is the best default - and at that point, it probably doesn't matter that you make it an option.

Almost all of the reports from people I know who have done ayahuasca have reported seeing "elves". It's not only common, they say it's not a "valid" trip unless you do, and even converse with them.

Though I don't know any reports of profound conversations.

It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.

Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.

I've been getting them for weeks and never noticed they were phishing.

I only used a SendGrid account briefly, as a potential backup to my current outgoing transaction mail provider. Sent exactly 5 test emails I think.

The ICE one this morning gave me pause, but only about 2s before I deleted it and moved on with my busy day of reading HN posts.

Looks just like mine.

But for $30, you can't beat this:

https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-...

I watched Sal's video yesterday, great summary.

So much complexity, plenty of redundancy, but not enough adherence to important rules.

If I understand them correctly, Ebers-Moll equations are based on the exponential relationship between voltage and current in a BJT.

But tubes aren't current amplifiers, they're voltage amplifiers, like FETs.

You can look at the "characteristics curves" of tubes (plate curves and transconductance curves), which tell the story of current against plate-to-cathode voltages for fixed grid voltages.

Rob Robinette is a great guitar-amp resource; knows just about everything about Fender amps in particular. He has many mods to many common/not-so-common Fenders.

Just his list of 5E3 mods (Fender Deluxe) is awesome:

https://robrobinette.com/5e3_Modifications.htm

Agreed!

There are probably broad categories that I might find myself using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.

I think he has it backwards: Easy for a small vendor, very hard for a large one.

I had the opposite experience with my 10-year-old Model S.

Most parts could only come from Tesla, including the Bilstein struts (a part number Bilstein refuses to sell to anyone but Tesla). $900 per corner.

USB port between the console? $400. I found a used one on eBay, fortunately.

When the wheel rotation sensor receiver went bad, it cost $2500 for them to install and reprogram the replacement, because they "upgraded" to a different mfr. When that one started to go bad (water ingress, which wasn't cured by the new part), I sold the car and said good riddance.

Elderly neighbor for me. Quite insipid; it took me a few minutes to realize that they were browser-based when I first got to the computer.

For music, they hear about 10dB is half/twice as loud.

The BBC used to teach +6dB for twice as loud for music sources, but they've always been a bit conservative.

Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax, in the same sense that (as mentioned elsewhere) a building permit is not a tax, but is still required by, and paid to, the government.

I'm not trying to excuse Verizon for not including them in their overall pricing, but these two in particular:

- Fed Universal Service Charge

- Regulatory Charge

are both paid to the government, and variable based on usage.

Edit: I will also note that Verizon has a $3.50 per-line fixed line item called "Admin & Telco Recovery Charge" that is utter BS.

There's also a full documentary movie "The Cover Story" by Eric Christensen that is pretty interesting, if long and redundant in parts.

It depends. I argued on the phone with Verizon for a long time (over an hour, going up and up the chain) about why a certain “Recovery Fee” was not in their per-line costs.

The answer (eventually) was that they do indeed pay the fee to government, but it varies with usage in a complex, government-defined formula in a bill from the 90s.

The beauty is you don’t have to.

The 'point' of Alvy's article is that pixels should be treated as point sources when manipulating them, not when displaying them.

Obviously, when a pile of pixels is shown on a screen (or for that matter, collected from a camera's CCD, or blobbed by ink on a piece of paper), it will have some shape: The shape of the LCD matrix, the shape of the physical sensor, the shape of the ink blot. But those aren't pixels, they're the physical shapes of the pixels expressed on some physical medium.

If you're going to manipulate pixels in a computer's memory (like by creating more of them, or fewer), then you'd do best by treating the pixels as sampling points - at this point, the operation is 100% sampling theory, not geometry.

When you're done, and have an XY matrix of pixels again, you'll no doubt have done it so that you can give those pixels _shape_ by displaying them on a screen or sheet of paper or some other medium.

Well, there's speed and then there's _speed_. As the OP says, very fast designs today are like the Sail Gran Prix [1] boats, 15m long foiling catamarans that go 3x the speed of the wind, up to around 50 knots.

They bear nothing in common with a typical monohull cruiser, or even racer-cruiser like a J-109[2]. Let alone compared to a comfortable cruiser like a Hallberg-Rassy[3]. These are all displacement hulls, whose speed is fundamentally limited to waterline-length.

There are monohull sailboats that can plane (most dinghys under 20' for example[4]), and there are large catamarans that can go much faster for their size than monohulls[5], but there are many tradeoffs in cost, dockage availability, and (somewhat subjectively) weather comfort.

[1] https://sailgp.com [2] https://jboats.com/j109/why-j1093 [3] https://www.hallberg-rassy.com/yachts/hallberg-rassy-370 [4] https://www.beneteau.com/en-us/first/first-14 [5] https://www.catamarans-fountaine-pajot.com/en/sailing-catama...

Racing isn’t what used to be, but sailing very much is.

There are roughly two kinds of sailors: those who care about speed, and those who care about comfort. They have almost antipodal design requirements, but both kinds are very much sailors.

VersaCAD was the only commercial program I can remember for p-System. It ran from floppies, or a hard drive that could be set to boot it.

It was a great CAD program, I many ways ahead of AutoCAD in its time. But AutoCAD was written in C, which proved far more popular (and, ultimately, more portable) than UCSD-p.

Probably, it's a cover of a Four Lads song written by Simon & Kennedy in the 50's.

For the sake of Ubuntu users, it’s ‘apt install fd-find’. You’ll need an alias fd=fdfind too.

You do not have (or write programs for) filesystems that contain loads of ancient mp3 and wma files.

It is the bane of my existence, but many programs support all the Latin-1 and other file name encodings that are incompatible with UTF-8, so users expect _your_ programs to work too.

Now if you want me to actually _display_ them all correctly, tough turds...