HN user
Email: starshipfuture@posteo.net
McDonalds
McDonalds should start allowing full 50% off order discounts in exchange for customers opting-in to receiving custom-printed wrappers with hyperpersonalized advertising printed on-demand just for them.
Could they afford to do it? IDK, advertising is effective and seems like a big business.
I think with their McDonalds App discounts for more normal pricing (last I checked), they're half way there?
Plenty of Palo Alto parents seem to want basically what Czechia appears to be doing:
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/palo-alto-schools/2026/07/10/...
https://www.fournorms.com/campaigns/petition-for-intentional...
It boggles my mind that this "b-b-but it's not actual real AI" whine is even a thing.
As I understand it, a major reason it's a consistent chorus is because people don't want the "AI is here" talk to drown out (and thus slow the arrival or distribution of) speech/text/popular-understanding about actual strong AGI.
To make an analogy, it could be like this:
Some people were expecting 100 tulips (because they were told tulips are available and can be ordered), and they ordered them. They received 100 daisies. And were saying "OMG, THE TULIPS ARE HERE! THE TULIPS ARE HERE!"
A nearby observer might have said, "You know, those are daisies. Not tulips."
And 95% of people might have said back, "WE GOT 100 TULIPS! SAYS SO RIGHT HERE! THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL! STOP BEING A NAY-SAYER! THESE ARE BEAUTIFUL TULIPS!"
The 5% could just to think to themselves, and could get chastised by the crowd, if they were to say say it out loud: "Well, those are not nearly as beautiful as tulips. And if you don't take it up with the seller, you may never receive the real tulips you were after. Since you think or at least act as though you've been sold them already."
The 18-month data charts in TFA don't give much information for comparing "this" with the past. I wish it went back 30 or 50 years. I like that the default view is units sold, looks like 2026 is a worse year for grocery stores compared with last year. Sales dollars is still growing, though slower that it grew in the past, and apparently only by jacking up prices.
So here's page with a line chart and downloadable CSV data, with a ~79 year lookback best as could quickly be found [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
In short: Don't worry, this one is just a 1974 or 2008 or 1992 or 1981 style blip. Hopefully. It always recovered before. (Before 1947, data is sketchy/excluded though.)
People did wait in soup and bread lines in the 1930s, I think. Check the online libraries, you'll find entire books from the early 1900s on how to make economical tasty meals on a shoestring budget.
We can do better. But it's not going to be by relying on large corps to help us out, probably.
It's going to be by reinventing the systems that are utterly broken.
[0] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real personal consumption expenditures: Nondurable goods: Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption (chain-type quantity index). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
Ok, but why?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN many times before.
Is it related to that?
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:
Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
This is perfect!
I too am not a SWE. This confuses a lot of SWEs, recruiters, interviewers, etc.
My domain used to have a name, but that name got changed to something that has the word AI in it. And I don't really identify with that either, although I use parts of that.
Hacker (in the HN sense, obviously) actually captures fairly perfectly how I approach using computers/tech.
Good piece for those with such an identity crisis to re-find the word for it.
Bravo. People who like the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica might like https://OldEncyc.com to dig into the volumes (by letter range) of 22 editions of old encyclopedias dated 1728-1926 (though not searchable like the OP).
Fastmail is the best.
Protonmail is good too.
Public service announcement: VLC is on iPhone in the App Store, too. (Some people don't know this.)
To be complete, for anyone following along: the above hypothesis was allegedly incorrect. 2 seconds is not supposed to be normal for so few chats. Element X is supposedly normally nearly instant to load & list chats for such a small number of chats.
So, I'll try to come back here and comment if I get it resolved.
Sure, both are uploaded, I'll DM you what to look for
opens in about 2s in Element X iOS
I think we're getting closer.
Your "good experience" on Element X iOS matches my "bad experience" on Element X iOS.
See, with my Server and Chats, Classic is actually very snappy:
- Element X: ~1.5 seconds avg (rounds to 2 sec if using a non-decimal stopwatch, but more like 1.5 when measured more precisely)
- Element Classic: ~0.6 second avg (actually slightly faster visually, this includes my response time to stop the timer, probably more like just around/under 0.5 sec)
But X loads in 2-3 times the time. I sit there waiting for content to load, even if it's just for a second.
Is this the best Issue to watch?: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/4102
Because I really hope speed does not regress for people already with very fast load times in Classic, when X becomes the only flagship App in the App Store.
> how many rooms are you in?
> and what server is this on (it could be a serverside problem)?
EDIT: Synapse 1.139.0
> And what precise build of the app?
EDIT: After updating to Element X Version 25.10.1 (192) [latest Update from App Store], about 2 seconds is observed -- still slower than Classic, but a little better than before. I will still finish following up regarding Server issues/info with server admins; hopefully that fixes it.
Thanks a ton for all you do! Good to know it's not the expectation.
It's [Element X is]...sluggish...
I regret to concur. On an iPhone PRO MAX with iOS 18.7-latest, my stopwatch says:
- Element X loads to list All Chats in 3 seconds.
- Element Classic loads to list All Chats in <1 second.
I'm giving Element X etc. the benefit of the doubt and will see them through.
But there NEEDS TO BE a user-advocate or project-manager just wailing on usability internally at Element. If you need such a person, find someone, and if you can't find anyone, hit me up, but I would think someone should be filling this role already.
In addition to bundling and network effects, one magic thing that helped grease the skids for some apps like AOL Instant Messenger or Facebook Messenger (in its glory days) or WhatsApp/Discord/Telegram or whatever gain very wide adoption was their relatively seamless user experience.
As much as the Parent sounds like complaining, I think it's complaining in good faith. We want Matrix to succeed.
For Desktop, use nheko as the client app. It's lightning fast.
Probably a confluence of reasons. Maybe:
1. It is much more profitable to introduce new features very, very slowly.
2. If everyone's doing the same thing... one has got to wonder what the people running those companies are up to. My gut says most of the founders/boards are probably largely all on the same WhatsApp/Signal group chat(s), and feel pressure to follow a certain groupthink.
3. It's much easier to profile individual users when the signals are nice and clean. I suspect modeling individual users (building digital twins) could be a really big and mostly quiet part of the longer play for these companies. That pristine initial data might be pretty nice to have.
4. Maybe it would be really boring or doesn't test well. A good thing about talking to the computer is the lack of having to deal with pesky other humans and all the issues they have. Many people instinctively despise reading text generated by a computer that SOME OTHER HUMAN PROMPTED IT TO WRITE (with some exceptions, of course). This might be called the "default conciseness" problem.
Nothing stops one from hosting their own LLM, hooking a web UI to it in such a way that multiple users can access it. Or using a commercial/networked API to do that.
Not a bad idea to try, really. Maybe you're the first one who thought of it...
IMO, 996 is kind of a scam to get people to work less and therefore be less competitive.
Real silicon valley works 24/7, only taking breaks to sleep.
The more people that work only 996, the better people can do who work 24/7.
Unless this means hourly wage workers. In which case, is that really "silicon valley" working? In which case, yes, web search show that generally California caps that at 72 hours/wk in general. So, 12 hours/day with 1 day off makes sense.
What is the fuss? People do what they sign up for. You don't like it, do something else, inventing the alternative if necessary?
I would do it if the rewards were good, if it was fun, or if I had to.
The normal approach would be:
1. Get a college degree in the engineering field of interest.
2. Get a job as an engineer in that field.
3. Optionally, become a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) according to however that is done in your location.
It's not really like software engineering, in which liberal arts or self-taught people get to be called engineers without the matching blood, sweat, and tears.
(If all you want to do is make stuff, you could learn the requisite sciences to know how things work, teach yourself CAD to design something close enough, and then either put in the hours at community hacker spaces or contract someone overseas to actually make whatever you came up with. But, it seems like you are considering a much more serious career shift?)
Not that I agree or disagree, just the link
Small Bets chat [0], an extensively modified fork of Campfire by 37signals (the group chat app in Ruby on Rails), is now FOSS, as announced at [1].
Changes added to the Small Bets edition of Campfire chat include those on this list: https://github.com/antiwork/smallbets/blob/master/campfire-m...
Notably, the rooms lists appears different in Small Bets chat vs. in the original Campfire, with the "star to pin favorite rooms" mechanism in the Small Bets fork.
Previously, 37signals recently changed the license of Campfire to be FOSS: https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire
regret my expensive switch from Linux to MacOS. MacOS is just so weird, it doesn't make any sense to me.
When picking up macOS, two things really help:
1. Having some macOS techies in your circle (co-workers or friends) to whom you can fearlessly ask random newbie questions, since there's a good chance there's a way that works well, which you are not discovering, and one or more people in your Mac User Friends group will have a good suggestion. (Maybe an LLM or Reddit can solve this, but real people are good, too.)
2. Leaning into whatever the macOS way to do the thing is. Don't try to do it the Windows or Linux way. Fall into the Apple paradigm. Don't fight it.
How do you maintain tests, in order for LLM edits to not keep breaking things?
- As a formal test suite in the program's own language?
- Or using a .md natural language "tests" collection that must pass, which an LLM can understand?
If it's a great swag item from a unicorn that you were at early enough to feel special about, you could frame it and put it up on the wall to look back fondly on.
Done and done. Thank you, sir.
Fullscreen (or, as is my preference, "hide menu bar automatically" and "open window to maximized not true fullscreen mode") is useful for presenting a full display cleanly, when the contents to present is exactly 16:9.
Otherwise, the menu bar makes the contents not truly 16:9 or awkwardly shows distractions/leakage in the form of the menu bar.
Critically, if contents being presented is true pixel perfect 16:9 ratio and the window is not "fullscreen" or "maximized with hidden menubar", then the aspect ratio gets messed up, ruining what is otherwise perfection through a slice of "missing" content along one edge.
Indeed, more for presenting than actual task work IME.
Nice thing is this clock can show on other displays, too, in multi monitor setups, e.g. when auto-hide-menu is enabled. So sweet.
Hey, this is really good for when "automatically hide and show menu bar" is enabled.
The only problem with "automatically hide and show menu bar" was that the clock was not there.
Which is actually very nicely solved now.
Well done!
Yes, safety of thermal paper is the first issue that comes to mind.
Secondly, IME thermal print can fade to nothing after 1-10 years. So these are specifically for short-ish-term use. Not for labeling something that is supposed to last a long time.
What kind of printer prints 3x5" (or larger) index cards well?
IME most printers struggle with printing thicker cardstock, or non-normal sizes, e.g. trouble with keeping that size paper straight or with bending/feeding.
Is it just a normal-sized printer, or are there special index-card printers?
Apple is very smart and very focused.
Apple is ruthlessly focused on extracting maximum current and long-term value from its high-end operating system which appeals to creative professionals, software developers, rich people, regular home users, and both the tech savvy and not very tech savvy.
In order to support its operating system experience, Apple has to make hardwarre.
Yes, Apple has a quite large ecosystem, but they do things slowly, intentionally, and by the book.
You know what's really not cool that the other companies all looked the other way on and are too big to fail on? Massive, massive copyright infringement. I suspect that Apple's legal team made the ethical choice to not do that.
Apple knows that models and inference are a race to the bottom, since the pirated content is broadly available, and since the model building is pretty openly published, and since there are several players already, and the hardware is basically commodity.
Apple can still be the glue that offers that platform on which people develop and make use of AI related technology.
The OP's assertion seems to miss that, for local AI, if one wants to spend under $10K or under $20K on an inference setup, or even under $1000 for that matter, (arguably) by far the the simplest and most efficient tokens per watt or tokens per dollar will come from buying Apple machines.
Apple appears to be simultaneously:
- avoiding truly silly levels of hype train buy-in
- letting market go where it wants to
- supporting that with AI where it make sense for them (on-device for user privacy and easy to use where applicable; connecting users to interfaces to other companies where that makes sense)
Honestly, I think AI has little place in an OS where the user is well acquainted with it and in full control. Many may disagree, and that's fine. But maybe Apple is willing to let those people use another operating system?
* Disclaimer, the above are just my thoughts, I do not have any special knowledge.
The INTERCAL satirical language (the original compiler's source code of which is announced as recovered in TFA) was covered in a couple of episodes [0, 1] of the (highly recommended, if I may say) Advent of Computing podcast [2].
[0] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/website/episode-78-intercal-and-esoterica
[1] https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/website/episode-158-intercal-rides-again-restoring-a-lost-compiler
[2] https://adventofcomputing.com