HN user
I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.
Since the dawn of USB-C iOS devices (iPhone 15 onwards), you can plug any old usb card reader into an iPhone or iPad without an adapter and it works.
I think this is going to be a much more common sight in most major western economies - many of them have a rapidly growing aged retired population and a declining young working segment etc.
The effects of this change are definitely being felt, good and bad, in many countries already.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, Ultima Online and Everquest would have had circa 500k-1m subscribers between them by 2003. Ultima Online had 100k subscribers as long ago as 1998.
I don't think I'll ever stop pressing ctrl + s/cmd + s every 5 minutes, the habit is too deeply ingrained at this stage!
They are beautiful things, but the last few I rode on with BA were absolutely starting to show their age inside prior to BA retiring them in 2020. I think the last passenger models were produced in 2011 and most of BA's 747 fleet was from the mid-90s. The experience was probably better on other carriers towards the end.
All of them pre-exist Swift, so I think it's perfectly fair to compare. Swift wasn't made in a vacuum.
I'm always surprised as well when new languages targeting widespread use launch without an official one. Dotnet/C#, Go and other languages that come batteries included with the package manager built into some kind of compiler/SDK binary, make the out of the box experience so much smoother, and the community hasn't fragmented nearly as much as say Java, Python and JS have into competing third party package management and project build tools.
Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.
My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...
I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.
People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...
That seems low for a Frigate setup with a Coral and suggests something else isn't right. Im running ~20 1080p cameras on two Corals right now. The general rule of thumb is 8-16 cameras per Coral, but it all depends on frequency Frigate is having to pass frames to the detector. Inference time per frame portion passed to the coral is about 10ms (100 detections a second), which is fast enough to cover a good number of cameras.
Worth noting most of the time the Corals sit idle in many setups, as Frigate only wakes them up if it detects motion with simpler algorithms on the CPU first. You gain capacity for a further 100 detections/sec for every Coral you add essentially. The corals are not sitting watching every single frame from every camera, which I think is a common misconception about Frigate.
It's worthwhile to spend some time with the docs - the mistake I always see made is folks passing a full fat 4k stream for detection at some silly FPS, which generally doesn't make the detection work any better and greatly increases processing costs.
If your six cameras really are generating enough events (100 a second) to saturate a coral, I'd be looking at what else I screwed up!
https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/camera_setup/#choosing-a-...
Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today, but Sony absolutely subsidized the PS5 at launch.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Their camera system isnt awful, but I would still pick Frigate over it (I have the option for both at home and have ran each). Frigate is nice in that it works with any old RTSP IP camera - many features in Unifi's NVR support only work with their own over-priced cameras. High quality PoE cameras are extremely cheap nowadays. If you connect a non-Ubiquiti branded RTSP cam to their NVR software you lose a ton of features.
with basically no AI product to speak of?
I don't use Meta products regularly, but they've crowbarred the "Meta AI" feature into everything - FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram... There's even a standalone website to chat with the Meta AI model similar to chatgpt:
I'm certainly prepared to agree that they don't have a huge amount of traction or marketshare, but they absolutely have already built AI products and they exist.
Outside of their own consumer products, there's the family of llama models too etc.
It's never been explicitly forbidden, just heavily discouraged in virtually every version of the spec. In the current 9110:
"A client SHOULD NOT generate content in a GET request unless it is made directly to an origin server that has previously indicated, in or out of band, that such a request has a purpose and will be adequately supported. An origin server SHOULD NOT rely on private agreements to receive content, since participants in HTTP communication are often unaware of intermediaries along the request chain."
"Content" is what the RFC calls a request body. The simplest argument against IMO is it makes caching more complex, as now the request body would have to be part of any cache keying etc, you can't just blindly key off the request + URI params for every single GET. There are plenty of other reasons to not do it.
The spec expects responses to GETs generally to be cacheable:
"The response to a GET request is cacheable; a cache MAY use it to satisfy subsequent GET and HEAD requests unless otherwise indicated by the Cache-Control header field (Section 5.2 of [CACHING])."
It's also a two line Dockerfile to add wget or curl to almost any pre-existing container image. This is a fun idea though.
It's interesting that this is a brushed design. In the RC car community, brushless motors are generally regarded as superior, but those of course have the rare earth magnet problem.
Technically the brushes can wear out, although there are claims they are good for 150,000-250,000 miles it seems.
Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.
Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.
I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.
And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.
The APIs in iOS that turn feature flags on/off as you travel now have gotten insanely complex. Some are on time triggers, some change instantly, some depend on where your iCloud account was setup, AFAIK there isn't a black and white answer as to what happens when you move a non-EU iPhone through Europe anymore, "it depends". It's similarly vague in the other direction.
Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.
I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.
I know a few folks who work in FTC compliance roles at Meta. I don't think the wider nerd-sphere appreciates the extent to which the FTC regulates Meta following the consent order after their privacy scandals of the 2010s, or the sheer number of roles within Meta now working only on FTC related compliance. I'm sure Zuck is no doubt desperate to ramp it down.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
Boxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi...
I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...
There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
Yet to encounter this side effect. So far every crappy wifi device I've tried has obliged.
In the UK, the equivalent tax on housing is council tax
Council tax is difficult to compare to a percentage based property tax - the band based system means people in super valuable homes pay virtually nothing, at least relative to the value of the property, and each of the ~8 bands pays a fixed fee - once in the max band the tax stays the same no matter how valuable the home.
This is especially acute in places like Scotland, where the top band kicks in at anything over 212,000 and hasn't been adjusted since 1991... Essentially any new build starter home in many places will automatically be in the top band and taxed the same as some dude who bought a castle for millions.
Personally I've never thought of council tax as a property tax, even if the bands superficially are linked to it- the link to underlying property values is so broken now.
My first rented flat outta college was taxed at the highest band, and I sure wasn't rich then. It's widely argued to be a very regressive form of taxation - its opponents indeed argue it should be replaced with an actual property tax.
Not sure how widely available this feature is, but the unifi controller software for the popular Ubiquiti APs lets you bind individual client devices to specific APs such that they can only connect to the ones you choose.
I had to solve a similar issue for some crap IoT lights that would join the incorrect AP after a power cut every time.
https://community.ui.com/questions/Lock-Client-to-Specific-A...
Smalltalk's syntax never go really popular though. One could say that was its biggest drawback.
A lot of Smalltalk-style syntax was absolutely massive for a decade or so you could argue, at least under the guise of the gazillions of iPhone apps that were written in Objective-C. This random blog post probably does a better job than me:
https://richardeng.medium.com/apple-has-been-using-smalltalk...
Ain't just me who thinks it looks like an Asian EV:
https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/05/26/ferraris-550000-ele...
https://nypost.com/2026/05/26/business/ferraris-new-640k-ele...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/ferrari-stock-price-luce-ev...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/26/ferraris-475...
etc
The exterior screams asian-EV design langauge to me - which may not be an accident. Ferrari have made no secret of their hopes this car will succeed for them in China.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-09/ferrari-s...
One such extension, https://www.tuxlervpn.com/faq/:
Will other users of tuxlerVPN be able to connect using my IP address?
"When you use our free residential VPN, you automatically agree to add your IP address into the community pool. This means that you are trading your own IP address in return for the ability to connect via the IP addresses of other users. You can opt out of this by purchasing our premium subscription; once you upgrade to the premium version, your IP address will be removed from our community pool."