gruturo

The "Oh no! Anyway" meme from Top Gear has never been more appropriate.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-no-anyway

To drive a touchscreen and serve as a Home Assistant interface you need neither a Pi nor an N100-class mini PC. That's the job of an ESP32. 20 bucks... for a pack of 5.

(plus the screen. And ethernet / PoE variants are rare, and not as cheap, so if that's a hard requirement, maybe not for your specific use case)

That's what your nose is for. (I'm quite skilled at advancing or going back by gently tapping the kindle against my face. It helps that I'm very nearsighted so it's kind of already there)

Yes - but - ironically - he did that _before_ joining them. IIRC he literally started collaborating and helping them while being at a different company.

Ok just unload the filevault key from ram, better? And if possible tell the secure enclave to revert to the before-first-unlock state

This would be perfect if it could monitor the force with which the lid is closed (macs have accelerometers after all, either this info or an acceptable proxy could be derived?).

Gently close? no action.

Stronger, faster action? Disable touch ID

Slam shut in full panic? yeah disable all biometrics, lose all state, even wipe the ram and the filevault key if it's an option

You could run an LLM like this, and the temperature parameter would become an actual thing...

OpenAI is not going to fund themselves with $20 subscriptions and advertising enough to be profitable.

Then it's doomed. Which is also my opinion, I don't disagree at all with you.

I wouldn't judge it so harshly. The Garmin side is indeed a wide gaping hole in the story, and I consider them actually well worth bothering with - but a lot of the considerations are interesting and resonate with me. The condemnation of google, how they betrayed the trust of consumers and partners, their fleeting, unstable attention, the damage it caused to companies and to trust in the product, is spot on.

I would have maybe added a mention of the extremely cheap watches (like an Amazfit I got for 49 EUR before I received an AW Ultra as a gift - but Xiaomi/Redmi, Huawei, even Samsung have stuff in that range) as they fit the described "What a Smartwatch Actually Does" use case perfectly at an amazing bargain price. If I really don't need much beyond telling time, showing notifications and maybe counting my steps, anything above 30EUR is going to be a really hard sell. We can add 20 EUR extra budget for a decent tracking of sports and fitness functionality. And the point is that, despite not admitting it even to themselves, really few people actually truly need something beyond these core functions which have stayed the same for a decade. As others observed in the past, the target user of an Apple Watch is someone who imagines themselves active and needing all the fancy stuff, but in reality doesn't.

I really do like my Ultra, and actually use the payment and scuba diving (as a backup) which go beyond the bare basics and set it aside from most competitors, whether cheap or not, but the reality is that I'd never have bought it myself. And I have no idea how the battery life is found acceptable by anyone - it's a joke. I can't leave 3 days without bringing its dedicated charger. One night out of every 3, my sleep quality isn't tracked as it's charging on the nightstand. Anything with less than 10 days (and I'm being generous) is - or should be - ashaming IMHO. Especially as a charging cycle every max 3 days means the nonremovable battery will turn them into e-waste within 6 years. Disgraceful.

Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.

There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.

They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.

The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.

Samsung has no vision.

I entirely agree with you, and profoundly dislike them, but it's clearly working for them if their financials don't lie. While most other manufacturers bleed money, Samsung had healthy profits on smartphones last time I checked. It still puzzles me that anyone would buy them at all, but I've long accepted that I'm not a representative sample.

So given that, I don't see why they would bother coming up with a vision after all this time.

Predictable and extremely low costs for less critical stuff. My 2 main ones are respectively around 4 and 8 EUR per _year_.

I use them to run wireguard to evade geoblocks when I'm travelling, a few redundant monitoring scripts alerting me of reachability issues of more critical stuff I care about, they serve as contingency access channels to my home (and home assistant) if my primary channels are down.

I get no support, no updates, it's all on me - which is fine, it allows me to stay current and not lose hands-on practice on skills which I anyway need for my job (and which are anyway my passion). I don't even get an entire IPv4 - I get.... 1/3000th of it? (21 ports, the rest are forwarded to other customers). Suits me fine.

It also fits in a handful of bytes or kilobytes what would take half a gigabyte to communicate in a video - sometimes making the difference if you have limited bandwidth or a cap on monthly traffic.

It's also ridiculously easy to cache (download a book in 9 seconds, board a transoceanic flight - no problem)

It also doesn't require the right sound and lighting conditions to see and understand a video (either those conditions, or good noise cancelling headphones - and now you're unaware of your surroundings)

It's also the only viable option on insanely low power devices which get months of battery life per charge.

It's also something you can read at an incredibly speedy pace if you are good at it and practice - though occasionally a decent audio/video player will be of use with this.

It's also something you can fall asleep while consuming, and tomorrow you won't have much trouble finding exactly where you left off.

I could continue..

True. But there are 2 ways to read this:

1: Yes, let's stick with ICE cars and die of preventable illnesses because EVs are only a massive improvement, rather than absolute perfection

2: Hey let's take this massive improvement and enjoy enormously cleaner air

I meet way too many people from group 1 unfortunately.

I can't really fault the 8086 designers for their decisions, since they made sense at the time. But if you could go back in a time machine, one could certainly give them a lot of advice!

Thanks for capturing my feeling very precisely! I was indeed thinking what they could have done better with the same approximate number of transistor and the benefit of a time traveler :) And yes the constraints you mention (8080 compatibility, etc) indeed limit their leeway so maybe we'd have to point the time machine at a few years earlier and influence the 8080 first

Awesome article Ken, I feel spoiled! It's always nice to see your posts hit HN!

Out of curiosity: Is there anything you feel they could have done better in hindsight? Useless instructions, or inefficient ones, or "missing" ones? Either down at the transistor level, or in high level design/philosophy (the segment/offset mechanism creating 20 bit addresses out of 2 16-bit registers with thousands of overlaps sure comes to mind - if not a flat model, but that's asking too much to 1979 design and transistor limitations I guess) ?

Thanks!

This is nothing new. The Army has been doing this forever. A certain General Failure was reading my C: drive all the way back in the 80s.

I'll show myself out..

You know you can get a lightning-to-C adapter for very little, right? Here you go, under $2 each: https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-C... (probably under $1 each if you have the patience to look for them in other sites)

And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter

Oh cool it's not just me doing exactly this.

Sticking to pure zigbee devices with zigbee2mqtt and slae.sh's excellent USB coordinator. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of spare IKEA zigbee devices before they go out of stock. Around 2030 I'll take a look if thread/matter is anywhere near mature and has settled.

The law got SO convoluted over 9 years of interpretation by the European courts that its now impossible to be 100% compliant

It absolutely isn't. I set up a blog for a friend where she shows her art and publishes an appearances itinerary/schedule. It doesn't collect ANY info from visitors, therefore requires no cookie banner at all. Simple as that.

HTTP logs are retained for 7 days for security analysis and then wiped. No analytics available, although my understanding is that a self-hosted Matomo instance set to anonymize the last 2 IP bytes of every logline it ingests would still be considered exempt from a banner.

An outcome I'm entirely fine with. Those industries are _not_ divinely entitled to fabulous wealth by violating one's privacy. I won't shed a tear if they don't survive once they are blocked from spying.

Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.

This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.

Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.

As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.

Actually the observation about ports being mostly a TCP/UDP feature is a very good point I had failed to consider. This would indeed greatly limit the ability of a NAT gateway - it could keep just a state table of IP src/dst pairs and just direct traffic back to its source, but it's indeed very crude. Thanks for bringing it up!

NAT also destroyed much of the end-to-end principle. If you don't have a real IP address and relies on a NAT router to forward your data, it needs to be in a protocol the router recognizes.

Not necessarily. Many protocols can survive being NATed if they don't carry IP/port related information inside their payload. FTP is a famous counterexample - it uses a control channel (TCP21) which contains commands to open data channels (TCP20), and those commands specify IP:port pairs, so, depending on the protocol, a NAT router has to rewrite them and/or open ports dynamically and/or create NAT entries on the fly. A lot of other stuff has no need for that and will happily go through without any rewriting.

Yep it's full of IP protocols other than the well-known TCP, UDP and ICMP (and, if you ever had the displeasure of learning IPSEC, its AH and ESP).

A bunch of multicast stuff (IGMP, PIM)

A few routing protocols (OSPF, but notably not BGP which just uses TCP, and (usually) not MPLS which just goes over the wire - it sits at the same layer as IP and not above it)

A few VPN/encapsulation solutions like GRE, IP-in-IP, L2TP and probably others I can't remember

As usual, Wikipedia has got you covered, much better than my own recollection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_protocol_numbers

ChatGPT doesn't really have much of a moat. If it becomes Microsoft or Nvidia exclusive, it just opens an opportunity for its competitors. I barely notice which LLM I'm using unless it's something super specific where one is known to be stronger.

I have close to 150 hours in Skyrim VR. What makes it unplayable without mods?

I'm in the same boat. Due to my vision not being perfect even after correction, a Quest 3 is entirely sufficient.

It absolutely doesn't take an app to issue a boarding pass which will appear in your Apple Wallet. It's literally a zip (with extension .pkpass) containing a master JSON, a few assets like logos and a digital signature. There are tutorials for making your own.

Many airlines let you download one once you check in on their website, or email you one, or embed a download link in an SMS, just to name 3 alternatives.

At 199EUR without the cells, I'm _almost_ tempted to go for it. It's a bit steep but the savings on the cells would already make the whole thing overall viable. If it had the ability to charge from USB-C as a contingency solution, it would be an impulse buy.