HN user
When I opened https://radio.garden/ and spun the globe the first time, I tuned to a radio station somewhere in Africa, and it gave me tingles to think that in Lagos at that same moment, some bus driver was surely listening to the same music.
Clicking around the code, it mentions a page with images... even more clicking around got me to this page/image: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Block1.html#DSKY / https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Block1ControlPanelDSKY.jpg
Damn, a control panel to input values, probably straight to the CPU. I guess the astronauts didn't have to learn assembly, but imagine a programmer having to recite all the raw code (I guess the commands (verbs) are numeric as well) to debug something, all the way at the moon.
God, "cyber incident"... I spent time in 1990's that that sounds like getting disconnected while having a steamy IRC chat with "22/F/Cali".
No problem, the apparatchik will rubber stamp it!
Gotta keep that trillion dollar Ponzi scheme floating!
Product idea: charging cables: snake the cable up to your AirPods while they're in your ears, use magnets to attach to the battery terminals and deliver juice.
But argh, I have a feeling the AirPods turn themselves off while being charged...
So no longer Search Engine Optimization, but Language Model Agent Optimization.
"I'm an LMAO expert"...
I somehow want to make a brick and mortar shop with products with 5-digit price tags and the famous brands, but they're all fake, and visitors can pick and choose all the fancy products they want. They can then go to the cashier and go through a simulation of the purchase of all those products, but walk out with nothing... Or maybe even a receipt so you can look at it and pretend you just bought those things, hah.
"The keys to the Lamborghini Aventador, and a Louis Vuitton bag. That'll be 350,000 dollars. How will you pay, ah with the made-up cheque? Certainly sir!".
Charge $40 for half an hour of this sort of entertainment (or more for a virtual chequebook with a bigger account behind it), rake in the bucks...
God damn, the AI-generated pics.
Well, since it's a site for Artificial Food Ordering, why not use AI images.
I wonder how Baudrillard would think about all this.
I doubt AWS has capability to do anything to generate $2T of charges, even if one user maxed every billable capability of every resource they have.
If I got an email with that amount I would've just laughed at the incompetence that lead to a bug that lead to me getting the email. But I write as a backseat email recipient.
It's already looking like Putin/Erdogan-style election fixing...
The bigger irony is that Sony and Philips worked together to create the CD-Audio specification.
My car reads USB sticks with MP3s on them (I was telling a Gen-Z colleague this and felt old...). There are external BluRay drives that connect via USB, but then to he able to play audio CDs, either the car needs to understand CDDA, or the drive needs to understand CDDA and pretend to be a FAT32 filesystem of some MP3s (or... WAVs?) to the car.
Huh I also have Subsonic on my home NAS and Symfonium on my phone (connectable via Android Auto). Another Rube Goldberg invention would be to put the audio CD in the drive connected to the NAS, have a driver that pretends to be a filesystem of MP3s but actually encodes the CD tracks (on the fly on every playback, of course!), stream it over the Internet to my phone, that's connected to Android Auto. That's how to play a CD on a modern car!
Trying to aim with the mouse immediately shows me "made by a fucking clanker"...
Pet-peeve: weirdos who use "x'ed" instead of "multiplied".
They can go in the corner with tech bros who use "ping" to mean "contact me".
AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
Some argue that another form of climate denial is the denial that we're headed for certain doom.
Of course it's an easy cop-out, to say "well the planet's doomed anyway, let's book those flights to the Maldives! (Before the sea swallows them)". Or to deny responsibility by saying "Why should I change, look at those private jets!".
I agree when Kurzgesagt argues, the fix is to push for political change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc . I like meat, petrol cars and flying vacations, but if they get heavily taxed to help save the planet, I'll sign up for that!
I'll grumble that meat is such a luxury, but that's how it's supposed to be...
lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car
The hilarious thing is that the EU decided that the assisting must be mandatory, and so now every time you turn on your 2024 or newer car, lane assist and "you're speeding!" warnings are turned on.
At least there's still a way to turn them off/getting in the car means sit down, seat belt, mirrors, turn on the engine, go to settings and switch off the nanny modes...
My first guess would be replicaton isn't that critical, because a user would mostly interact with an instance that's nearby, and this instance has their data. But the page mentions:
Games and Tools — including leaderboards, quizzes and more.
A leaderboard that's globally consistent, huh, that's not trivial.
Maybe they just propagate the SQL commands to all their servers...
Bill Gates wrote about paying to send you mail in his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" (yeah this is an old old idea). His expansion was that you could refund the sender's "stamp" if you consider their email worth your while.
Huh I was going to say you may be talking about a differen thing, but I checked and they actually are C7/C8: https://ptcomputers.com.au/wp-content/uploads/without-power-...
So in this universe Apple doesn't invent its own standards...
It's a viable scenario, but I'd bet "Emma"'s story is something the AI imagined for this slop article.
Imagine if the requirements were instead "You need to have a phone with an OS controlled by Huawei"... do you see the issue there?
Maybe 99% of people have surrendered to Google/Apple (include me there), but the 1% has a valid point...
Isn't that... Windows Update? At least last time I looked it would update .net runtimes, Office, what else? OK, Visual Studio has its own update mechanism. Edge is part of the OS, isn't it?
It's passing the buck, isn't it, if I ask AI and AI tells me something dumb, I can blame AI and absolve myself of responsibility.
At the same time, the troubling allure is that the machine has ingested a million books and has better knowledge than me (e.g. in things like JavaScript or Japanese), so why not trust it about how to raise kids.
Man, in some ways this is a future Star Trek envisioned: a display showing you a planet's orbital hardware and its launch sites...
But the sad reality many of the hardware is Elon Musk's ejaculation stains, polluting the skies.
Just redirect the solar power to cool the water going out of the nuclear powerplant.
"Just".
My 4th grade physics knowledge is telling me this doesn't work, because the heat energy from the water still has to go somewhere...
The evening mode has vibes of Ghost in the Shell's "chase UI", glimpses of which is in this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amKt8ttja1E
The idea is the system would just judge terrible drivers quietly, and then route them away from my route whenever I'm on the road.
Of course the first step of that is I have to gain control of Google Maps...
Terrible drivers cause traffic jams and accidents, who wouldn't want to be segregated away from them?
Why "slop-sounding"? It's definitely LLM slop.
Man, why the fuck don't they just make a powerpoint with bullet points if all the sentences are like that.
I wish there was more police presence to spot lane-camping and fine them in Germany, too many idiots do it and get away with it.
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!"
It'd be unethical, but man it'd be magical...
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the cloud-based navigation system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...