paulgerhardt

I just restored an 1800’s house and we redid the paint in limewash as part of that process. (Effectively zero VOCs but pretty caustic when wet.)

Historically (for interior paint) you would use regular limewash in dry spaces and add casein/milk in high traffic/wet spaces. It works in a bathroom but wouldn’t hold up in a shower (for that you would want to use “tadelakt“ - especially if you’re going for that Aman spa look).

The contemporary solution with modern limewashing is to use “mineral shield” - it uses silicone instead of casein - it makes water droplets bead up but still lets water vapor breath through.

It also doesn’t flatten out the nice velvet texture one gets with limewash paint from the calcite crystals.

That said, it’s extremely obvious if one touches up a patch of wall with limewash. No two batches are the same color unless you’re going pure white and even then…

Seeing the index in action next to an oura I appreciate how much smaller/thinner the index is (or at least how much less it seems to “spread” my fingers apart with of a width of 6.5mm vs 8mm).

It’s effectively a regular ring with a button on it that’s smaller than a typical 1ct engagement ring. The oura by contrast (even the 4) is a chonker compared to “regular” wedding bands. I’ve tried in the past but personally a very thick ring is a non-starter for me. Might just be a personal sensitivity thing. Clearly the oura sells.

From a V1/MVP/founder lens I am sensitive to the value in shipping a product that just works rather than doubling the complexity with a bms, custom charger, wrap around flex pcb, and associated engineering effort to mitigate ignition hazards. Especially when there’s platform risk in seeing if this thing even gets used. There’s no platform risk on the watch side which has comes miles from my first pebble/Alerta that was one day charge and blackberry phone compatible only.

As for the ewaste argument? If the market demands a rechargeable product then that’s the right move. But from a weight perspective? This feels performative. Even pessimistically three-four 5g device that are 0% recyclable will generate less ewaste than a 200g phone with 55% recovery and a 5% recapture rate of obsolete devices thats turn over every 3.5 years. It’s like 10x less and probably in the ballpark of what a hypothetical “rechargeable” index would look like.

Sounds like a kanji version of their Big Tic line.

You can find old copies of the JR-1999/JR-8034/JR7978 on eBay but if you’re curious about fashion history (as I am) the backstory is more interesting[1].

You may be pleased to know that fossil is rebooting the big tic series of watches.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVMOp_HDixh/

Recurring revenue, K-factor, long shelf life and low actuation rate.

Few verticals outside of video storage could support a monthly subscription putting negative pressure on supporting a shipped product.

Most smart home products are anti-social and had a low k-factor. You don’t want to share access to your scale to more than a handful (2?) people. This makes market adoption slower than a social networking app.

Touched on in the video but median shelf life for these $200 products is 8 years. Thats very “bad” relative to most other consumer hardware. Especially say a $1500 smartphone that’s replaced every 2 years.

Actuation rates on many categories are abysmal. Your smart smoke detector may go years without sending you a message. Compare to say screentime for ChatGPT on mobile averaging hours per day.

Interestingly a lot of those floundering smart home products became thriving businesses when pivoting to smart office focus. Subscriptions go up, user counts go up, utility goes up.

Some lesser god of protein folding is big mad we just copied her homework instead of spending 6 billion years in the lab like she did.

Watched this when it came out. I felt like it had that typical Technology Connections problem where it will take one under explored point along a Pareto frontier and conflate it for the global optimal design.

At least that was my experience with the toaster, microwave, and dishwasher detergent episodes.

While Hybrid System II is very clever and non-intuitive coming from an ICE or EV frame of reference there are reasons even Toyota hasn’t placed all their chips on this bet. In fact as Japan’s largest manufacturer they want to have a bet on every point of Pareto frontier which is why Toyota makes cars with their own competing iForce hybrid design (I’m a big fan of the generator + torque assist), hydrogen cars, electrics, plug in hybrids, diesels, propane and yes gas.

Specifically Hybrid System II is best if you can 1) only have one car 2) don’t have a place to charge it 3) do lots of starts and stops driving around town.

This recent article[1] answers a lot of these questions with great photos too. I would go so far to say it’s the most authoritative piece to date. Previously [2].

[1] https://apps.npr.org/life-on-tristan-da-cunha/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47640431

Pretty clever solution to rabbit starvation.

Some napkin math suggests July 11, 2478 AD assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch.

Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.

First couple of crews to orbit the earth at 0’ AGL had mortality rate of 9 in 10.

I’d say we’re doing better!

I mean there are multiple, multiple boundaries in place for this reason. I’d start by saying most “in the middle of the night” updates target non-safety critical systems in the car like the IHU. The update I received last night has a build date of 2024 reflecting extensive validation before general availability in 2026. It was field tested in limited markets after factory validation and had staged rollouts through dealers before going to general OTA availability.

Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.

While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.

“Cyberfunk”

Just went through this. Sample size one:

While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.

As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”

Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.

For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.

The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.

From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.

I’ve seen it a lot in ‘90’s hacker / net adjacent cultures. It always reads as gen-x/elderly tech millennial to me - specifically post 1993 net culture but prior to mass adoption of autocorrect.

It was the norm on irc/icq/aim chats but also, later, as the house style for blogs like hackaday.

Now I read it as one would an hear an accent (such as a New England Maritime accent) that low-key signifies this person has been around the block.

Even more recently is a minor signifier that this text was less likely generated by llm.

I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.

I was curious about the forecasting success story here too. The German LOK article is better in this regard: https://www.lok-report.de/news/europa/item/62410-oesterreich...

That unreplicability between chips is actually a very, very desirable property when fingerprinting chips (sometimes known as ChipDNA) to implement unique keys for each chip. You use precisely this property (plus a lot of magic to control for temperature as you point out) to give each chip its own physically unclonable key. This has wonderfully interesting properties.

Thanks. Higham explicitly addresses the authors substitution crime in section 2.5. Wonderful resource.

My complaint stems more to the general observation that readability is prized in math and programming but not emphasized in traditional education curriculum to the degree it is in writing.

Bad style is seldomly commented on in our profession.

I wish there was a Strunk and White for mathematics.

While by no means logically incorrect, it feels inelegant to setup a problem using variables A and B in the first paragraph and solve for X and Y in the second (compounded with the implicit X==B, and Y==A).

Because it keeps coming up there is an anti-Novamin crowd that says it’s useless and Biomin is the true re-enamelizer.

While I understand the spirit of this comment, if you look at the fossil record you’ll see that’s objectively not true.

Roughly half of the shifts in the last 11 evolutionary periods, over the last 500 million years, were caused by changes that occurred in a-few-hours-to-a-few-thousand-years with 75%-90% species lost.

Evolution did not fail to work then.

Aside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this space but literature is full of better practice.

[1] https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-st...

A few ways. This particular project is doing it by hand and very tedious.

The traditional way of transplanting large trees while keeping the root system intact is with a hydrovac. A machine the size of a jet engine that liquifies the soil with water and then vacuums it up. [1]

More recent developments have tried using an AirSpade which doesn’t use water but compressed air to blow apart and then suck the soil without making a slurry which is better as the soil can be redeposited in the same hole rather than discarded[2]

[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/HinwD5-Q2xA

[2] https://youtu.be/B3XomJ6Z1I4

Do recommend the LG C series (C5 or C4 are new or the C1 series if you want a deal on classifieds - same hardware as the higher end models but needs a firmware bit flip). The OS is very rootable and it makes a great TV that doubles as a monitor. Supports free sync / g-sync. OLED is nice at this scale.

Text is very readable, refresh rate is good. It uses the same panels as the fancier G series in the larger sizes. One can root the firmware to make it go brighter. (Though this is screen works well in medium or dimly lit rooms. It does not shine in very bright rooms).

Plenty of YouTube videos singing the C series praises as a TV / Monitor.[1] LG webOS is also trivial/friendly to root in developer mode and network control of the tv is a nice to have.

Would avoid Samsung. I love the matte on the Frame and the design of the Serif but the OS is frustrating / impractical to root.

[1] https://youtu.be/Qtve0u3GJ9Y

I’ve recently thrown out all my masking tape (crepe paper) in favor of Washi tape (rice/mulberry paper with a 3M adhesive). I use Blue Dolphin for house painting and Nichiban for airbrushing. Very nice quality of life upgrade.

Masking tape would bleed or lift paint. (Even frog tape). 10x reduction in these problems since switching to washi.

Impressive work for a solo effort.

Would love to see less front loading on the registration side - I fell off onboarding because I couldn’t get through the 12(!) page questionnaire.

The value proposition is clear, just let me use the app. Notes (my current solution for this) doesn’t make me read summaries of other people’s research every time I open the app :-)

I’m sure I’m missing something here but isn’t this common knowledge in sailing and climbing?

Specifically tying a knot with opposite chirality to one existing on a line can cause both knots to capsize and roll out.

One would not take it as given that three knots plus three knots would yield six knots in this scenario.

Given they’re near Hangzhou they can source a lot of stock for 1/4-1/40th the price as the US. I would guess $1.5k-$2k for the hot mess they show at 6:06 and $8k for the polished setup plus $0-$850,000 in billable hours to some PLC engineers.

The old school way to learn this field is an Allen Bradley or Siemens certification[1] but it’s pretty dry and tedious [2] with good money [3] because once you have a network you can show up at any factory or bottling line as they all use Siemens or Allen Bradley and they’re always breaking down.

The new school way is AI, raspberry pi’s, and 3D printer tool chains.

It’s worth watching the Valve Steam Controller Factory video to appreciate the scale of these lights off factories: https://youtu.be/uCgnWqoP4MM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/TimWilborne

[2] https://youtu.be/zDmGSHGH_is

[3] https://youtu.be/aLd2Y7pQ79o

[2019]

(In 2025, using Tailscale simplifies a lot of the configuration and reachability parts. This guide omits a lot of the hurdles one will run into with NAT traversal and the macOS section is a little dated.)

Cash is also—I regret to say—disgusting.

Not true!

For a while I was manufacturing cash and did some research on the hygiene component.

Surprisingly, I learned tap to pay was the most hygienic iff one didn’t use a common terminal for tips or signing.

Coins were the second most hygienic with a germ score of 168RLU . Cash third. Credit fourth, and dead last was shared payment terminals one physically touched (this includes tap to pay if one “answers a couple of questions.”) A separate study found smart watches were dirtier than terminals.

[1] https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/what-is...

[2] https://www.self.inc/info/dirty-money/

[3] https://www.nmi.com/blog/how-contactless-payments-impact-glo...

And amusingly [4] https://nocash.ro/oxford-university-european-bank-notes-on-a...

Reports in this space are full of confirmation bias so take the RLU scores with a grain of salt. Likewise some cultures have cleaner methods of dealing with cash than others.