reaperducer

Been racking my brain trying to understand what the purpose of this comment is.

Some people just like to see themselves in phosphor, and were never taught not to speak ill of the dead. Etiquette is a lost art.

I used to transcribe his articles to a text file and post them to Usenet.

Thank you for your service.

People like you were how people in other countries learned about technology and of other cultures in the days before the internet.

Some person (people?) would post scripts from Red Dwarf on one of the networks years before the show became available televisually in the United States. I used to devour those and laughed and laughed and laughed. That kind of British humor comes through well as text.

You pay a brickload more money but get (much) higher quality in return.

Not anymore. The last time I checked B&H they weren't very much more expensive than comparable "smart" televisions.

I have a new LG TV, holy moly what a terrible user experience.

My LG TV doesn't support Bluetooth, and it's only maybe eight years old.

Instead of simply connecting to Bluetooth headphones, you're supposed to put some LG app on your smart phone, then sync that via wifi with another app on the TV, then connect your smart phone to the headphones via Bluetooth.

Instead, I just watch less TV and will not purchase LG in the future.

(And let's stop pretending that "LG" stands for "Life's Good" like it says on the power-on splash screen. It means "Lucky Goldstar." If life was good, I'd be able to use Bluetooth headphones.)

Tesla semi?

Well, that did make it to market. One of them killed two people near Reno recently.

https://electrek.co/2026/07/01/tesla-semi-first-fatal-crash-...

It always feels a bit like lost magic.

I sometimes wonder if there is still a lot of that magic in the tech world, but were so used to having everything abstracted away from us in multiple layers that we've lost the ability to look for it.

I think about the TLA hackers who do seemingly impossible things. Surely they must operate on this level.

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to work in an Apple-sized rounding error.

I think the OP is trying to say if it was in Cupertino, it would be more of an event.

Just like Amazon posting for this position in Phoenix wouldn't be seen the same way as Seattle.

They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up

That sounds awful.

For those of us who don't follow the AI hype cycle, what does that have to do with the topic of this thread: Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber?

I was actually mucking with ChatGPT about possible "post-binary" architectures.

Ternary computers were around almost 70 years ago, and first posited well over 100 years ago.

Maybe ChatGPT isn't the best place to do research.

Fun fact: If your house is under 5 ft of ash, it's not covered by volcano insurance. That only covers you if your home is destroyed by the actual eruption/explosion.

What you need is "pyroclastic event" insurance to cover you for ash and lahar.

/ It cost something like $15/year when I lived in Seattle.

// The macOS spell checker doesn't know "lahar."

Is that still true?

Except for certain industries where the government has a direct interest (banking, healthcare, real estate), I don't think anyone has asked for my SSN in at least a decade. It's not like the old days when you'd fork over your SSN to rent videos at Blockbuster.

But this time around, even though I applied online, I was directed to make an appointment at the field office and physically walk in there, to prove my humanity.

I'm curious when this happened. The phrase "but this time around" makes it sound fairly recent. However, my wife had this very procedure required back in the 1990's.

She also had the same experience as you: Very friendly civil servants eager to help, and things were cleared up quickly once she understood the process.

You must be getting downvoted by people who have never run an ad-supported web site.

When I used to do that, North American traffic got ads 100% of the time. European traffic might get ads 5% of the time. Otherwise, there were few advertisers that cared.

However, this was back before Google AdSense upended the industry, and you could still make a living showing one static ad per page.

The Post Office shifting mail transport from trains to planes is what changed the economics.

The passenger trains also carried mail, which helped make them profitable. Then the mail, and the money, moved to passenger planes.

In my own experiments in this area I've been gobsmacked by how much malicious traffic comes from Azure.

I'm currently fighting this battle.

As of this morning:

  80% of malicious traffic comes from Azure.
  10% from Digital Ocean.
  5% from AWS.
  5% from GCP.

Probably a relay through a "free" app installed on someone's phone or "smart" TV.

https://health.amazon.com/prime

Ugh. No. Never. Do not use Amazon Pharmacy.

I had it for three months, and each month it was unable to deliver pills before I ran out, so I cancelled and switched to the brick-and-mortar pharmacy down the street.

A year later, suddenly Amazon Pharmacy starts sending unauthorized prescription refill requests to my doctor.

I still have the account cancellation confirmation e-mail from Amazon Pharmacy, but Amazon won't close my account. Amazon's account rep says it cannot close accounts for "legal reasons." Bullshit. He can't say what the legal reasons are, or point me to a document stating these conditions.

Now my doctor's office just ignores all refill requests from Amazon Pharmacy.

Never trust your health to big tech.

Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket.

I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000.

When do you ever get that opportunity?

I'd really like an analog watch face for the lock screen of my iPhone.

I really wish I could turn the clock OFF on my iPhone. The best I can do is to change the numbers to a language I can't read, and make the characters really thin and translucent.

I've read that in iOS 27, we'll at least be able to make it small.

My favorite digital clock was an LCD watch made by Fossil that had the digits spelled out in white Chinese characters on a cobalt background.

Not only did it show the characters, it slowly painted them on the screen. This wasn't a dot-matrix display. It was more like a 40-seg display. I've never been able to find a replacement, or even a photo of it online.

You're six months out of date. They're buds again.

When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.

I had a similar experience. It was mostly lower- and middle-managers who needed to put their mark on something visible.

I responded with, "Tell me what features you want the app to have that the web site doesn't; or is this a vanity project?" The "vanity project" line is what made people re-think what they were asking.

When that didn't work, I pointed out that they'd have to hire an entire new team to do the app, and gave them a high six-figure number to accomplish what they wanted.† That always worked.

† For a number of regulatory and political reasons, we cannot offshore for cheap.

Because of the use of the specific word that I made up. No human being would send it back to me.

Or tech companies could stop staring at their own belly-buttons and realize there's a whole big world outside of Silicon Valley, and training on the writing styles and pattens of their bubble and its hangers-on is perhaps not all that useful outside of 415.

Apple used to be guilty of this back when you'd ask Siri what the temperature was, and any number above 79°F was followed by the word "Hot!"

use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model.

I have a delightful time poisoning my company's AI system this way.

I invented my own word that sounds perfectly cromulent† to an ordinary person, and any brain that's read a book learns how to infer meaning from context, so it's not a problem.

When I get a e-mail response from a coworker using my special word incorrectly, then I know it's AI and I respond telling the coworker I don't know what that word means. Busted.

† It's not actual "cromulent," but any Simpsons fan or human brain will know what I mean.

I have always wondered why there was never a big market[1] for "cheap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e card you can stick a boatload of your old/surplus/n-generation old simms/dimms on and use as swap/slow memory/ram disk/etc"

Reminds me of the days of JBOD arrays. Mac OS X had built-in support for it.

JBOR?

A refund for the price paid.

But life is more than financial transactions. Those people wasted hours and hours curating their personal libraries with books they loved.

Considering how the price and availability of ebooks fluctuates, the refund value is not necessarily equal to the replacement cost, plus more hours finding replacements, if replacements are even available.

New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony

I guess it's a secret to the Brits and the BBC. We learned about Swedish colonies in the Delaware Valley area in fifth grade history class.

So secret that it had its own U.S. postage stamp, as shown at the top of TFA.

There's lots of things that people learned in elementary school in the UK that I don't know about. That doesn't made them a secret.

Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility

This is the same company that closed its e-book store, and everyone lost the libraries they'd worked so hard to curate.