HN user

yborg

4,767 karma
Posts7
Comments1,194
View on HN

I wonder when the use of 'culminate', v. "reach a climax or point of highest development" for "cease to be effective" became the standard in military-related writing when trying to sound smart. The original usage in the specific context of an army's advance or offensive coming to an end made some sense but it's now used as basically a wordy synonym for "stops" in any context.

This will free manufacturers to build supersonic private jets for the superwealthy to cruise over flyover America. With normal steerage air travel becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average person, I can't see airlines buying supersonic airliners given fuel costs, they couldn't fill them for what they would have to charge.

Agentic Mfw 2 months ago

It's AI. Telling a model to shitpost really isn't very interesting since that's pretty much half of everything on the internets and there was practically infinite training material.

This actually isn't that far-fetched, once Microsoft saw that the bundled competing suite went subscription, they were free to drop their "perpetual" support.

I would occasionally see the standalone MS for Mac on sale for ~$30 and considered getting a copy just in case I needed it for some compatibility reason, but I just knew there was a catch. So I just kept running Libre. Glad I didn't waste the money.

There won't be "websites" anymore, it will all just be Google. Other behemoths that generate original content (that aren't AI) like sports, news, entertainment will either be big enough to sign individual deals on pain of litigation or just force-scraped (as is happening now) by bots that are indistinguishable from human users.

I don't think it's that PS has a better UI it's that so many people spent years in it because it became the de facto standard in graphic design work. Given the choice between doing work and learning a totally different interface so you can do work is choice many people won't make.

Can confirm, friend who moved to Mac after 30+ years on Win ecosystem and all of the discussions we have are basically "but on Windows..." They specifically have lamented the unavailability of Notepad++ because of a specific hanging indent behavior they are used to.

Most people do not have the cognitive flexibility to really adapt to a tool that is more or less domain equivalent but different in any way. These small differences create more friction than learning something that doesn't have any close mapping to what you knew before.

You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other indicator of mouse battery level.

I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.

Tony Hoare has died 4 months ago

This particular word for the oldest profession goes back to Old English. I am fairly sure it would outlive the building.

Because most tablets are intended to be as thin and compact as possible while being too large to wrap a hand around. Imagine the complaints if Apple told people to buy a case so they could hold the product. Imagine putting a ledge on one side to hold it oh hey, it's a Kindle Scribe (and still ALSO has a bigger bezel than the iPad Pro.)

This just accelerates the Balkanization of the Internet, which already is segregated by China and Russia. Maybe it was inevitable. Corporations benefit the most from open access and as they have demonstrated with unrestricted AI scraping they obey no morality, ethics, or law they are not compelled to by force.

The Quanta article on the paper was considerably more breathless in describing a fine piece of work in mathematics. The author here points out that one of the things that makes Dijkstra's result iconic is that it could be used practically in a straightforward way. As an engineer, beautiful mathematics is useless if I can't convert it to running code.