News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Affric

Re:Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek on Saturday September 19, 2026 @06:01PM (#49770475)
It's funny how you cited sources and rather than be given information you were just told that you were very wrong without any attempt to distill knowledge.
Yep, I have come to believe that as complex adaptive systems made of complex adaptive systems the part of us that experience music do so through being able to predict new information.

If there is no ability to predict it’s random and just noise.

If there is no uncertainty and it’s just purely repetitive then there’s also no new information and it loses the music (see what happens with overplayed pre-recorded songs).

The sweet spot is when we can to some degree predict what’s coming and thus understand it to be information while not being sure of what’s coming so we get the reward of encoding it.

I think this works for pretty much all genres and contexts. Even listening to techno in a dark warehouse while off ones face: the altered state makes most things seem novel no matter how repetitive and your mind doesn’t tune the information out.

But that’s IMO why octave harmonies largely don’t work: the mind perceives no information in the pure octave, and so little joy is gained from it.

Re:A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway. on Sunday July 26, 2026 @05:04AM (#49056122)
Stupidly terse code is fun and a good laugh to show to people as a puzzle… it is the opposite in an application that relies on it.
Re:Safari Technology Preview 248 Released on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @06:41PM (#49014461)
Since they nixed uBlock Origin Safari has not been a serious web browser to me. No amount of technology can make up for it.
Re:The lost joy of music piracy on Thursday July 16, 2026 @07:23AM (#48933037)
I still have the last cd I was ever given. Incredible mix.
Re:The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996) on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @08:31PM (#48929049)
I was thinking the same thing.

I think what it describes is about right too: computers programs should have a REPL and we should have agents that can input them for us if we don't want to get into the weeds and wish to automate tasks, in some ways anticipating the browser too.

Re:Just Let Me Write Digits on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @07:03AM (#48904891)
These are all great nominations.

Crazy to add complexity like this.

Re:TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @06:34PM (#48838277)
I had people who had been writing Tabs on paper for a very long time. I would wager that ascii is just a representation
My Apple Watch has 3 days of battery tops.
Re:Virginia bans sale of geolocation data on Thursday July 02, 2026 @08:07PM (#48769045)
So, aside from nothing to hide domestic/family violence and stalking, the fact that they can and will build an inference about you to attempt to influence your choices is fundamentally menacing to every person.

Corporate stalking has become so normalised (and provides so many livings) that we are through the other side.

Half a millennium ago they tried to control us by restricting our access to information to control what we think, now they bombard us with it to control what we think.

Re:Forestiere Underground Gardens on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @09:42PM (#48741452)
Not sure if it was from the last time this was posted but there’s a decent YouTube video about this place.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUKRPoQKynk

Right so it would seem increased physical exertion would be the answer.

Yeah, humans should have more free time and do enough work or exercise each day to keep their body in shape.

Played this originally, glad to see scripting included
Would be cool if Apple incorporated something like this into pages
I skilfully use computers to make art every day.

I also can identify a bird by myself, have my own sense of timing and rhythm, and can figure out things about a person myself.

It doesn’t augment reality, it simply puts a display on your face, like the article says.

Our eyes, sight: close enough to magic. It creates an experience, that in people without synesthesia, cannot be encapsulated within another experience.

Elves know and sense, they have names for things, they don’t get told the names of things by something else. There have been people in on earth who read their environment well, who can reliably predict rain from wind and feel.

We perhaps, someday, will be able to create new experiences, senses, that cannot be encapsulated within our current senses, we might be able to expand our current senses (vision in all directions, new colours, new audible frequencies, quieter sounds, et cetera). What that isn’t is looking at a display or listening to a speaker.

I use computers every day. My phone, pedestrian crossing signals, guitar pedals, food, books, the web. Art, work, recreation.

I just don’t think these glasses amount to augmented reality but a distraction from reality.

We can learn to, and I have to an extent, identify our environment and surroundings. The Pokédex is a fun novelty but knowing how to name a creature or a rock or a person based on what we perceive rather than someone or something else telling us what it perceives is simply a higher state of existence and a richer internal world.

And yeah, internalising another language is inherently better than using Google translate.

These glasses ain’t it.

No, it’s the “reading about exercise isn’t exercise” argument
Other animals use symbols, Koko clearly used symbols.

Not using our senses except to read symbols is the death of human experience.

That’s not what you see when you wear the glasses, you will see a symbol, a series of symbols, a facsimile of life that you will convince yourself is real.

It’s not elf like, it’s not magic, it’s not a sense, quite the opposite, it’s replacing sensing and processing with reading. The death of aptitude, prowess, and the human experience.

It's been a while since I did telecoms related stuff but also you might want a different CLI and ANI for forwarded calls so you can preserve the original line being used.

Obviously the whole scam call centre has changed how it has to work but we actually had a working system that had quite a few useful features.

Re:An interview with an Apple emoji designer on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @07:02PM (#48563480)
Emoji are fun to use because they make written communication more human… corporations or LLMs using them just comes off as insincere.
Re:Fox to Buy Roku Streaming Service in $22B Deal on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @12:02AM (#48550445)
Bingo.

Again Apple's offering is the worst apart from every other one on the market.

Re:Magnifica Humanitas (Encyclical Letter) on Monday May 25, 2026 @07:28PM (#48273080)
Should be noted that Australia, and even NSW, had quite a few different systems. Country NSW was largely done by the (local) county councils and they didn’t seek to profit by once the debt was cleared and instead wanted to give out cheap power until they had to take on more debt.

This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company.

It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.

Re:The case against boolean logic on Friday May 22, 2026 @08:24AM (#48234909)
I thought e was optimal
Re:Why is Inkwell stuck in review on Thursday May 21, 2026 @02:05AM (#48218521)
Needs to be generic in the United States, and only the United States... which is funny considering the global jurisdiction US courts often assume.
Re:Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid on Thursday May 14, 2026 @10:46PM (#48143958)
Never for production at scale admittedly, only for research and on fixed line connections, mostly public transport related. Some datasets are better than others.

Internet connected options here in Australia generally have good speed limit data but there are generally very few variable speed limits that allow you to travel faster than usual.

Transition is never perfect but surely regulation would account for that?

I genuinely don’t know but to me it’s an interesting problem.

Re:Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:23PM (#48142540)
Get a determined ex-partner who knows a lot about you and wants to harm you or kidnap your children. For most people this represents the greatest immediate risk with this kind of data.
Re:Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:14PM (#48142476)
Why wouldn’t they?

Dataset is readily available for most places. Pull local on entry to jurisdiction on every drive…

Re:Apple is increasing my cortisol levels on Saturday May 09, 2026 @06:07PM (#48078738)
Bingo. I know I would.

I am the king of knowing immediately when I have fucked up.

“Undo” has made us far too comfortable with mistakes.

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