DavidPeiffer

Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.

I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.

(Iowan)

We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).

I went to school for industrial engineering and have worked in manufacturing the last decade or so.

Bus production would be an entire refactoring of an auto factory. Tons of equipment would need to move around, electrical conduit would need to be re-run to different places, much of the existing equipment would be too small. The equipment would need to be ordered from suppliers who already have the next couple months to years of business booked, new suppliers sourced and contracts signed, etc. On an American timeline, I can't imagine it being done in under a year if you threw money at every problem aggressively.

We did change some auto plants to manufacturing airplanes and airplane components for WWII, but there was a lot more human labor involved, manufacturing tolerances were more loose, and we had widespread support of the American public to do what we needed to make things happen. It'd be incredible to see the War Powers Act implemented to publicly fund bus transportation, but I cannot fathom that occurring with this administration.

I was really hoping this CVE would have been caused by the Copilot integration into Notepad.

Calculator hasn't been infiltrated by Copilot yet, but I'm sure the day is coming.

>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?

This reminds me of a neat piece of computer keyboard -> audio software I found on what had to be an "old internet" site 15-20 years ago. For lack of a better phrase, it was relative tone keyboard. I've looked but have not been able to find the software, not remembering any hint of the name, but it was fun to play with.

It worked one of two ways, I'm not positive which.

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You stared with musical note C. One note could be played at a time. G would go down a half note, H up a half note. F down a whole note, J up a whole note. Repeatedly pressing G would go down the chromatic scale. Playing a Diatonic scale up would be a combination of pressing H and J.

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Pretend the keyboard letter G is the base note, mapped to C in music. F would give a half note lower, H a half note higher, and so on across the home row of the keyboard. Then you could adjust the base note (perhaps T to go down a half note, Y to go up a half note).

In essence, you could transpose a song from the key of C to D by doing a modifier, and your fingers could complete the exact same sequence. In a jazz application, something on Spiral Synth like "FSA, GDS, HFD, K" might have been

What struck me about the big island is that it has 8 of the 13 climate zones, and you can go around the perimeter of the island in about 5 hours.

I loved going up Mauna Kea visitor center and stargazing. At ~11,000 feet, it's one of the best places in the world for naked eye stargazing. You're literally above the clouds, the island has strict rules about exterior lights at night to minimize light pollution, and you're above the thickest air. I wasn't expecting to see the Milky Way so easily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#/media/File:Milky_Wa...

I worked with some supply chain consultants who mentioned "internal suppliers are often worse suppliers than external".

Their point was that service levels are often not as stringently tracked, SLA's become internal money shuffling, but the company as a whole paid the price in lower output/profit. The internal partner being the default allows an amount of complacency, and if you shopped around for a comparable level of service to what's being provided, you can often find it for a better price.

>This is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the current AI hype cycle. There are boring, well-behaved classical solutions for many of the use-cases where fancy ML is pushed today.

In 2013 my statistics professor warned that once we are in the real world, "people will come up to you trying to sell fancy machine learning models for big money, though the simple truth is that many problems can be solved better by applying straightforward statistical methods".

There has always been the ML hype, but the last couple years are a whole different level.

Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.

>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?

I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.

I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.

The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.

I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to press to get it setup correctly.

It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.

For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.

In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.

I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.

The YoLink system works great! I was able to spot an issue causing my chest freezer to very slowly increase in temp (roughly -10 to +10 F in a month) and move the contents before losing the food. Across 5 temperature sensors, I've needed to replace batteries on 2 in 16 months.

This is a very long and well written article. One fact I'd like to highlight is that the liver can regrow to the same size quite quickly if you choose to be a living liver donor.

I work in manufacturing. There are a few instances where watching YouTube may not be a huge hazard, but 98% of the roles I've seen the are reasonable reasons to not permit that. If nothing else, it'd be easy to let quality suffer which causes many bigger headaches.

I went to a panel discussion at a conference last year. Operations managers agreed labor was their biggest challenge. The manager for the promotional materials company who was probably around 60 discussed how he has loosened up a bit the last ~15 years. If someone sends a couple texts and it slightly impacts the units they (personally) do per hour, it was better than being super strict and losing employees. He had to adapt because the mentality was far different than when he started in the workforce.

Here are links to the episodes, for anyone interested.

April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...

Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...

It's the best data that's available at the time. It's been collected in a consistent fashion for a significant duration of time. To understand how a new methodology would differ, we'd want to run a new process in parallel for a couple years.

A few notes from an interview on the Odd Lots podcast, interviewing Bill Beach, former head of the BLS:

* Response rates among surveyed employees are roughly:

Month 1 68%

Month 2 83%

Month 3 93-94%

* Large employers tend to respond sooner, and are staffed to handle these requests better.

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April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...

Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...

> Wow - noticeable at least!

The blue is sufficient but not necessary for the animal to be impacted by the poison. It is a very vibrant blue though, and anyone would be concerned if they opened an animal and saw that.

I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc.

I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research.

https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-S...

I've had a couple coworkers attempt to use AirPods with Windows computers, and the audio quality has been awful and unusable. They sound super distant even with sound turned up all the way.

You will be going through underwriting again, your new rate will be based on starting at an older age, and you'll have a new exclusion period begin (unless there are some provisions which prevent these in the event of a company failure). Hopefully you haven't had any significant health conditions present themselves since the original policy went into effect.

>During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste and knowledge in these areas.

Man, you helped me realize how much the RSS era helped me out. I followed so many different sources of articles and had them roughly prioritized by my interest in them. It was really helpful reading thousands of articles and developing better and better mental models of how technology works while I was in high school. A lot has changed, but many of the mental models are still pretty accurate and handy for branching off and diving in deeper where I'm interested.

I lived about a mile outside of the DART zone where they were trialing this, if it's the program I'm thinking of. I attempted to use it one time, but had issues with the app. I love the concept though, and hope there's an economically viable way to implement something similar.

My favorite application of dead reckoning is the early 80's Honda system to display the car location on a map. While testing the system, there were times where the car showed itself off of the road. After looking into it further, they learned the map maker had taken some liberties with the exact position of the road, and the vehicle was correct.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38135979

>...I am sorta doubtful companies will deliberately make less efficient appliances if it goes away.

Working in the manufacturing space, I have no doubt designs will change and energy consumption will go up. They will be able to remove sensors, heat water hotter in dishwashers and clothes washers, run cycles more aggressively, and use cheaper motors (such as HVAC fans). Any item you can remove from the bill of materials adds to the profit directly.

Capital expenditure versus operating expenditure is a common tradeoff discussed in a business sense, and the Energy Star gave a pretty darn good comparison for opex for consumers. Taking that away (even with some of the games that have been played over the years) is a huge loss for consumers.

A P51 is my daily driver, and I personally really like it. The charging brick is indeed huge, but I throw it in my backpack and it doesn't bother me. I hate that the processor isn't compatible with Windows 11, because it's a solid laptop with good build quality.

I have 64 GB of RAM and it gives no grief with Factorio or Solidworks (admittedly I haven't pushed the limits in Solidworks), though I am could see VR causing challenges.

W700ds is such an oddity. I love it. One day in high school, my dad asked "what's the difference between RAID 1 and RAID 0?", which led to me sitting down next to him to spec this monster laptop out. A week later he purchased it.

At ~10.9 lbs + 2.2 lbs for the charger, it was not terribly practical to travel with, so it ended up effectively as a desktop in the office.

It now sits in my closet, and periodically I turn it on. The dual screen was a bit too small to do much with, but it was great for notepad or a chat window. Being a 32 bit system limited to 4 GB of RAM, it's not terribly useful today.

If this type of surveillance is concerning to you, please look at advocating against it at a local level. Thomas Ptacek [1] has experience and seems very willing to help out. He recently provided a really helpful comment regarding reining in a Flock install in his city. [2]

And as has been mentioned a couple other places in this discussion, please contribute to mapping out license plate readers in OpenStreetMap at https://deflock.me. Ideally someone will create a routing engine which with an option to avoid all known ALPR's while generating a route.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777