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archi42

Re:Burning Man Death Rates – A Short Lesson in Statistics on Thursday October 01, 2026 @03:24AM (#49918752)
Another selection bias in favor of 0 deaths: Getting there isn't totally trivial and not exactly cheap, so if you're feeling so sick you're literally gonna die within a few days, it's unlikely you will go there. With the low number of expected deaths it's enough if a few seriously sick persons stay at home to reduce 4.9 deaths to just two or three.

While it's hard to account for this in exact numbers, this selection is surely happening.

This also interacts with the cause of death: Fighting late stage cancer makes it hard to attend. And while on premises it's much less likely to get into a fatal car accident. Plus Burning Man doesn't seem to be the place you're going to be mugged on the way to your home/tent. The car accident factor alone would lead me to expect that most fatalities associated with Burning Man happen while getting there or on the return trip.

The cause of death might be scrubbed from the statistics to get a more realistic (read: smaller) number.

Re:We have a year to fix security everywhere on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @02:06AM (#49606073)
Zzzzz, we should have gotten security right a few decades ago. But security costs money and isn't a flashy feature to attract new customers, or cuts into your margin if you're a "real" business producing stuff or offering some service. Or whatever the decision makers in Berlin were thinking when they ignored security.

Yeah, we would still see hacks, but we would see less of them if security wasn't optional.

Maybe the AI craze helps by forcing more decision makes to see security as imperative, and by giving us another powerful tool for our tool box.

N.b.: I work in the security industry, our customers obviously want to improve their security. We've been seeing an uptick in awareness, but that's mostly due to NIS2 and other legislative efforts. Those force them to do something. AI is a curiosity for small talk to many of them.

Re:The lost joy of music piracy on Thursday July 16, 2026 @04:28AM (#48931769)
On the more legal side of services was the original last.fm - as a pupil/student I spend days/hours discovering new music there. Not only due to automatic recommendations, but a lot of time by browsing other people's listening habits - just like browsing the music collection of someone else on soulseek.
Re:Benchmarking 15 "E-Waste" GPUs with Modern Workloads on Thursday July 16, 2026 @04:10AM (#48931635)
Ah, I'm aware of the physical limitations (including cooling), but I was under impression that these days we had a good handle on rendering on one device and doing the video output on another (at the expense of some latency). Obviously I never tried that with a datacenter GPU.
Re:Benchmarking 15 "E-Waste" GPUs with Modern Workloads on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @10:51AM (#48907821)
Wait a few years, and we're all gaming on decomissioned data center GPUs ;-)
It's a 100" telescope... from 1917. To summarize Wikipedia for you (my words, not a genai): While it was used by famous people like Hubble it isn't used for scientific work anymore. Some adaptics optics stuff happened in the 1990s, but I suppose that was just to test the system on a telescope that wasn't in active use anymore. In 2014 it "began its new life as the world's largest telescope dedicated to public use".

So I'd say it's a good use as any ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Wilson_Observatory#100-i...

Re:QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:56PM (#48866887)
It still works pretty well in the IR band. I know that one from experience due to storm damage to our roof ;-)

A leak only turns invisible if the water has the exact same temperature as the wall and there is no meaningful evaporation happening (as that cools the affected area).

Of course don't let me stop you from actively probing your all using RF. Though also there you might have good chances with IR, since wet $stuff should behave differently than dry $stuff ;-)

Ugh, we have BSH [Bosch Siemens Group] appliances with wifi, but ours add actual features and don't artificially lock any. Both dryer and washing machine: Remote start, start when energy is cheap, notifications when done or on issues. The dryer can automatically select the program based on the last washing machine program. For the washing machine program I can use the phone to select what I put in there, and it picks a program for me.

However, I can also use the dials much like I did with our old appliances. There is nothing locked out and we actually used them offline for a few weeks (tbh I didn't try setting the finish time using the appliances' controls).

In Jeff's case that's obviously not the case, but there are still options from BSH. As with everything, one has to be careful in what they buy these days. Don't interpret this as victim blaming: I hate that we have to be careful with these traps.

Edit: There are of course alternative manufacturers, but BSH ist a known quantity regarding quality. And when it comes to cloud stuff I trust them a little bit more than other manufacturers; they're actually the only smart thing we own that's not blocked in my OpnSense.

Re:Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @06:27AM (#48382160)
That's actually a use case that I imagine could work well, if done well. Especially in fully integrated systems like GMail or our corporate Exchange, when the LLM can access enough data to produce meaningful suggestions.

IMHO the UX problem is, as the article points out in so many words, shoving AI slop down our collective throats as if we were geese waiting to be fattened.

Re:New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @03:16PM (#48198021)
Yeah, that was one of features that made me try Plex a long time ago.

And that's why these days, I run Jellyfin on a VPS for watch parties (similar situation as yours), while sticking with Plex for family use.

Re:New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @03:09PM (#48197926)
It's dumb the apps don't remember that, but I think it's not nice that you're being downvoted for neutrally pointing out a workaround.
Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format on Monday May 18, 2026 @05:28AM (#48177225)
I don't get your reasoning? You're agreeing with the author but are not?

The author argues that open CTFs are done for because of rampant cheating. You're agreeing with that, don't you?

The title is "AI has broken the open CTF format". If the format is "open CTF" then it is very specifically open.

As to your second question: Yeah, I believe having open CTFs was a good idea.

Re:Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format on Saturday May 16, 2026 @06:52PM (#48164481)
The article addresses this:

> Rules that ask people not to use LLMs are ignored and almost impossible to enforce in open online events.

It's quite sad to see CTFs dying. I never had the time do seriously participate in CTFs, but I always respected those who did, as well as the people organizing these events.

Re:The Shinkansen on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:55AM (#47765051)
We got IC cards (ICOCA) in Osaka for 500 Yen each, and used them for 2 weeks travelling across Japan this March. Worked like a charm, only thing that's annoying for us tourists is how it is a stored value card and needs to be topped up. I think we still had like 500 Yen on our cards when we departed, even though we bought a lot of stuff with it on the last few days.

While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.

But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) on Monday April 13, 2026 @06:55AM (#47750267)
Are you going to localize this? Using US recipes works only okay-ish: I usually have to figure out local substitutions for some ingredients, and transform units.

Anyway, amazing idea and I absolutely feel you. Recipe sites (and search engine results) are cluttered like hell, that's why I started collecting recipes in Mealie. But in practice this merely bumped my pool from "five fallback meals" to "10 usual recipes, which mostly cover my eating preferences since I'm the only one in the household putting recipes into Mealie".

Re:Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March on Thursday April 02, 2026 @09:20AM (#47614134)
krita looks great! I'm not a hugely creative person, so last time I spent time to learn a graphics tool that was gimp in the early 2010s. But I used krita last week to test my convertibles's pen (Dell PN7552W, on Linux of course). Pleasant experience overall, and utterly amazing how far krita came in the last decade.
Re:Comparison shows audiophiles waste a lot of money on Monday March 30, 2026 @07:43AM (#47573013)
Yeah, the Linkwitz stuff seems relatively affordable to me, yet based on actual science instead of audiophile voodoo. Building one of those is definitely on my list (to replace the early 90s monkey coffins I inherited). 3000€ for a hobby is a bit much at once, but considering it can bring joy for decades that's actually quite cheap.

Though IIRC his original design used active XO with op amps (after all he's the L in LR filter) instead of going the DSP route with IIR/FIR (which IIUC wasn't a good option back when he was alive). Did his successors modernize that aspect of the design?

Never heared of the site, but judging by the given creation dates, it only launched last year?

Mission seems to be game archival and there is indeed a lot of stuff that likely no copyright holders care about anymore. And that is likely of value for computer historians.

But in addition to that, it is also used to share modern, non-game media. One folder contains 10 different Alien (the movie franchise), two Finding Dory Blu-rays (as ~40GB zips), plus a few dozen more... I'm pretty sure stuff (piracy) like that also increases storage and bandwidth costs, while they don't align with the stated mission. And I think that stuff is unlikely to go missing any time soon; in fact Jeff Bezos will be happy to ship you a copy.

I don't want to deep link, but the article mentions the site's name. The folder is "files/No-Intro/BD-Video/". There is more like that.

Great points. To add:

3. Just imagine being in a car accident, and some idiot in the vicinity didn't realize why traffic is slow, and takes multiple minutes to shutdown their jammer. Or is unable because they're the other party involved in the accident.

For those interested: The SHA512 file lists 4096 files. Each file is 2 GiB. That means 8 TiB (or about 8.6 TB) of storage required.
The text was first linked on HN during September 2020. ChatGPT became public access in November 2022.

The paragraph you criticized was part of the original text: https://web.archive.org/web/20200909104647/https://effectivi...

So: Yes, it could have been more concise. Nope, we humans can write much too long text for the sake of writing text, which some of us can do better than others (e.g., better than me), and we can do that with no artificial assistance or substitute - we do it just fine using our own (in)ability ;-)

Re:Stranger Things creator says turn off "garbage" settings on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @05:31AM (#46431733)
Nope. That's a misconception. Due to space constraints I don't have dedicated speakers for our living room TV. And I don't think I'm the only one.

And I do own two proper dedicated speakers + amps setups. I also know how to use REW and Sigma Studio. So I guess I qualify regarding "cares".

Sadly I lack time to build a third set of cabinets to the constraints of our living room.

It's a siren call for us techies, but reality is less pretty than our fantasies of "cheap base load".

I got an offer for a "essentially free" residential turbine including the pylon (8 to 10 meters, the legal limit for a "Kleinwindanlage") in SW Germany - just had to dismantle it and put it on my lawn. And of course pour a huge foundation [2x2m?] and have an accredited electrician do the necessary alterations. Nope. It didn't even produce enough electricity to offset the maintenance costs - no idea how I should offset the costs for moving it, even with the free capex.

And I did the math about 3 years ago: Prices for both PV and batteries dropped a lot since then. For late fall/early spring I would be better off by adding a PV carport (2 cars). I could also finally automate charging my batteries while electricity is cheap during Dec/Jan, might even be worth bumping my existing battery from 28 kWh to 42 kWh.

To be fair: The math might work out in the Northern Germany; but I would not bet on it.

Re:Copy-Item is 27% slower than File Explorer on Saturday December 06, 2025 @05:50PM (#46177308)
This is atrocious. I get it, some things are less trivial than they seem - but I would be ashamed for shipping something like this, and even more for not fixing it.
Huh? S60? Can you clarify?

I've driven a 2003 Volvo S60 (plain 5 cylinder, no turbo), which matches your 20 years - and most diy repairs were quite straightforward. I suppose you're talking about some Mercedes or other brand I'm less familiar with?

Re:Unreal Tournament 2004 is back on Thursday December 04, 2025 @02:44PM (#46151940)
Ah, for me that would have been UT aka UT99. But chances are, I'm simply 3 - 6 years older than you ;-) Though I definitely I was not the intended age group upon release.

UT4 would have been pretty nice. I remember building the alpha from source when they put it GitHub.... .... Which is now closer to the release of UT 2004 than today. sigh

Wait until you learn that some people abuse this to funnel potential subscribers to their OF. And I don't mean the kind that's about the artwork they show off (which would usually be on Patreon these days, I guess?).

Most woman don't run an OF of course. And wether they do or don't, anyone should be free to socialize over their hobbies on the internet, and/or present their art work for other to appreciate (and get validation with hundreds or thousands of up votes). But those on the intersection that choose to run thinly disguised ads ruin it for me :(

Re:What Killed Perl? on Thursday November 20, 2025 @10:47AM (#45993861)
Hm, if I understand this correctly

  - awkward function argument syntax: my ($x, $y) = @_;
then you might be interested to learn about feature 'signatures':

  use feature 'signatures';
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  
  sub foobar ($foo, $bar = undef) {
     # do something smart
  }
  
  # call it:
  foobar(1);
  foobar(1, 2);
Not sure when it was added, but when I write the usual glue code, I love to use it these days.
Re:Steam Frame on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @02:33PM (#45905108)
Same here. Also happens when navigating there from within the all.

Open the website in your browser instead.

Re:Steam Frame on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @02:30PM (#45905053)
Last time I read up on OLED in VR, it was said that pancake lenses dissipate too much light. Might be dated of course, and iirc there is now at least one OLED+pancake HMD on the market.

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