News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

catach

Re:When did Google get so f-ing weird? on Sunday September 27, 2026 @05:28PM (#49871036)
Duckduckgo is still like that, once you turn off the AI options.
Re:Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story on Saturday September 26, 2026 @06:08PM (#49860992)
Really good point that those indicators are on-demand rather than always-on.
Re:Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story on Saturday September 26, 2026 @05:20PM (#49860647)
Well. Apple reuses the branding. The MagSafe chargers for Mac do have indicator lights, while the MagSafe chargers for iPhone do not.

The magnetic chargers for Apple Watch also do not have lights. Neither do the USB-C cables for iPads and AirPods. I assume the newest AirPod cases still have charging lights though.

> This website will die off in a couple years

While that might be true, it's worth noting that the project has been running for seven years already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

Re:WriterdeckOS on Saturday November 08, 2025 @03:32PM (#45859714)
> Battery state is probably the only thing that I really think it must show you.

The screenshot provided does show a battery indicator in the top right of the UI (Usage section).

Re:Firefox Forcing LLM Features on Saturday November 08, 2025 @02:49PM (#45859417)
I've found the "Copy text from image" menu command to be useful from time to time, and the features I'm not interested in seemed easy to turn off/dismiss/ignore?
Re:iPhone Air on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @06:11PM (#45190027)
> It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.

Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.

Re:Gaslight-driven development on Thursday July 17, 2025 @12:42AM (#44589752)
It's really difficult because many of the task types we use AI for are those that are linguistically tied to concepts of human actions and cognition. Most of our convenient language use implies that AI are thinking people.
It would indeed be naive to make that claim, so it's a good thing that's not what I did.
If the closed fork functionality is superior enough to make the original de facto obsolete then the users have already collectively decided that the tradeoff is worth it.

And if the original can't compete it means the additional functionality was only going to exist because the financial model of the closed fork could pay for it.

Re:Everything Is Ghibli on Monday March 31, 2025 @08:08PM (#43541412)
Speed of replication isn't a part of copyright law, is it?
Re:A Look at Firefox Forks on Sunday March 16, 2025 @02:55AM (#43377325)
I have TST set up thus: closing a tab will close all its child tabs, if that branch is collapsed. Pretty sure Sidebery can be configured the same way.
I recall it being claimed that Mozilla has the warchest to survive at typical spending levels for quite some time, without Google.
Re:Microsoft Discontinues iMac Rival Surface Studio 2 on Friday December 13, 2024 @12:23AM (#42406131)
Indicating that they could make it amazing if they wanted to, they just don't want to. Likely due to cost.
Re:Why Monotonous Repetition Is Unsatisfying on Sunday June 30, 2024 @04:43PM (#40840217)
Incrementals tend to rely on a drip-feed of new mechanics and capabilities at the introductory phase, extensive automation in the middle phase, and marathon-like competition against other high-ranked players in the elite phase.

I don't think it's a particularly good counter-example.

Re:My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore on Saturday June 22, 2024 @03:37AM (#40757191)
I suspect that the x86-64 to ARM transition had more to do with it.
Re:We gotta stop ignoring AI's hallucination problem on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @09:49AM (#40366941)
Possibly, possibly. But those extremes are not what you get from an effective bias appeal.
Re:We gotta stop ignoring AI's hallucination problem on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @09:02AM (#40366361)
We won't, because the machines are trained on data created by humans.

We won't, because the machine results people want will be those that appeal to their biases.

Re:The Subversive Hyperlink on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @04:16AM (#39825294)
I'd say rather that linking is the standard, the established social order, and that companies restricting linking in their platforms are the ones subverting.
The article's talk page already has a request for an impartial editor to weigh in, though several months old.
Re:X Is Elon Musk's Lonely Party Now on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @08:55PM (#38778235)
Took me another read, but I think the assertion is that a strong characteristic of twitter alternatives is that they talk about twitter a great deal. And so that's a common thread between twitter alternatives and HN.
Re:Japan to crack down on Apple and Google app store monopolies on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @08:40PM (#38778142)
Maybe, but that's not US law.
Re:WebP is so great except it's not on Friday December 15, 2023 @05:08PM (#38659427)
Interesting question! The st and ct ligatures used in the article don't seem to be part of the precomposed Latin ligature set, and what is there strikes me as far less obnoxious [1,2]. I expect it's possible to hack something together with combining characters, but also that the visual result would be far too ugly for the tastes of anyone who was desiring ligatures in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)#Ligatures_i...

[2] https://superuser.com/questions/669130/double-latin-letters-...

Re:WebP is so great except it's not on Friday December 15, 2023 @06:51AM (#38653204)
Luckily Reader Mode or disabling CSS takes care of the oddity.
Re:Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access on Friday December 08, 2023 @09:28PM (#38577838)
I believe you're talking about capacity for compassion, and I'm speaking of the triggering of compassion.

I'd agree that both capacity and scope of triggers can be altered, but it seems to me that that's a process that takes some time and effort. Distinct from choosing in the moment "I am going to feel a certain way about this, right now".

Re:Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access on Friday December 08, 2023 @08:42PM (#38577464)
Observing that a particular business model is very likely to fail because of the conflict with another business model that happens to have much more powerful backing requires no compassion spend.

But also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction.

Re:Java 8 still widely used on Thursday November 30, 2023 @11:48PM (#38483257)
> The fact that the project you had to work on didn't use maven isn't evidence that java's tooling is bad!

It can be simultaneously true that some Java tooling is excellent and some of it is subpar. This is a problem when both kinds have been historically popular.

Re:Geany 2.0 Is Out on Friday October 20, 2023 @04:30PM (#37961151)
Solution: disable JS. The site degrades quite gracefully.

https://geany.org/news/geany-20-is-out/

Re:Scrollbars Are Becoming a Problem on Thursday October 12, 2023 @10:22PM (#37865801)
Also, kudos for the extended family of extension writers. The article author ends on praise for minimap sidebars as an upgrade over conventional scrollbars, and what do you know, there's something for that:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimap-scrol...

Re:Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year on Friday September 22, 2023 @09:01AM (#37611445)
Is piracy on the rise? That seems like a difficult thing to reliably track.

Older »