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disillusioned

Re:New iMac with M6 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:56AM (#50270430)
I mean, to this point, my Logitech Brio sits atop my monitor, with a tightly cinched cable hanging down, plugging straight _into_ said monitor. It might not be the cleanest possible option, but it's not adding desk clutter.
Re:SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:34AM (#50269912)
Interestingly, we honeymooned on the Celebrity Infinity, and its "theme" at the time (and possibly still?) was the SS United States. They had several pieces of art related to it, and more interestingly, the original china pattern for their plateware in the fancy restaurants.
Re:OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud on Thursday October 22, 2026 @12:39AM (#50191238)
The way they work, you get a preferred price for various services at a substantial discount to list rate, but you commit to a guaranteed spend level for that period. The guaranteed spend is typically account-wide, but you have to pay a true-up at the end of the period if you fail to hit it.

It's a bit of calculus: will your growth increase enough such that, especially with the discount, you'll reach the minimum?

You can see these agreements littering 10-Qs, or similar, like when Snapchat filed their S-1 and revealed:

>When Snap originally filed for its IPO in 2017, it revealed a massive $2 billion commitment over five years ($400 million annually) with Google Cloud.

Re:The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:53PM (#50190185)
Star Trek: TNG uses one of those displays to great effect. Interactive mini-games, great 1-bit graphics, really clear instructions and directives. It makes for a great game.
India averages 20,000 deaths by train every year. About 16 deaths per 100,000 people.

Compare to 40,000 vehicle deaths in the US (and 960 train deaths, 2.8 deaths per 100,000 people), and 177,000 vehicle deaths in India.

But India only has 1 death per _4.1 billion passenger-miles_. The US is 1 death per 2.33 billion passenger-miles.

Anecdotally, there's a _lot_ of Indians-walking-near-trains-and-getting-hit-posting-them-doing-it videos on reddit.

In any event, the OP is way off target anyway. The poor kid was in a carriage with his mom, the horse got spooked, she fell out and he leapt out to try to save her but hit his head and died.

Re:Do dentists know what they're doing? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @08:43PM (#50097682)
A journalist with Reader's Digest famously visited 50 dentists in 50 states and received WILDLY different diagnoses for... the same mouth, ranging from essentially "you have a single cavity you should get filled" to "you need 21 crowns for $30,000", and this was back in 1997:

https://asset.cdocs.com/uploads/forum/attachments/258722/Rea...

It's a fascinating read that basically confirms all of these anecdotes.

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @02:20AM (#50083147)
It's genuinely unthinkable... this sort of technology opens up a universe of bespoke micro-explainers and apps that meet you exactly where you are, for your exact, specific needs. I don't think we've ever seen a quantum leap in technological advancement that results in such a multiple orders of magnitude reduction in input effort related to volume and quality and type of output... ever. I mean, innovations like electric light, radio, television, the internet, and smart phones are huge transformative tools that similarly changed the fabric of what's possible. But this technology compresses work that would have taken pyramid-building effort and cost and condenses it down to... minutes of matrix multiplication for pennies worth of tokens. The mind boggles.
Re:Sound – Bartosz Ciechanowski on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:44AM (#50082893)
And, crucially, all hand-written, vanilla JavaScript. Absolutely an artisan.
Re:Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:16AM (#50016662)
It hurts _all the time_ for me.

I've used a Windows PC my entire life. 35 years of PC.

I use my MBP M2 Pro when I travel, and for about 6 weeks every summer, and it's like pouring lemon juice into a paper cut the entire time.

Specifically, my concerns are around this exact matter: I have such muscle memory attached to, say, slamming my pinky across L-Ctrl+L-Shift+left arrow in order to quickly select just the previous word from the cursor.

This is something I do... I don't know, at least once a paragraph, as I very very quickly type and then realize I've introduced some basic typo that I need to nuke the previous word to address.

Doing this on Mac keyboards is Shift + Option + Left Arrow and... it's hell. It's absolute hell. Mashing that extreme corner shortcut with my pinkie is so baked in that there's just... no reasonable way for me to reprogram my brain to do that on a Mac.

Similarly, I have a stroke every time I try to mentally remap what things use control and what uses command. And while I could potentially remap the fn key on an MBP keyboard, I tend to use my Logitech K800 on both systems, so instead try to remap control to ALSO be command to basically get me as close to muscle memory as possible for things that need the command + shift. Since control is relatively rarely used, I think I just remapped it to caps lock. Though boy does that screw me in tmux.

Either way, when I'm typing extremely fast, being able to reliably navigate the caret and jumping around words, whole lines, etc. is just something I simply cannot get anywhere close to on a Mac and I die a tiny death every time I try.

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @11:37PM (#49917445)
I have _long_ said don't sleep on Google for precisely these reasons. They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital they can deploy, and attention and focus and phenomenal architects and engineers, and a pre-existing catalog of as much of the world's data as possible. Counting them out would be completely absurd.

It started to feel just a bit like they were potentially content staying in the effective-fast-cheap lane and ceding frontier models to frontier labs, but I don't think anyone seriously thought that Google was going to sit back and let this generational shift pass them by when they're so well positioned to remain on the top of the heap.

If anything, I thought that 4 was maybe coming up short or causing safety concerns that were forcing them to be a bit more cautious, but nothing packs a wallop like being able to launch ahead of everyone else's brand newest toys...

Re:Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:50AM (#49692872)
My wife was searching for an Our Place rice cooker, because we had just bought one for $149 and she wanted to show my dad. Up popped an insanely authentic looking branded OurPlace ad highlighting the exact same rice cooker, but for only $49! Insane deal!

She clicked it, it was basically ourplacce.it, but like, not an easy thing to flag on her phone. Made it all the way through the purchase process until I got this from Citi: Please use only to complete your purchase with Grand Egypti for 9000.00 EGP using card ending 3551

I'm like "what the hell are you buying?" and sure enough, it's all scams the whole way down.

There's simply no excuse for Google to not use their advanced AI to block this sort of copycat/lookalike/impersonation scam every day of the week, at scale. The excuse, obviously, is revenue, but it's really upsetting how many people it's hurting.

Re:The Largest Electric Aircraft Just Flew [video] on Friday September 04, 2026 @01:59AM (#49561025)
Well, technically, it's always electric. Sometimes the source of that electricity is from the battery system, and sometimes it's from an onboard generator.
Re:.name Termination on Thursday September 03, 2026 @11:36PM (#49560238)
That's like saying murdering someone doesn't have any effect on their life cycle because the full cycle: birth, life, death, plays out. The timing, evidently, isn't a factor!
Re:It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell on Monday August 31, 2026 @12:21AM (#49505524)
So... you already owned Google Home minis... why not buy Google's Nest doorbell, which rings every Google Home device out of the box with none of the absurdity? If you have a Google 4k TV Streamer, it even pops up on your TV when someone rings the doorbell...
>People with diabetes alone account for 60% of hospital expenditure

That number seemed too large to be true, and I think you might be conflating some numbers...

The NIH study about Economic Costs of Diabetes in the US in 2022 [1] states:

>For cost categories analyzed, care for people diagnosed with diabetes accounts for 1 in 4 health care dollars in the U.S., 61% of which are attributable to diabetes.

So, 25% of health care (not hospital) dollars in the US are apportioned to people with diabetes, and in 61% of those cases, the cause is directly attributable to diabetes itself.

Similarly, an NHS study [2] revealed that 60% of overall diabetes spend goes towards diabetes-related complications.

Finally, this presentation [3] states that: "hospital stays involving patients with diabetes contributed almost $83 billion or 23% of the total hospitalization costs in the United States," and, of course, not all of those were directly diabetes-related.

Obviously that is still a staggering amount of money spent on diabetes every year, and represents a huge burden on our healthcare system. But 60% for all hospital expenditure just doesn't track from my cursory Google-ing here.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37909353/

[2] https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about-us/news-and-views/cost-com...

[3] https://www.bu.edu/csmet/2020/08/04/healthcare-data-analytic...

Re:Don't Paste the AI, please on Thursday August 20, 2026 @08:21PM (#49382085)
Thanks for the compliment! I just posted the other 3 in another reply!
Re:Don't Paste the AI, please on Thursday August 20, 2026 @08:06PM (#49381966)
Here are the rest. I wrote these to specifically be principles that can be easily internalized and pointed to for accountability:

2. Own the Output. Everyone is encouraged to use these tools to accelerate the pace of their work and to take the toil out of their daily output. But that doesn’t mean you simply defer to the model and skip your own careful review step. Part of the paradox of these models is that they’re wordy and it can feel exhausting to read through everything they’re writing and confirm its validity. But that’s an enormous part of the job: you’re the human-in-the-loop to make sure what it’s saying is correct, and that you’ve reviewed it before you’ve shared it with the rest of the class. Read all of the words before they reach the rest of your team or a client, and make sure you stand behind having your name attached to them. In situations where a full review isn’t possible for expediency, disclose it directly! “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to review, this is pure Claude, but here’s what it says.” This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but it can be used occasionally when the situation dictates. Most of the time, you need to review and adjust the output before other people see it.

3. Be the expert. Have an opinion. This is a big one. Do not offload your role as expert to the model. The model is an assistant. You need to internalize the work being asked of you, and apply your education, instincts, and specific expertise to form your own opinion. You can use models to work to adversarially challenge things, but part of being an expert is knowing when to discard irrelevant feedback. Use this skill daily. Don’t let it atrophy.

4. Don’t Slop-Bomb. This is an amalgamation of all of the above, but again, don’t just spew large volumes of model slop into comms channels. Bring your own perspective, internalize the problem in front of you. And be judicious about what you share, and how wordy these things are. Put another way: edit for clarity and concision. It’s too easy to generate busy-work-seeming reports and outputs, and that burden shift to everyone else is multiplicative. Use fewer words, distill things into insights (backed with longer form deep dives), but make sure you’re not just making the rest of the team read a bunch of useless pablum. I don’t want to have to make my model read your model’s output to glean what I’m supposed to out of it. Do that for your coworkers and your clients. Think in terms of information hierarchy.

Re:Don't Paste the AI, please on Thursday August 20, 2026 @04:46AM (#49372025)
Heh. Just got done writing (by hand!) a Principles of AI Use document for my (ironically) AI enablement firm, the first of which is:

Write as yourself. You’re being paid for your expertise and insights. Communicate them directly to us. Copying and pasting Claude responses into Slack or an email directly shifts the burden of comprehension and understanding to everyone else, and worse, risks skipping that step for yourself. Even if you’re fundamentally using Claude to gather your thoughts or help you prepare a response, you need to be writing it yourself, in your own voice. Not having Claude ape your voice, or “make it sound less like AI”. You, directly. Doing this will further reinforce your own understanding of the state of things, the same way teaching someone is the best way to learn. As a guideline: for Slack and email comms, this should be near-universally written as you. For deliverables that are longer form and follow a template like proposals, roadmap/discovery work, etc., use of agents is expected but, see Principle #2. (Own the Output.)

Ha! I love this! This is absolutely an "iykyk" situation. I brought this thread up with my brother and he remembered every bit of it as well.

Here's a friendly reminder you can play Police Quest in your browser, right now:

http://sarien.net/policequest#hq

Not the poker room... the... park? In the bushes? You're asking a lot of eight-year-old me's memory here, man.
Aha, but there's an added dimension to this Sierra-branded cruelty:

A young 8-year-old me, playing Police Quest for the first time. Sits through the briefing. Gets the gun, the ammo, the briefcase, from the locker room. Grabs the car key. Heads out to the parking lot, gets in the car, starts driving... and immediately dies: "you failed to perform the prescribed vehicle walkaround."

A bit of a "gotcha" for sharewareing the game, because said prescription was in a manual I definitely did not own (remember the games that would ask you for, say, the third word of the tenth page of the manual, as a form of DRM? brilliant.)

NO PROBLEM: ASSIGNMENT RECEIVED: I WILL SAVE THE GAME EARLY AND OFTEN!

Begin another playthrough. Lather, rinse, repeat. Play for several hours, carefully save scumming my way to glory: I have built a complex ladder of 10 save slots that I am slowly rotating through. Then the action gets heavier and heavier, and the saves come faster and faster, until the climax of the game, where you have the Death Angel cornered. "Radio for help."

And there it says: "With what radio?"

The one I had left back at the station, I don't know, 10 hours ago? But that's okay, because I can head back to the station and grab it from one of my convenient saves!

No, no I cannot. I have over-indexed and let fear win the day and save scummed myself into oblivion. The earliest save is in a walking-dead state as well. I am toast.

I died a bit that day. A painful lesson for an 8-year-old to learn. As Bennett Foddy says in his Getting Over It soliloquy, "When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that."

It's a bit like trying to finish a sentence when you're really stoned... you vaguely remember the preceding couple of words you've said but don't really know how you got there and now you're wandering in the forest trying to stumble on coherency.

Well, I suppose it's nearly the opposite of that experience, upon further review. But for some reason, that's where my head jumped.

Re:Grok 4.6 on Thursday August 13, 2026 @05:29AM (#49283542)
The difference is the asymmetry of the potential warfare we're talking about here.

Committing physical, in-person crimes anonymously has obviously always been possible: there are unsolved murders, thefts, and other crimes every day. But they require a great deal of personal risk to the criminal because the criminal has to physically put themselves into the act of committing the crime, along the path of getting to where the crime is, and has to face an opponent, if their crime is against another person.

Now, that can be sourced remotely, routed through anonymizing tools, VPNs, etc., and do a great deal to cover their tracks so that the "pretty good chance they go to jail" can be substantively minimized in a way we couldn't previously contemplate.

The idea that we should let the US based models be permissive because at least they'll be subject to subpoena power is fatuous: yes, strictly speaking, a user committing crimes on a permissive foreign model will be harder to catch, but non-sophisticated users who have never heard of hugging face may find that being blocked by the US model is enough for them to reconsider their behavior. A dedicated enough individual is going to commit the crime they're going to commit, but there are tons of situations where preventing trivial access to tools that can be used for malice can actually prevent malice from occurring.

Accountability theatre, quite literally.
Beyond these obviously deplorable ads, my wife got sniped by an ecommerce lookalike ad on Google the other day: a near-identical match of the vendor she was looking for, with a paid for sponsored ad (that was clearly linked to some chinese firm upon further review). Site had prices that were just a bit too good to be true, and a slightly different TLD that _I_ would've caught, but she missed because the price was a bit too good to be true. Only caught it when Citi asked me if I was spending 9000EGD on some random website.

And my point here is, we're in this great revolution of AI empowered everything and... these companies can't be bothered to scan this volume of AI ad slop to make sure we're not being actively scammed? Or having porn or CSAM spread? I understand it's a "perverse incentive" in the truest sense: they make money by taking the scammers money, but I was scammed once by an insanely clever lookalike Facebook ad, and had trusted their verified checkmark (about a decade ago)... with AI, these things should be a thing of the past.

Re:Vehicle Motion Cues on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @02:36AM (#49080173)
Were a lot of people rawdogging their Thinkpads while driving back in the day? Plugged into an inverter into the cigarette lighter to trickle charge? :-)
Re:Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders on Saturday July 18, 2026 @06:42AM (#48956775)
Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post:

Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.

Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.

Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.

Re:QR-Swastika-Avoider on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @07:42PM (#48914391)
Surprised Grok hasn't already incorporated an "ensure Swastikas are buried in any QR codes we generate" skill into the model...
Re:QR-Swastika-Avoider on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @07:41PM (#48914384)
For the very obvious reason that the percentage of population aware of what the term Hakenkreuz means is literal orders of magnitude smaller than those familiar with the term Swastika?

I mean, feel free to run a "taking Swastika back" information campaign, but also, you know, good luck.

Re:Show HN: Super Dario on Monday July 13, 2026 @03:16PM (#48897418)
That's the power of venture capital!

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