dublin

It's the 21st century: All computers should do Base10 math by default. We have cycles to burn, and some ARM and IBM CPUs even have decimal math instructions.

Only true propellerheaded programmers should ever see or care about binary floating point issues. NB: I do massively scalable wireless data collection networks for IoT (using variously, floats, doubles, and half-precision, as called for by their use case), so I'm one of those people, but ordinary folks and users should never, ever, be impacted by binary imprecision.

Mee, too. And that's why I've made my peace with the idea of never again buying a new car. They're all garbage quality, outrageously expensive, and effectively unrepairable, anyway, so it's not a big loss. Probably most cars and trucks older than about 2018 are safe, I figure...

I long for a future in which we can do what we did 20 years ago, when we just had double-DIN radio sockets in the dash so we could just choose, buy, and upgrade the car's stereo and touchscreen/phone interface at will.

I used to be an architect with a bag of pro certifications for the world's largest AWS services provider/developer/reseller (we even did a lot of work for Amazon.com themselves). I gave it up a few years ago when it became clear that for most people, moving OUT of the cloud was a far better move than moving IN.

In a lot of ways, I really love AWS, but most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs.

For a while, cloud native development actually made sense. But as Cloud services have converged to become just big Kubernetes providers with API sprinkles (whose syntax is often more vinegary than sugary), there is less and less value there.

Add to that that almost no companies really need a huge cloud-based system to run their businesses, and that $500-2500 computers literally outstrip the performance of supercomputers from around the turn of the century in every respect, and there is less and less real need for cloud services...

That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)

Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...

The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.

Most Apps are just emasculated and spyware-infested WebApps version of the website, anyway. Why not just use the Browser and get the real experience?

I do not want you app of crap.

I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked perfectly - better than Freon-12, even. Which is the only reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web site (ghgcool, IIRC, I'm sure long gone by now) taught me that you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the required compressor oil mixed into it.

George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.

I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.

They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.

My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...

If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)

In my experience, AI is more akin to Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as a service....

Likewise - I tried the demo recently, and it's really impressive. I wanted to try it because the new CAD package I'm using (Sharpr3D) runs on it, and it seemed like a good idea to try that. (Unfortunately, despite being one of the most impressive and serious 3D apps for VisionPro, it's not one that the Apple store (at least here in Austin) was able to demo.)

But the demo also really convinced me that there is no damn way I'm going to want that ridiculously heavy and bulky hardware on my head for more than a few minutes. It's impressive, but pretty expensive, and completely impractical. It makes a great demo, but it's a miserably uncooked product - very well though out in some ways, but missing big targets like weight and comfort by a mile. Maybe in a few more years...

FYI, We just had world-class cellist Steuart Pincombe here in Austin last month performing the last three Bach cello concertos along with three matched brews from the excellent local Lazarus brewery as part of his occcasional "Bach and Beer" performances.

He's a flat amazing cellist, and watching him perform that last concerto you really realize how hard he's working to get it done - it's a workout. Anyway, it was a really good evening. (FWIW, this was part of the Arts On Alexander program this year, which is one of Austin's lesser known gems of amazing live classical music performaces.

Correction: Being a Founder is fine. Just make sure you own the company, and are not at the mercy of venture or Private Equity funds. 60% of America's economy is small privately held companies. With the leverage we now have with AI and other advanced tools (CNC, 3D printing, 3PL, etc.), it's never been easier to start your own company - and be able to survive and let your family thrive, if maybe not take over the world...

Hacker News is getting really useless. I thought I'd heard this some time ago, and yep, clicking through,this is indeed "news" that is OVER A YEAR OLD.

Are we just completely ignoring the "News" part of Hacker News now?

Of course it does. Math is not programming - it's almost entirely irrelevant to programming and certainly to software and architecture development. Most modern programming only involves math for trivial things like counting.

This classic article explains the real issue - like Mike Gancarz' classic on the Unix Philosophy, this is something all younger hackers should read, but few have, since these are the fundamental ideas that have created our modern world of computers: https://web.archive.org/web/20000529125023/http://www.wenet....

The fixes for such things are often quite amusing. One of these days, i'll get around to telling the story of how a major computer manufacturer was forced to make the BIOS smarter than the OS...

Even the best photography does a very poor job of capturing what many works of art actually look like. This is an area where tech is not the answer, and those that insist it is are just ignorant of the subtleties of actual artwork. BTW, this isn't some woo-woo claim, there are myriad things that cameras capture very poorly, if at all, starting with the obvious things like reflections (amny types), refractions (ditto), transparency and translucency (esp. in marble!), and many, many more.

We'll see how this holds up. I currently have nearly 3283 tabs in my primary Firefox window. (The other six windows only have 35-125 tabs at the moment. I sort of use the windows as tab groups.)

To its credit, Firefox is the only browser that does not either slow to a crawl or just fall over dead with that many tabs.

I still need a good tool to merge bookmarks from a bunch of older Firefox profiles, though. Does anyone know of a good tool to do that?

This attitude is still presenet among doctors, and is one reason why electronic Medical Records still suck, and why Obama's "Affordable Care Act" has made American healthcare simultaneously the most expensive in the world as well as among the worst in the world. Doctors consider their time too valuable to be used in slow and fiddly data entry, so they offload it to additional staff.

They're not entirely wrong in this regard - modern EMR web UIs are arguably inferior in many ways to some light pen driven systems of the 1970s-80s (I'm thinking especially of the old TDS system, which nurses (and the few docs that used them) loved because it was so easy and quick - replacing or "upgrading" it was like pulling teeth, and the nurses fought hard to keep it in every case I ever saw.)

Yeah, that self-policing guild discipline by doctors and lawyers has really worked out well, hasn't it?

No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone.

The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech.

(Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" - that wording comes from Schenk v. United States (which was not even a 1A case, but involved the Espionage Act), and was nearly entirely overturned in 1969's Brandenburg v. Ohio. The clear falsity of the "Fire!" claim has repeatedly and wrongly used as a justification for suppressing speech for a century, to the detriment of us all.)

March was the beginning of the year not all that long ago.

That's why there frequent confusion about George Washington's birthday, along with other historical dates of that era: The New Year started in March when he was born, but changed to January during his lifetime (The British Empire switched in 1752). So being born in February, there's an ambiguity about the year, unless you specify which calendar you mean:

"George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, according to the Gregorian calendar. However, when he was born, the Julian calendar was in use, which would have placed his birth on February 11, 1731."

Despite having 4 of the 10 largest cities in the US, no Texas (or other Southern) city rates a listing in the zoneinfo file, so we're stuck having to pick Chicago, which is so far away (~1000 miles from Austin, in the middle of the state), that many people in the Southern US aren't necessarily certain what timezone Chicago is even in.

(The #10 slot varies according to source, but in general, Houston #4, San Antonio #7, Dallas #9, Austin #10. Fort Worth is nearly tied with Austin. Some sources claim Jacksonville, FL is #10, but they must be wrong...) :-)

Chicago is he ultimate style guide and reference for nearly any kind of writing.

Well, this puts me another edition behind. Should I update the 11th edition sitting on my shelf that belonged to my late father in law?

Just checked and it dates to 1949 (my printing 1952). That's old enough that the address listed for the University of Chicago Press is "Chicago 37".

Wow. Racist framing, much?

I'm a robotics engineer trained back in the 80s, but still working with pretty cutting edge stuff today. It's true that automation poorly thought out can be anti-human, but to assume that it's inherently racist is just raw woke racism at its purest.

Good automation solutions reduce or eliminate mindless, menial drudge work and free up people to things that people are better at than machines - dream, think, and make it happen. And IMO, it will still be a long time before the machines are better than people at those sorts of jobs.

Even our best AIs don't really understand, they just mimic their training set.

It's worth noting that only several years earlier, the US aircraft industry was almost completely killed by the Wright's patents and licensing practices.

The UK, France (especially), Italy, and others were way ahead of the US until the Feds made the Wrights share their patents to support production of arms for WW I. This led to the rise of far more innovative competitors in aircraft design and production: Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., which rapidly eclipsed the Wright company's fossilized and already obsolete technology. (Note that Wright was soon more or less forced to merge with Curtiss...)

Thanks, @Thev00d00, I hadn't herd of this! I've amazed folks in the past with things I've built to do fairly heavy duty image processing using only shell (incl. Unix text utilities and awk) and ImageMagick, even though I am not a programmer!

I almost didn't click through to read about libvips, since I only want to use these tools from a CLI/shell interface, but - would you look at that - it's got command line bindings! I'm going to have to give this a try to see if it can do some of the "magick" stuff...

It actually works very well. Phones/tablets are now more capable than many PCs/Macs. When you've literally got more compute power, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth than supercomputer centers had 15-20 years ago in a phone or tablet-sized package, all you really need is a nice dock to plug it into for display (I'll take a 42" multitouch/pen setup like the Surface Studio, please), keyboard, mouse, and network.

BTW, I've done exactly this daily with the only slightly larger Surface Pros and docks for over a decade, so the concept definitely works, and there are probably millions of people using it, contrary to your assertion.

It's a very small step from doing that with a PC or tablet to doing that with a folding phone design, and there are a few such solutions like that today. (Though they should run the same OS/interface, just morphed slightly for the hardware that's active.)

After having this setup, I will never, ever, go back to an old caveman laptop or desktop computer.

I disagree. I'm typing this on a nice Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 and though it's quite nice and well-built, it's the worst computer I've bought in decades, because it's stupidly designed: It's got all the compromises of a tablet, but is too heavy and thick to really be used as one. The pen is marginal (and there's no way to carry it with the laptop except in a pocket!), and it gets way hotter than any of my Surfaces have.

It was clearly designed to be used as a laptop, and never really as a tablet. This shows in myriad ways, from being uncomfortable to hold as a tablet (though its rounded edges are infinitely better than the Surface Studio Laptop's razor-sharp edges (which really can cut you when holding it as a tablet!), to there being NO GOOD WAY to adjust volume without opening it back up to get to the keyboard!

To be fair, half of what I hate about the Yoga is Win11. I'm definitely moving to a Linux desktop next time, if that's viable. The Starlabs StarLite would be perfect if I could get it with 32-64 GB of RAM and a fast ARM processor like the one used in the new Surface Pro

I'm very seriously thinking about one of these (or really, its successor) when I need to replace my computer again in the next year or two - it's already optimized for several Linux distros: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite#

All I need now is a good replacement for OneNote that stores notes in an open format and supports pen input for sketching and handwritten note-taking...