frereubu

Agreed, this was fun. Some other feedback:

- The down key should move backwards

- I found the left / right keys don't just spin left / right, they move forward a bit, which I found quite frustrating at points.

Duh, yes, slow brain day.

Wouldn't the charge / discharge cycles reduce the life of the car battery? I presume the same is true of in-home batteries, but although an in-home battery is an extra capital expense, I imagine the replacement cost of in-home batteries is quite a bit lower, isn't it? Would be interested to know more about the medium-to-long term economics of this.

My favourite quote at the moment: "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?" Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

> I've never seen this much outrage over flock cameras on here or on most tech forums

I have entirely the opposite impression of HN - I feel like I hear a huge amount of (rightful) resistance to that kind of surveillance.

How bizarre. Like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Which sites were these?

Thanks, I hate it. I imagine Calvino turning in his grave at such an abdication of human imagination.

And?

That's an uncharitable reading of what I mean, but I suppose I could have been clearer. Perhaps "no point staying alive if you're so unhealthy that you're perpetually miserable" would be closer to what I meant, particularly having seen a number of elderly relatives living through their last years in unrelenting misery, impatient for death. One in particular sticks with me, an uncle who had been a doctor and knew exactly what was coming because he'd seen plenty of it in his career, but without the means to end it in a dignified way. These people absolutely didn't want to be kept alive longer - which is the point of the distinction between lifespan and healthspan in the podcast.

No point staying alive if you're not healthy. This is a great podcast about the difference between lifespan and healthspan: "To start our new series about what it means to live in a world of ageing populations, David talks to geneticist Adam Rutherford about the benefits and pitfalls of increasing longevity. Are GLP-1s – drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – miracle cures that will extend human lifespans? What happens if longer lives do not coincide with better health? How far can life extension be pushed? And who wants to live forever anyway?" https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/an-ageing-world-lifespan-v...

Interesting, although could those not be different things? The linked page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit) - shows that it absolutely was a foundational measure in England. I guess it's probably down to the etymology, which would tell you when and where the phrase came from, then you could tell whether it from the English or ancient meaning, although it's not especially relevant to the meaning. The linked article does call it an "English idiom", so you'd need to show a similar ancient idiom for that to be the source.

I don't think this is right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_grain_of_salt The "grain" isn't a single grain, it's an old English measure which is around 65mg, i.e. roughly how much there is in a pinch. I've also only ever heard people use larger amounts to mean more scepticism.

This is semiconductors, not superconductors.

Reminds me of this - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/ - which I think was on HN at some point in the last week. The fact that (according to another comment here) these papers were in areas outside his specialism, and therefore things he doesn't have the domain knowledge to critique, makes me think we're going to see more of this special kind of madness that seems to have some kind of grandiosity at its heart. It really does feel like some people are falling hard for plausibility rather than rigour.

Edit: the papers do seem to have other names on them, and he says that all papers "were reviewed by humans for accuracy", but I still think there's a very serious risk of people being gulled into okaying something that's plausible rather than rigorously checking everything. There's enough human-generated slop in science already!

Just checked - now the homepage of the BBC on load has a transfer of 1.5MB with 5.7MB of resources, and once you've scrolled down the page for the lazy loaded images those figures are 2.9MB and 7.2MB respectively.

When I worked at the BBC in the late 90s / early 2000s the home page of any site - including images - couldn't be more than 70kb!

That "if" is doing such an incredible amount of work I think we could use it to power the entire US grid.

Ugh, how annoying. Thanks.

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?

> Yes, software is more complex than bicycle.

In ethical terms I agree that software quality should be better, but I think this line is too dismissive. Software is a few orders of magnitude more complicated than a bicycle, to the point where I would say it's an entirely fruitless comparison.

I think anyone who differentiates between design and functionality has a profound misconception of what design should mean, and are the kind of people who produce terrible interfaces because they just see design as prettifying the functionality. That's why you get buttons that don't look clickable, lines where they're not needed, no lines where they are etc. Good design is a holistic practice, and in the case of apps the interface should be an integral part of the functionality. There's lots of literature out there about things like affordances, but many people don't know about it or don't care enough to use it in practice.

Good design is part of the functionality.

I know it sounds a bit like "don't make mistakes", but surely this could be part of the core instructions? Recognising categories of sensitive data like medical data and having some kind of check-in with whoever has asked it to do something?

Why aren't these agents set up to do what a security researcher should do - responsible disclosure, ideally to a specific person in its company to handle, or I suppose potentially directly to the organisation itself e.g. if they have a security.txt file on their website? I really hope legal precedent is quickly established that holds companies responsible for the actions of their agents.

> I got a basic Beko because they are usually good with replacement parts

Can confirm this. My mum has broken two drawer fronts in her Beko freezer and I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get replacements.

Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)

Not working in Firefox. I get this error:

  Uncaught TypeError: The specifier “semfont/analyze” was a bare specifier, but was not remapped to anything. Relative module specifiers must start with “./”, “../” or “/”.

Works in Chrome though.