hn_acc1

We bought the first Wii at 35. We still have a Wii U for the family and still play 4-player games, and have 8 WiiMotes for Smash Brothers.

I suppose. 95%+ of the games I've played on my phone are one euchre implementation. I tried a couple of early space-shooting games (Motorola Photon Q era and earlier) and basically gave up on the idea. No joystick, trying to hit the right spot on a phone to actually do anything is hard (I type with one finger on a phone vs. 140+ wpm on a keyboard), etc. Plus, I rarely have sound on, so that part is also missing.

Games I currently play: SupermegaBaseball, Assetto Corsa (with wheel), Dirt series on gaming PC. Also various Mario etc games on Wii U.

Wii U is even better since it can play all the Wii games. And that's NOT my childhood - my childhood was audio cassette drives for storage.

My children were always "anything but STEAM" - we don't want to be nerds / code geeks.. Sure, they did some basic "coding for girls" and such as kids, but it never stuck.

Now, the oldest is realizing that tech skills are incredibly useful in every undergrad degree and taking SQL, Python, etc, and the youngest is studying CS and just told me the other day: "I had trouble following the lecture in physics because I kept thinking about what my prof said, that there was a way to do this O(log N), and I was constantly trying to figure out how". Wow, was that a cool moment as a geek dad who started with BASIC in the 80s..

Yes, this. I mean, if you're writing a novel meant to be read, maybe not. But if you're just trying to communicate 3 ideas, write them out in a way I can quickly tell if it's worth reading more.

There are few things (relatively speaking, I mean online activities, etc) more annoying than seeing a click-baity headline, and then having to read 17 paragraphs to actually get to the point that I realize I already knew and understood it, and it's just slop padding.

I think it's more that the majority of humans DON'T REALIZE it's NOT doing that.

Most people think AI answers are carefully sourced, triple vetted, over-researched to death and can trust it with their life, despite the warnings, until they run into nonsense and then dismiss it as a one-off.

If there was a "always give the best possible, most researched and trusted answer" flag that was easily visible, or maybe "chatGpt" and "bestAnswersGpt", where the second one did all the verification and was considered much better overall, guess which one people would start using after a while and/or quote, because of improved accuracy?

It's not that people don't WANT honest information (well, most people) - they just don't KNOW they're not getting it right now. That's the problem with tech - they're trading on "computers were always right in the past" because there has been no generally available "fuzzy search" type application that needs handholding to give "good" results. Most software either gave the result of computations that are always the same, or enforced static rules (like spellcheck) which were perceived as "always right".

Growing up, my daughters HATED anything STEM (maybe because I'm such a nerd :-)

Now they're realizing that all "work" is tech related, and younger one is actually taking comp sci.

I mean, just because OpenAI started it doesn't mean the vendors didn't form a cartel afterwards (or conspire together) to ensure maximum profits in a "crazy high demand" situation..

>Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.

How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices? And how gullible would you be to BELIEVE the politician they could actually make it happen, and even if they did, that it would extend to the average person, and not JUST megacorps/megadonors?

Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..

I've found that some sites (even like restaurants, for example) have no problem setting up an order when I connect via my VPN (from Linux) - my default browsing setup. But when I go to pay, their payment processor refuses to work properly / fails, so I can't actually transact any $$. Others work just fine WITH VPN on. Sadly, the former is increasing and the latter decreasing, to the point it's getting harder and harder.

Heck, Lowes and BestBuy are pretty unusable in general via VPN already.. (or maybe due to ublock, or privacy badger or eff, etc.. :-)

We have a data center in Utah.. And I'm sure some of our customers are storing "adult" material.. Are we now banned?

Next it will be illegal for anyone to visit an adult website from some states, even with proof of age, kinda like Prohibition..

GAVE, not gives - past tense. What good is an amendment if the govt can ignore it at will (2025+) and you can't sue successfully because SCOTUS will find some made up reason to make you lose?

Can 3D printers print with 1 micrometer (not millimeter) accuracy? 1 micron gets you things like the original 8086. Oh wait, current best desktop printers get like 100 micron (0.1 mm) accuracy. So scale up what we have now 100x in terms of accuracy (imagine how much bigger / more precise the motors, magnets, everything has to be). EASILY 10-50x the cost of a good home 3D printer today - say $50K. And 8086? Your phone is faster than probably 50-100 of them in parallel today) - so $100K (materials aren't cheap) to print a series of chips that were insanely obsolete 20 years ago and 1 $500 fpga could run circles around. Then scale that up at least another 50x to get semi-competitive (20 nm). There's a reason they put fabs in places like Arizona where there are relatively few earthquakes... Even the garbage truck driving past your house could damage your chip.

As far as home printing stuff: the clean room requirements are INSANE: just the HF (hydrofluoric acid) is crazy bad stuff that you could NOT get certified for general consumer use, no way, no how. And even if you did, you'd be crazy to buy something that comes with HF as part of the process.. And that's just ONE bad, bad chemical used by TSMC all the time.

FPGAs are the "faster-than-software / can make a custom chip" compromise - companies like Intel used to (not sure if they still do) use a ton of FGPAs to simulate new chip designs. Precisely because manufacturing state-of-the-art chips is so hard.

When TSMC capacity is already sold out for a couple of years, and demand just for plain RAM is through the roof, where will these "more chips" be actually fabbed?

Is that in cash, so if the stock market drops 80%, it's still true?

I did a deep dive into NiMH batteries a few years ago and concluded that most people felt similarly: you can often get "good" (similar to Eneloop) specs for a short run from almost any manufacturer at the outset (see Ikea Ladda batteries - suspected of relabeled Eneloop for a while, but now not as good), but consistent quality is pretty much only Eneloop or other name brand, with Eneloop generally being the best.

In the interests of saving my sanity and time (it's not free!) having to chase down which batch of which brand is "good" at the moment, I just decided on Eneloop all the time. Sure, we now have like 100-120 or something (wife likes flameless candles - just bought another 16-pack AAs) and I COULD maybe have saved $200 by buying dirt cheap. But all the time spent debugging flaky batteries, having the spouse complain, etc wasn't worth it to me (I get paid reasonably well).

How much for a decent home battery setup? Already have 15-year-old 4.2 kW system and lately, PG&E isn't really giving us anything for our power..

I've only ever rented a room back in my college/intern days, so I have no context exactly, but from coworkers here in the valley, even the rent on those types of apartments keeps going up ridiculous amounts so that they keep moving..

I know someone who works for Google Canada with AI. Her parents and mine were friends and some thought something might happen there at one point in time..

Dang, you sound like you were in school in Ontario at the same time as me? I also graduated from grade 13 in 1989...

What kind of tools would help renters? This "just one penny less than they will bear" is part of the problem of modern society. There used to be SOME areas you could "win" a little. Pay a reasonable price for rent, not exactly 33.3333% of your income. Pay a reasonable price for a car, not 25.0% of your income, etc. Save a few percent here, a few percent there, and you could eventually get a downpayment on a house, or indulge in a hobby.

The endgame for these ghouls is to have you work 996+ and spend 99.9999999...% of your income on just the bare essentials so that there's not one penny left unmonetized for you to just exist, and nothing left for any type of enjoyment.

Sure, but insurance companies also routinely pay only part of the cost - I.e. if the hospital has evaluated that a CAT scan costs them $1250 to do, and they need a small profit margin (make up your own numbers), they need to bill the insurance $3300 just to get $1400 paid out. Insurances routinely only cover a certain percentage of the cost (to save $$), so hospitals have to bill more to get the $$ they need.

And I'm not saying the hospital is innocent here, but this "costs more when billed to insurance" is a long-known issue.

I've had an internet email address since the late 80s, BBSing since the early 80s, pretty active online compared to many people I know who are also software people, especially for my age..

Had to google to figure out the abbreviation and look at the summary. I HAD heard the name before, but that's about it.

So does this host the files? For free? How long before ads start / you have to register / subscription model, etc?

>If you can charge at home then trading in for an EV makes sense. Electric at home is vastly cheaper than fuel. If you can't charge at home, electric prices are all over, generally cheaper, but often not by enough to be worth the bother.

Sadly, in CA, charging at home (minimum $0.26/kWh) isn't that much cheaper. Sure, maybe half the price of fueling up an efficient gas car, but not like 5x cheaper or anything..

Yeah, not sure I would rely on that.. Sure, they have Knipex and Klein on the approved list (which, AFAIK, is true), but then they list Warby Parker (read reddit - has gone WAY downhill), Cutco (by all accounts, a total rip-off and super low-quality knives requiring you to constantly get them sharpened) and Henkels, which also makes some pretty suspect knives, AFAIK.

I loved it too, and my daughters (who had access to several looney toons collections as kids) also seemed to enjoy it.

To do what? I usually hold it with my left and, and one-finger (right-hand index finger) to type / scroll / select / etc. I guess I never "got" the phone model properly or something. My daughters type way faster on their phones, I can't do thumb typing (how do you hit those letters?!?), plus my thumbs get too sore too fast (decades on the edge of carpal tunnel) and/or cramp up.

I was timed at 140+ wpm in high school and online tests / etc have hit close to 200 wpm on a Qwerty. So I CAN touch-type and do it well - and keyboard + mouse is my goto jam. My favorite phone (alas, discontinued way too soon) was the Photon Q (work gave us phones way back) with slide-out physical keyboard.

I "use" an S21, but even just entering my 4-digit pin is awkward with my left thumb - is there some other way to hold it? I can't even imagine trying it with my right.. My thumbs just cramp up..