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Re:DoorDash to Acquire Instacart on Thursday October 29, 2026 @09:29AM (#50288718)
Fascinatingly, this is not prima facie illegal in many US states! Wow. We live in a corporatist hell hole don’t we?
Re:Sigsaly: Churchill's top secret hotline to the President on Monday October 19, 2026 @10:32AM (#50152992)
From what I heard when I was a patent examiner, there was a secure area of the patent office where these classified patents would be examined. I never knew where it was but there were rumors.
Especially since if you were driving in Sicily you must have your head on a swivel 100% of the time. There are probably multiple fiat pandas trying to drag race around you on the one lane road that somehow has traffic going both ways, lol.
Re:Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU on Monday June 29, 2026 @09:47AM (#48719269)
I assume the tooling and process are such that it’s a one-time thing, as in, this is the most of these chips that we could ever possibly need for all time. They’re not going to be able to spin up the same fab and build the same chips the same way again in the future whether that’s 5 or 50 years in the future. Given the long lifespans of military systems, it’s maybe not so crazy.
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Saturday May 30, 2026 @08:41AM (#48335553)
And all it cost was 15+ years of life?
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Saturday May 30, 2026 @08:37AM (#48335529)
What exactly do you mean by “politicians bribe the populace for votes” ?
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Saturday May 30, 2026 @08:34AM (#48335505)
Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Saturday May 30, 2026 @08:27AM (#48335457)
Labor law will be hit more by widespread use of robotics, but I can envision a much larger market for contract disputes and transactional law. Having AI in both sides doesn’t mean people won’t disagree about stuff.
I recently tried to install Samsung magician on Windows 11. Tried. It flat out doesn’t work, tried some basic remediation and internet searching to figure it out, but could not get it to run at all. Completely nonfunctional. Seems to be an issue with some electron configuration or command line args. I gave up because it wasn’t worth more effort, but I believe it when I read that the software is a dumpster fire.
Only if it’s in this district, it has almost no weight in another district. And being unpublished makes it a flimsy argument even in this district.
I find this humorous but I’m also genuinely curious what the analogy is between fiber and GLPs?
Re:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Fourier Transform on Friday January 09, 2026 @08:59AM (#46553908)
I’d argue that most if not all of the math that I learned in school could be distilled down to analyzing problems in the correct coordinate system or domain! The actual manipulation isn’t that esoteric once you get in the right paradigm. And those professors never explained things at that kind of higher theoretical level, all I remember was the nitty gritty of implementation. What a shame. I’m sure there’s higher levels of mathematics that go beyond my simplistic understanding, but I’d argue it’s enough to get one through the full sequence of undergraduate level (electrical) engineering, physics, and calculus.
Re:Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams on Friday November 07, 2025 @10:21AM (#45847333)
Same with streaming services, ad-free services seem to be unusually higher priced than the ad-supported tiers. Netflix for example charges $10 for ad-free over the ad support tier ($18 vs. $8). I’ve seen estimates that ad revenue per subscriber is less than that, maybe $4-$8. And there’s a cost to that revenue as well, so their profit is even lower. Why go through all that trouble? Maybe the economics works out somehow, in that users willing to pay to get rid of ads are so price insensitive they may as well squeeze them for more money? Or the lower subscription cost opens up enough new subscribers to make it worthwhile to tolerate a much lower margin. I am very suspicious though and wonder if there is a more insidious or otherwise opaque motivation behind it. Is there some kind of ‘soft power’ benefit to being in the ad business?
Re:Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @09:52AM (#45197715)
I think there is value in having only one lossy encoding step on the way to my ears. And with all of the 4k video being streamed these days, lossless music bit rates are rather pedestrian, so I'm just not that concerned about the resources argument
Re:uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @07:18AM (#44796691)
Must depend on your block lists, I get a 98% using AdGuard on iOS. I'm using easy list, easy privacy, fanboy annoyances and social filters, and hagezi's light dns filter. I'm a big fan of ublock but I don't see much issue with AdGuard for now.
Re:How We Built Bluey's World on Monday August 04, 2025 @09:42AM (#44785669)
I know this trope has been beaten to death elsewhere too, but it certainly seems like we haven't seen much really 'new' for like 20 years (as far as popular media that is)
Re:How We Built Bluey's World on Monday August 04, 2025 @09:38AM (#44785624)
Peppa pig has little to no value though, whereas many people find Bluey wholesome and touching and sometimes really poignant. To each their own, but at least Bluey tries to encourage creativity and play and fun beyond jumping up and down in muddy puddles. The short episode length can be a natural disengage checkpoint with Bluey too, as long as auto play is turned off.
What's the issue with carbon-plated shoes?
Re:Ask HN: Why are there no no-name inkjet printers? on Sunday March 31, 2024 @10:14AM (#39884470)
Not challenging you, but I'm curious what source you have for this stat? I'd be interested in a good source for profit margins for many products, and also in the process behind those numbers.
I find this dubious. Google is not known for respecting privacy, and large corporations in general are not known for voluntarily passing on trillion dollar markets on moral grounds. Is there perhaps an alternative explanation that isn't as far fetched?
Anecdotal, but I went 2000 -> 7 -> 10, skipping XP, Vista, and 8. Given that cadence, will hopefully be skipping 11 as well and waiting for whatever is next.
Seems like they're trying to balance out the other end of the equation by punishing labor through very high interest rates. My personal pet theory is that the fed wanted to raise rates enough so that the static interest rates on student loan debt didn't look so absurd when student loan payments came back online. Otherwise people would be demanding student loan debt relief. That ~7% doesn't seem so silly now, it's about inline with mortgage rates. But when mortgages were approaching 2%, that same 7% looked usurious.
Same here, cancelled prime and still receive packages in 1-2 days generally. I never really used any other of the services under prime like video or music, so I don't miss it one bit. Also shifted most of my online purchasing to target anyways, I find the products and experience to be far superior, and I have a local store to go to also. I spent my prime budget on a shipt subscription and get target items delivered in a couple hours.
Lawyers are already sufficiently good at "detecting patterns in texts, find inconsistencies and so on" in written legal texts, that's not really the hard part in practicing law. Even legal research, despite what non-lawyers may think, isn't all that big of a problem for wide swaths of lawyers. In any given field, there's going to be a short list of relevant cases to know, and everyone will know pretty quickly when a new one comes out. Experienced lawyers don't generally spend a lot of time doing legal research. The hard part is in fitting the facts of your case to the fact pattern of the cases you're relying on for your legal argument, and then fitting it all together so that its easy to read, understand, and agree with.
Re:The tiny corp raised $5.1M on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @07:41PM (#36065352)
If they can achieve something competitive with CUDA for $5m, why hasn't AMD done it yet?
I'm closing in on 40 and trying to run my first sub 4 hour marathon before then. I figure you don't really start running that fast after 40, so this is my last chance to ever be a 4 hour marathoner.
Re:The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature on Thursday April 27, 2023 @08:56AM (#35727309)
I guess that's what we get when a rotary encoder is much much less expensive than a 4-6 gang potentiometer. And I also feel your pain with the car "booting up" phenomenon. I don't even have a particularly tech-heavy vehicle and upon starting the car the entire infotainment system feels like booting up a packard bell in 1996.
Re:Why are movies so dark these days? on Saturday April 01, 2023 @10:27AM (#35400549)
I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.
Re:Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff on Thursday February 09, 2023 @11:06AM (#34726066)
The macroeconomic problems facing all of these corporations are that labor is feeling empowered, that's it. Between union actions, NLRB actions, wages rising, low unemployment, and the whole return to work debate; power has subtly, slightly shifted towards workers. And it scares the shit out of the capital class. In response, they're culling the herd and raising interest rates to discipline workers.
How about disallowing urls or even just vetting urls in the messages sent from your own service? One of the ones I received was a link to a fake PayPal login that was something along the of lines of (making this up) http://login.PayPal.com.somethingsketchy.biz/login.php and was a replica of the PayPal login screen. It was pretty blatant. Seems like they should figure out a way to avoid that is all, because I know my mother would have put in her PayPal credentials to that site and I'd be hard pressed to fault her for it. We train users to check if it's a valid/real email before clicking on links and this was a perfectly real email sent from PayPal with a malicious link. This seems like PayPal's responsibility to me. I'm shocked they don't care about this.

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