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planck_tonne

As someone who writes both "thought out"-blog-post-type content and throwaway HN comments, I'd be interested in knowing why you think it's important to spend more time on the former.
Re:Mercury Delay Line Memory on Thursday May 08, 2025 @07:46PM (#43932477)
I also like reading about old engineering solutions.

The way I see it, though, that kind of thing still exists today: the "cheap modern memory card" probably contains many "exciting carefully engineered features". They got teams of people working full time to make these thing as fast, reliable, cheap, low-power as possible.

But the engineering feats are likely much more niche (and thus harder to understand). Not to mention, secret.

Re:More people are getting tattoos removed on Thursday May 08, 2025 @06:22PM (#43931971)
Great article, thanks for sharing. Though what I liked about it has nothing to do with tattoos.

Towards the end he talks about how people trusted blogs and online content more because mainstream media was fake and biased.

The final paragraph:

> PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

This is where we are now. It's even worse, I guess. Publishing online is essentially free, so they don't really have to try hard. And we are left with the work of separating the wheat out of this tsunami of chaff. The future of the Internet looks bleak TBH.

The relationship between industry and academia is borderline parasitic. Academia trains the talent, and nowadays industry tries to make them stay there as long as possible (wait until they finish their PhD), developing their skills and potentially interesting projects while on the taxpayer's dime. Industry is always busy on safe incremental improvements, while the stuff with the potential to be truly revolutionary only happens in academia -- the article cites many great examples. And as soon as a project starts to show promise, they take over. Public research, private profits. Finally, even for their shy incremental improvements, they rely to an extent on academic research for inspiration.

Whether or not this dynamic is good or fair for society, to me it's obvious that academia is necessary for industry to thrive (unless we do a complete restructuring of the whole system or something). Shutting it down seems incompatible with having cutting edge technology.

P.S.: Don't get the impression I'm a sucker for academia either. It's rotten as well.

Re:The Price of Remission on Thursday May 08, 2025 @09:46AM (#43926062)
Crazy how they managed to restrict the competing researchers from obtaining the drug.

How did they do that?

Why is the sale of a super expensive drug used exclusively to treat a super specific type of cancer even controlled in the first place? What is even the argument?

I couldn't think of any argument before. After reading, I can only think of "to restrict competition".

Tell us more if you care to. Who are these people? Who curates their world and insulates them from risk?

I think I might know what you're talking about. I've met some people who seem to have had their entire lives planned for them (by their parents, usually), and all they did was follow the plan. It does give the impression that they would not be able to function outside this bubble, because they never had to. Is this what you mean?

TBH, I didn't get the impression that the people described in the article fit this category (though IMO the article was so shallow it didn't seem to go any further than "these people attend prestigious universities and work in software or in finance or in management consulting or in... marketing (???) instead of law or medicine"). If anything because the people I described whose path was planned for them by their parents often did follow traditional paths such as law or medicine, because the paths had been planned by the parents, and those were the safe options in their time.

BTW I thought medicine was still a pretty solid career.

Another funny story is Nokia. They started as a paper company or something like that. Wikipedia page has a photo of Nokia-brand toilet paper rolls.

Overall, this kind of business shift is not rare. It's good to be reminded from time to time though, that businesses change over time. Same goes for other institutions (say, universities, countries...). Puts things in perspective.

I am honestly shocked about the gaming industry size thing though. No joke, are videogames more influential in pop culture than film and music now? I really have a hard time picturing that. But when I was growing up, being a nerd would get you bullied. How does it work now?

Finally, regarding the downfall of legacy media: it's very simple, the way I see it. Back then, you only had two sets of conversations: (1) the people you personally knew, and (2) the one in the legacy media. So the legacy media had a huge power over the official narrative. People always trusted (1) more, but it was very limited in scope. With the rise of the Internet, discussion forums such as this one, (1) started to include conversations with people all over the world, so people ditched (2) in favor of that. As that got to big, we started to get astroturfing etc... that's where we are now.

Cool article.

There must be a balance.

Recently I met some people that were constantly filming and taking pictures of everything. It was ridiculous IMO, for the same reasons OP mentions.

This is not new. For me, it began with the rise of the smartphone. So I made it a point not to waste my time photographing things.

10 years later, I regret having essentially no pictures of anything. In particular, no "good" or "frameable" pictures (blurry pictures from funny angles don't count...). Especially from important moments. Yes, I was there living the moment. But with a picture, I could relive it for a bit.

It's not hard to find the balance, though, I guess. You don't have to constantly be filming everything. Maybe just get the group together for one picture at the end of the event and that's it. Good enough.

That's what'll I try from now on at least. Report back in 10 years...

Re:My from-scratch OS kernel that runs DOOM on Wednesday April 23, 2025 @08:57PM (#43778319)
Hi, congratulations! You must be feeling proud. Nice choice of proof of concept (DOOM).

Sorry to disappoint you but all I have are some noob questions.

What would be the steps to run this on a laptop? I take it that after building it there would be a process similar to, say, setting up dual-boot in a Windows PC? (Whoa I'm asking a stranger on the Internet how to run dangerous software on my computer...)

If one wanted to undertake such a project, do you have any recommendations of textbooks or other reading material? I had some OS & related courses in university (I'm EE, so computer-adjacent), but they were all very abstract / high level / conceptually-focused. I'd love something more concrete. It doesn't have to be x64.