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rkapsoro

I remember reading a scene where this exact thing was going on in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End: there, the books were being shredded and scanned as tiny bits and stitched together in software similar to shotgun genome sequencing.

At any rate, I ought to pick it up again and finish reading it...

Re:Incident with Github.com on Monday August 17, 2026 @01:54PM (#49334979)
A story as old as time.
Re:Birds Are Shit on Friday August 14, 2026 @12:34PM (#49301097)
My beef with birds has always been that they treat the entire world as their toilet. Woe betide the creature who finds himself beneath a bird.
Re:Community firmware for the Xteink X4 e-paper reader on Thursday May 07, 2026 @09:01AM (#48048899)
Whoa that's a surprise. They even call out support for CrossPoint by name, too.

Moreover, it's a bit of a crazy looking hack too, by doing a MITM attack.

I'm curious to see what exactly is the seam between the Xteink brand and its upstream supplier(s).

It's like the brand company was against the firmware lockdown in the first place. It would be neat to better understand the Chinese consumer devices ecosystem.

I only partly agree with this. The answer is maddeningly more complicated.

Some parts of their software stack -- higher up than the kernel -- are actually pretty great. There's a lot of realy brilliant stuff in their system frameworks, and in SwiftUI, Cocoa, and UIKit. I've been using Linux at home recently, and I find myself missing some of it.

But, on the flip side, suddenly you hid maddening bugs, crashes, or terrible developer-experience papercuts. And, of course, there's the App Store, which is just evil. For my next app I'm just going to go Notarization only, and see how that goes...

Re:YouTube now lets you turn off Shorts on Thursday April 16, 2026 @08:49AM (#47792246)
Argh. I was really excited for this. I'm a YouTube Premium user, and I get a lot of value from YouTube, but I can't get rid of the nicotine-tastic home feed and shorts. I go to YouTube for useful (especially, long-form) stuff, and get sucked into garbage.

On desktop you can manage this with extensions. Not so much on mobile.

Profound product misalignment.

Re:I Quit. The Clankers Won on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @10:34AM (#47601521)
I think you're agreeing with him. All of the things you just listed are key senior developer skills.
I say, those chat logs read like Wodehouse.
Re:A Eulogy for Vim on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @12:37PM (#47519716)
I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.
> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.”

There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.

Re:Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @02:15PM (#46979407)
Wait until you hear what kind of vehicles the CAFE regulatory framework has incentivized US automakers to build.
Re:All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025) on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:32AM (#46499950)
There is one use case that is brilliant: comedy and meme videos.

Bigfoot comes to mind.

Re:Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality on Friday December 05, 2025 @11:17AM (#46163361)
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.

While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.

Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.

Re:Show HN: Bash Screensavers on Tuesday October 28, 2025 @01:58PM (#45736407)
fwiw I've noticed that Omarchy[1] uses some terminal-based screensavers, using something called tte[2] to do so.

1: https://omarchy.org/

2: https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects

Re:The Swift SDK for Android on Friday October 24, 2025 @11:22PM (#45701143)
They didn't port SwiftUI to windows; they wrote a Swift wrapper for WinUI. Impressive in its own right, but not SwiftUI.
Re:Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy on Monday September 22, 2025 @01:46PM (#45336940)
Timely sponsorship, downloading the Omarchy 3 ISO last week sat at about 600 KiB/s. Appreciated!
Re:Why Local-First Apps Haven't Become Popular? on Monday September 22, 2025 @09:57AM (#45333572)
The use case I always think of is the developer experience for regular hobbyist and workaday devs writing their apps with local-first sync.

Apple comes close with CloudKit, in that it takes the backend service and makes it generic, basically making it an OS platform API, backed by Apple's own cloud. Basically cloud and app decoupled. But, the fundamental issue remains, in that it's proprietary and only available on Apple devices.

An open source Firebase/CloudKit-like storage API that requires no cloud service, works by p2p sync, with awesome DX that is friendly to regular developers, would be the holy grail for this one.

Dealing with eventually consistent data models is not so unusual these days, even for devs working on traditional cloud SAAS systems, since clouds are distributed systems themselves.

I would be very happy to see such a thing built on top of Iroh (a p2p network layer, with all the NAT hole punching, tunnelling and addressing solved for you) for example, with great mobile-first support. https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @11:39AM (#44877747)
Something like 15 years ago I once went to a Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias meetup in my town after being a reader of Yudkowsky's blog for some years. I was like, Bayesian Conspiracy, cool, right?

The group was weird and involved quite a lot of creepy oversharing. I didn't return.

Re:The Epochalypse Project on Sunday May 11, 2025 @10:49AM (#43954219)
I've been planning for decades to have a party on that day.

Only 13 years left!

Re:DOGE as a National Cyberattack on Thursday February 13, 2025 @09:53AM (#43036435)
The institution of DOGE was literally in the winning candidate's platform, and is thus coming from the top down.

That does not fit the definition of a cyberattack. Schneier is wrapping his political opinions in the guise of his expertise as a security researcher.

If the President can't execute his mandate to build a team to audit government spending as promised -- rather than just hiring an incumbent like EY or Deloitte -- then what's the point of the role?

Re:Air Quality Reporting on iOS on Sunday June 25, 2023 @02:04PM (#36471012)
Yeah, I've noticed this too.

It looks like the air quality models that iOS Weather is using are integrated into a single system, and then that system is asked to render maps in any of the different regions' AQI systems.

Which means, as OP has observed, if you open the map from one region, and then navigate the map viewer to another region, you can see how the AQI scoring system from the first region would evaluate the second. Which is rather interesting.

Also fwiw I've reckoned that these AQI models are clearly highly algorithmic, extrapolating and synthesizing data where sensors are not available.

Re:OpenAI Employee: GPT-4 hasn't gotten worse since March on Thursday June 01, 2023 @03:59PM (#36156556)
Perhaps the evolution of this story is an interesting example of confirmation bias?
Re:DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS on Monday May 29, 2023 @09:53AM (#36113984)
Man. The filesystem and disk features look particularly awesome. I would have definitely got mileage out of it back in those days. Alas!
Re:DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS on Monday May 29, 2023 @09:51AM (#36113962)
This was my first (tiny) taste of a non-MS-DOS/Windows environment for PC.

Back in middle school, circa 1997 or 98, with the tiny scraps of time I could get on an Internet connection with a web browser, I ended up using Infoseek (or similar) to look for software I could run on my 486 at home. Amusingly, I think this was on a Mac.

One of the first things I found was Desktop2, but alas I never got it to run because the installer I downloaded ended up corrupted. Probably on account of using the Mac to download it and save it on a floppy (probably using the PC Exchange Mac extension?)

Never actually saw the thing run until I YouTube'd it more than 20 years later.

Shame I never got it to run - it looks like it actually would have been pretty useful and interesting.

Not long after I found FreeBSD, got dialup at home, and embarked on a project to download and run that.

Have a read of Manuel Smith's "When I say no, I feel guilty".

The tools there are astonishingly effective at reframing one's relationship with criticism (reasonable or otherwise). Highly recommend.

Re:OpenAI Brings ChatGPT to iOS on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:47PM (#35991569)
Are you outside the US? It seems to be region locked to US right now, so all of the third party frontend apps are all you see when searching from elsewhere.
Re:Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong on Monday April 17, 2023 @09:44AM (#35600600)
Me, I stick with Stephen Krashen's hypothesis, borne out by my own experience: compelling, comprehensible input is the key. This applies to both your first language acquired when you are young and any other languages later.

Start with reading to kids, then give them access to wide selection of books to choose from. Comic books are good, too.

I have many criticisms of the education I received as a youngster, but they did get this right.

A great way to be terribly sore all the time.

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