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samch

Re:Mosquito Lasers on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:50AM (#50302684)
Laser tracking and elimination of mosquitos.

https://archive.ph/YsGD6

Re:Bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: Best Pill Splitter on Thursday October 15, 2026 @07:48AM (#50102325)
Not every medication is manufactured in the precise doses required. To get to the right amount, a few common doses will be produced with score marks to allow easy(ish) division for a smaller amount. For example, one of my family members has needed a half-pill of thyroid medicine. Something like a 75mcg pill split in half to make it 37.5mcg.
Two planes, the same airport, crossing paths.
Here is a different link covering the same topic without requiring a subscription:

https://www.mainepublic.org/maine/2025-06-02/on-verona-islan...

Re:Doom in MS Paint from Mark Russinovich on Sunday July 19, 2026 @01:19PM (#48969935)
“The actual Doom engine (ViZDoom) runs the real shareware DOOM1.WAD — with the BSD-licensed Freedoom WADs covering the episodes shareware doesn't ship — and renders headlessly; every frame is placed on the Windows clipboard and pasted into Paint's canvas as a genuine document edit.”

Pretty impressive

Re:Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @09:31AM (#48644704)
The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.

While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.

Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.

Re:Gaussian Point Splatting on Thursday June 04, 2026 @12:09PM (#48400684)
It seems like there are fairly regular posts on HN about splatting, and most appear to be fairly technical or proof-of-concept level. While the outputs look nice, I’m not sure that I could distinguish them from a nice ray-traced scene. What I think I’m missing is the “why?” of splatting. What are the material benefits of this area of research?
The author should’ve known that we already have an accepted unit for measuring things in terms of a person’s stature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

Re:It's time to talk about my writerdeck on Saturday May 23, 2026 @05:59PM (#48251967)
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/
Nice database (got a brief glimpse before it was hugged to death). Personally, I’ve always really liked this apple rating site (no affiliation):

https://applerankings.com/

Re:The Smelly Baby Problem on Friday May 01, 2026 @10:27PM (#47982765)
Agreed - like the sibling comment, we also used cloth diapers with our two kids. They were actually great. The ones we had were basically two-part construction: there was an outer shell with adjustable snaps for appropriate sizing, and an inner liner that absorbed the moisture. Both were easily washable. Like other parents we knew who did this, we added a small hand-held sprayer / bidet wand to one of our toilets and used it to hose off the diaper and liners. We would then toss them in the washing machine. I think these also provided more cushion for the kids’ bottoms and they both ended up sitting and scooting on them pretty fast. Also like the others here, we used disposables on the go / on vacation. Just my two cents, but we loved our cloth diapers.
Re:Phyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone on Sunday April 12, 2026 @07:37AM (#47738503)
One of my kids has science project due each quarter in school, and this is our go-to app. We’ve measured acceleration in an elevator, sound attenuation of an audio source in a small vacuum chamber, and the Doppler effect. The app makes it easy to capture and export the data points to make graphs. I highly recommend this even just to play around with.
Copilot is not a model, to my knowledge. When you’re asking about the data that it was trained on, you are most likely referring to an OpenAI or, in some circumstances, an Anthropic model. Customer data is not used for training the models that run Copilot.
I hadn’t thought about using their first-party API offering, but I will look into it.

Personally, I’ve used AWS Bedrock as the fallback when my plan runs out, and that seems to work well in my experience. I believe you can now connect to Azure as well.

Some of this could be related to laws that necessitate updated location data for emergency calling. Since a common component of Teams is Teams Phone, there can be a compliance gap. I’m sure this isn’t the whole story, but it is likely one facet: https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law...
Re:NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power on Saturday December 20, 2025 @11:25AM (#46337284)
Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot is a commercial failure on Saturday October 04, 2025 @10:25PM (#45478410)
Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.
Re:Microsoft 365 Copilot is a commercial failure on Saturday October 04, 2025 @10:21PM (#45478396)
The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.
Re:Electromechanical Reshaping Offers Safer Eye Surgery on Thursday September 04, 2025 @09:07AM (#45126839)
My wife had PRK done on both eyes over a decade ago, and it was great. At the time, she had the choice between LASIK and PRK (I’m not sure that everybody has both options given their particular conditions). After reviewing the long-term prognosis and possible side effects of both, she went with PRK. It’s been a fantastic decision for her, but that just one person’s experience.
Maybe they’ve thought about this and measure that too? Maybe they can adjust measurements based on data from multiple sensors?

https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volc...

Yes, as is OneDrive and Teams file sharing. Those, however, are part of SharePoint Online. SPO is distinct from this CVE, which only applies to the standalone SharePoint Server.
This is what precisely why I willingly pay more to Google for their fiber optic service than AT&T for an equivalent, albeit less expensive, plan: Google readily allows me to use my own equipment. I am voting with my dollars on this one.
So many of the comments are focusing on Office products. Okay, that’s fair. People can talk Calc vs Excel for example, and that’s fair. What I don’t get is how you replicate knowledge worker collaboration without using a major commercial provider like Google Workspace or M365. How do you handle the use cases solved by collaborative document editing, SharePoint / OneDrive, Teams with DLP, document classification, etc. I’m not affiliated with Google or MSFT, just genuinely curious how you replace the broader ecosystem around the core Office products using open-source solutions. Has anybody solved for this?
Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.
Re:A Letter to the American People on Saturday March 01, 2025 @10:04PM (#43226781)
This is precisely what’s happened with the educational system in many U.S. states:

1. Reduce funding and investment in public education.

2. Claim that our educational system is broken and we need to privatize.

3. Fund charter and private schools with vouchers while continuing to defund public schools.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see steps 4 and 5 where we return to well-support education for all.

Re:macOS Tips and Tricks (2022) on Friday February 28, 2025 @10:17AM (#43206538)
One Windows shortcut that I use habitually is Ctrl + left or right arrow keys and optionally with shift in order to navigate by or select entire words at a time instead of single characters.

I’ve looked into MacOS approaches to achieve the same functionality in the past, but I never seemed to find anything of use. I’m wondering if anybody here would be aware of a solution.

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