NoboruWataya

I got a Dell Latitude 5520 about five years ago. I chose it because it seemed pretty repairable/upgradeable, with two NVME SSD slots, two RAM slots and an easily replaceable battery. And those features have indeed served me well.

But I have been quite disappointed in the build quality of the laptop itself. The thing is literally falling apart. A lot of paint is chipping off both the keyboard and the body, and there are two sizeable cracks in the side of the laptop which don't currently affect operation but which are getting bigger over time. Lately the touchpad has started to give me issues as well.

I use my laptop a lot but I'm not particularly hard on it - it occasionally moves from my home desk to my sofa, basically never leaves the house. I also have a different laptop for work. In hindsight I think maybe I should have gotten a Thinkpad, but when I was looking around I remember the newer Thinkpads only having one free RAM slot with the other soldered in which turned me off. Also I quite like larger laptops and numpads which limits me somewhat.

I usually check in on gemini://antenna.michaelnordmeyer.com/ and think the content is a bit broader than you suggest. Recent posts cover topics like OpenBSD, Disney movies, Arch Linux, UK local radio, socks, books, and so on. Yes, there are a number of posts about Gemini, too, but it's a minority.

What models are people actually using to pump out code? That is the relevant comparison, not the absolute best in class models.

A dumb TV connected via HDMI to a Raspberry Pi running Kodi is smart enough for me.

Knowing that a new competitor has entered the market with a superior product is not inside information. The iPhone was public knowledge (that is how the Nokia engineers, who were not Apple insiders, knew about it). Nokia's existing offering was also public knowledge. Sure, some members of the public might have speculated that maybe Nokia was about to respond with its own killer smartphone, and Nokia insiders knew that wasn't the case. But that's not concrete information. Not to mention that "we can't compete with Apple" is ultimately a matter of opinion/prediction, not concrete information.

This has nothing to do with inside information or insider trading, it is just "if your company is bad, maybe you should go work for a better company".

Also it reeks of AI.

This is an oversimplification. It is straightforwardly correct that, for any imperfectly correlated basket of assets, the senior slice will be safer than the junior slice. If you hold the most senior 10% of a basket of mortgages, 90% of those mortgages would need to default for you to start taking losses. That is rare in any context and in fact there is a good bit of evidence that AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities didn't actually do all that badly in the 2008 crisis: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24509

There were a lot of factors that contributed to the 2008 crisis: adverse selection leading to low quality portfolios, mispriced assets, high leverage which magnified losses, lower-quality securities being held by investors who couldn't really afford to bear the losses on them, etc. But the fundamental concept of tranching is not actually that bad, even though every time people read about it they think it's the exact same as 2008. Banks have been tranching debt since long before 2008 and they have been tranching debt ever since. Not just mortgages either, but all kinds of debt.

The next sentence in that article is:

> They sell down debt when they are worried about concentration, which is exactly what "approaching internal limits" means in plain English: too much of this bank's balance sheet is now one bet on one sector holding up.

Which is correct, but kind of weird because being confident in a credit and being worried about concentration are not really mutually exclusive things. You can be pretty confident in an investment but not want it to constitute a majority of your portfolio. (Bankers know that even very strong credits are never 100% guaranteed to pay out.)

Let's say I offered you the chance to pay $100 to get $120 back if at least one coin toss in five came up heads. That's a pretty good bet, right? But would you bet your house on it?

The short answer is to free up money to make other investments.

The longer answer is that banks generally have policies about how concentrated they can be in individual borrowers, industry sectors, geographies, etc. That is why you rarely see a single bank take all of a very large corporate loan. They syndicate it out.

This is the definition of survivorship bias. There are a ton of tech stocks that you would have lost your shirt on had you invested in them just prior to the crash.

Even if you invested in a company that ultimately became a winner, you'd need to be able to hold on to it throughout the correction. You put your savings in tech stocks, the tech sector undergoes a significant correction, the stocks dive, you get laid off because you also work in tech and now you have to liquidate your stocks to meet your obligations. (Or you just retire at the wrong time.)

Here's the HN thread about the rebrand that "many people actually loved for its ingenuity" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425380

There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.

If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched "wedding" and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the "Wed" results.

Writing a will isn't really "transactional", there is no negotiation involved. And wills are already a highly commoditised legal product. (So I agree with you that will drafting is ripe for disruption by LLMs, but don't think this indicates a broader disruption of transactional work or the profession generally.)

From now on, whenever we want to refer to particular software, as well as the name we're going to have to specify whether we mean the AI thing or the other thing.

Interesting that the site is only available in the US. I wonder why that is.

Presumably if the protocol becomes popular you will have public instances that anyone* can sign up to, the same way other federated services work now.

(It's approximately as hard for a layman user to sign up to a Mastodon instance as it is to sign up for X. The fact that most layman users don't do that is a separate issue.)

I did think postmarketOS was a bit of an awkward name but it was also widely recognised, at least in Linux nerd circles. I guess this will cause a bit of confusion in the short term but hopefully lead to broader recognition in the longer term. Though the obstacles to Nura's growth are probably not primarily branding-related.

What do you find is missing? The main apps I need Google Play for are apps that are tied to a specific company or government service (eg, banking apps, or HMRC). For pretty much all basic functions I think F-Droid does the job.

In Biglaw, the scarcity is driven by the hours and stress. If it was a chilled 9-5 job you would certainly have more people willing to do it, even if it paid less.

The salaries are a result of the insane hours they have to do. Biglaw needs to pay those salaries to keep getting young associates in the door because burnout is a real problem in the industry. If salaries were lower and hours/stresses were lower, you would probably still find people wanting to be lawyers. A different kind of person, maybe.

(Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)

Millions if not billions of agreements are made every day without the involvement of lawyers. Lawyers are only needed for particularly complex situations and even there they are generally only "needed" in the sense that parties feel they would add value.

In my experience it basically doesn't even try to interpret the law. It just summarises the publicly available law/guidance out there and, if there is a question about how to interpret some provision, might set out the arguments for each interpretation. It doesn't really take a position. It is pretty good at drafting though. (Legora)

Of course you will get tired if you change your OS every three months. I have used roughly the same ArchLinux setup for years now, probably over a decade, and it is remarkably stable. Things break very occasionally but are easily fixed (and are usually a result of my own tinkering with experimental software).

Also regarding everything convergence of desktop environments, there are plenty of more interesting options out there, but they don't call themselves "desktop environments" - tiling or scrolling window managers, for example, which are often infinitely configurable though scripts.

Probably wishful thinking but does this get us any closer to porting postmarketOS to these devices? (Or even LineageOS, though I think LineageOS may have decent support on many of these devices already?)

A couple of times now I have walked a stretch of the Camino de Santiago (each time it was just a small bit near the end; sadly don't have the time off to do a full route which can take a month or longer). I find the simplicity of it super rewarding and enjoyable compared to my busy life back home. Just, for the most part, miles and miles of peaceful countryside.

It's kind of the opposite of what is described in the article, where the author is using his time off to improve his knowledge in other areas. Personally, I find that back home I am constantly thinking, both at work and in my time off, so much so that I forget what the end goal of all that thinking actually is. So doing these long walks helps me take a break from that and put it in perspective. No laptop, as little smartphone use as possible, I will maybe read a book or two in the evenings but nothing too heavy, etc.

As an aside, I am in a non-tech field, and programming is my hobby (and nothing like my day job). I enjoy it and I think it helps me stay sharp, but it has its drawbacks as a hobby. Being a solo hobby, and not one that many people in my field are into, it's not really something I can easily bond with others over (unlike, say, golf or chess). And sometimes it can be the opposite of relaxing when you encounter a bug that you can't seem to diagnose or fix.

She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.

I had only heard about these things on HN, and thought they were primarily popular as a toy for people to hack on. I didn't realise they are so popular amongst "normies".

I have no current need for one as I am happy with my cheap second hand Kobo but it's great that they exist, especially with the open source alternative firmware. Hopefully they don't clamp down on that in future.

Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc.

A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.

If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.

(As an aside, I have no idea if donations to OSC are subject to sales tax, but I would be surprised if they were given there is no sale or supply happening, and no one here seems to have suggested they are.)

> In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.

I disagree, because it uses the loose term "tax exempt donations", and nobody, it seems, can agree on whether that means exempt from income tax (ie, recipient does not need to pay income tax on it), exempt from sales tax, or deductible for income tax purposes (personally I think this is likely what it is intended to capture, and the only real basis on which to distinguish between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organisations, but in fact is the least supported by a literal reading).

The policy is far from clear cut, and even having read your comments I am still not sure what you think it's trying to say. The policy suggests that an app may lead users to another payment method where the payment is a "tax exempt donation". What tax, specifically, are you suggesting a donation to OSC is not exempt from? You mention sales tax, is it the case that donations are not exempt from (ie, are subject to) sales tax?

Or are you saying the key point is that the donation not tax-deductible for the donor, which is a different thing to being tax exempt (and does not have anything to do with the "taxability of the transaction")?

Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.

The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.

Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.

As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.