bigiain

I bought whole Intel N100 mini pc with 16GB of DDR5 in it in 2023 for $AUD289 (so about $US200). I got a 16GB (DDR4) SODIMM in 2022 for $AUD88 ($US60).

> on hardware that ordinary people can afford

These days, can "ordinary people" afford 24GB of ram and half a TB of NVME ssd?

sigh

This is a beautiful turn of phrase - the likes of which is unlikely to ever be generated correctly and in appropriate context by an LLM:

"An additional inconvenience is the flyby speed: as designed, the Cyclers would swing by Earth at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, and fly past Mars at 22,000 mph. In order to intercept such speedy Cyclers, the rocket-taxis would need to be capable of splitting a lot of lickety."

Yeah - I think we're on the same page here?

If I'm interviewing at a Python shop that actually does statistics t=ype stuff or text munging, I'd expect them to have preferred/existing solutions for these tasks in their standard dependencies. And if it were a Javascript/Nodejs shop, or a C/C++ shop, or a Rust shop, they'd also have "standard tooling" that'd be "the preferred option" to anything I could hand roll (either in an interview or during a regular workday).

My "sort | uniq | sort" pipeline (usually combined with grep/tr/awk/sed or similar) is a reasonable answer for an underspecified task with none of the obviously existing but as yet unstated requirements that'd come along with this task is "the real world". It's not an actual proposed piece of production code - it's a way to demonstrate "a" way of doing it without even committing to a language, never mind whatever is in the in house standard set of modules.

If you want to test how find the median in Python, my immediate question would be "what Python modules are you already using? It'd be foolish to invent it myself if the actual codebase already imports numpy or pandas or SciPy. And it's be equally foolish to import one of those if they are already not in use.

(Admittedly, it's been a _looooong_ time since I interviewed for a junior or mid level developer role where leetcode games might be part of the hiring hoop-jumping.)

Is that really a "more applicable" task that finding the median? Are there actually software development jobs where either of those tasks are a regular/common part of the work, where people don't "just know" how to do them using whatever tools the job already uses?

I'm guessing I'd flunk your interview, because my initial response would be something like "No, I wouldn't write code for that. Unless there are unstated requirements, I'll just reach for the simplest possible solution, which for me would be something like cat textfile | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r That doesn't handle punctuation, probably doesn't handle unicode the way you might expect, and has a bunch of other things that additional requirements might rule out. But that'd be my starting point."

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I drove a '72 Superbug reasonably regularly from Sydney to Brisbane and Melbourne, even Adelaide a few times. They're 800-1000km trips each way and 1600km for Adelaide.

Admittedly my muscles and bones ache and complain more now than when I was in my late teens and early 20s. And I'd almost certainly regret not having air con and working heating if I owned one now.

But realistically? 98+% of all my driving is trips or 5-15km or so. And probably still 95% of my driving (at least by trip count if not by km travelled) would be less than 50km trips. I think a "suitable for around town" car supplemented by taxis or rentals at airports because I choose to fly most of my 800+km trips these days would work out just fine for me.

The last 5 or 6 years the only long trips I've driven have been in a campervan borrowed from a friend to go to music festivals in Queensland - partly because a camper van is really nice compared to a tent (especially if the weather goes bad) and partly because that friend really likes lending it out (at leat to people he trusts).

> I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI.

I'm not _sure_ that's true? "Most people" know that McDonalds don't make the best burgers in their city - probably not even the best burgers in their neighbourhood. But they do make burgers that are reliably the same and for heaps of people "good enough" when things like price and availability and consistency are taken into account. And I don't blame then for that, for those people burger quality is a think that value less then me, and convenience is something they value more than me. They're not "wrong" just different.

Some of us will. I'm more concerned personally with books and music, and go well out of my way to make sure I'm buying then from "real people"(tm). The last few years most of my in cinema movie watching has been at a local cinema that screens classic movies. Recently I've seen a 70mm print of 2001 A Space Odyssey, 35mm prints of Blade Runner and Godfather. Last week we went to see the original Matrix I _know_ I'm not watching much AI generates film.

Yep.

Earlier today I pointed someone toward Sade's song Young Lion.

It's a really good song all on it's own.

But if you take time to not only listen and understand the lyrics, but to find out the backstory of who she wrote that song for and why, it's a much more powerful story and a way more meaningful song.

AI can't make me feel that way. You can't have empathy with the author if there is no author. Whoever prompted some AI song/story/movie is more like the editor or producer than an author, and Sade's song can't make me feel empathy for her band or recording engineer.

I think there's probably some discussion about using AI to write fiction that should be had.

But.

Passing off your AI output as "human written" should be punished somehow. As a fiction reader, I don't care what ChatGPT has to say, even if you think you prompted it into a publishable story. I want to read stories written by humans, and I want to reliably be able to tell which are and which aren't, so I don't spend half my attention while reading trying to work out if this is an AI or not.

I have no clue how to make that come true. Part of me is sitting here thinking "I'm glad I'm old enough that I can spend the rest of my life reading fiction written before about 2020 and never run out of genuinely great human written stories."

"Download NoBeepPro for Android Auto now! It silences all unwanted warning sound, and totally doesn't surreptitiously enroll your car into a residential proxy service or mine crypto currency using your main power or hybrid battery!"

> At this point I don't know if I'd buy anything made after 2008.

At this point I'm contemplating finding a a late 60s/early 70s Beetle - or some other car with no more complex electronics in it than headlight switches and dizzy/points type ignition. Nobody is gonna be able to sewt that to remote brick itself when it thinks I'm ignoring it's incessant beeping.

Any advice on good communities or sources of (reliable) information on alternative firmwares and pen testing type tools?

Especially since, as that article describes, the "firmware" has a much more limited scope that it used to, now being mostly a loader for app rather that providing user functions.

Worrying about firmware development resources for a Flipper Zero seems a bit like concentrating on your bios instead of ongoing updates to Linux and the applications you use. Yeah, it's important, but it's probably exceedingly rare for the firmware here to need to change much.

I wonder if, for autonomous (or semi autonomous) flight, there's a way to make the drone flip and "power dive" then fly a carefully configured/programmed half-loop at the bottom? Seems there might be scope that way to have an autonomous "reduce altitude as rapidly as possible to 5m" function on a button that'd fly a full power j shape and compensate for the semicircular radius of the "deceleration without flying through your own prop wash" part of the maneuver? Similar (but more complex) to the "flip" and auto land functions on "toy" drones?

(I wonder if the drone people from Ukraine already have this? I suspect it'd make drones even harder to defend against with anti aircraft system designed and optimised to shoot down fighter/bomber planes instead of swarms of inexpensive drones.)

Keep in mind "copyright" explicitly does not cover "knowledge" or "ideas".

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).

I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends.

And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.

Too many. By which I mean "more than zero". And yes, I'm including nation states as "nutjobs" for the purposes of this calculation.

> Small differences in gain are ABX able much more readily than differences in noise at the 16 vs 24 bit level.

This was common knowledge at least as far back as the mid 80s, when every hifi shop and salesguy knew to ensure the bit of gear with the highest profit margin got played an almost imperceptible bit louder than the gear the customer came in to buy during back to back testing.

Did the subheading "AirPods liberated from Apple's ecosystem." and the first line of body text "LibrePods allows you to use AirPods features that are exclusive to Apple devices." not provide the required context? Or at least strongly hint that there is context that iPhone-only AirPods users might not know - and for whom this project is probably irrelevant?

I think I'd "behead" subthreads at posts by blocked users, so their posts and any replies under them get hidden for me. I'm happy enough to lose followup discussion and/or arguments against anything a user who I've caught out not reading the actual post and replying - and been annoyed enough at too add them to my blocklist. I _might_ miss some interesting discussion that way, but I'm fine with that to be the cost of me avoiding getting irritated by annoying posters.

(And the mood I'm in right now, I'd probably block top level posts by blocked users as well)

Yeah. And that's sad.

Recently, for the first time in over 15 years here, I've wished often for a "block user" function, so I can gradually weed those zero-effort zero-contributing users out. (If I didn't read HN across 4 or 5 different devices, I'd probably write a browser extension to allow me to do that...)

Still a useful project for those of us with a foot in both the iOS and Android camps. (And who use Linux as well as macOS)

:sigh:

There's very little point having a discussion about something where other people can't even be bothered to properly read the link that was submitted - and even more frustrating when that link was literally a README file.

Whether you believe that copyright _should_ exist is quite different from whether it _actually_ exists and whether there are consequences due to the existence of copyright.

All "open source" licenses rely on copyright. If copyright did not exist, GPL and BSD and MIT (and all the other software license options, open and commercial) would be unenforceable.

(I'm less convinced that you seem to be about whether there arte any good reasons for copyright. I believe real "creative people" like authors and musicians and artists and film makers _should_ have a legally enforceable monopoly to control use of and to generate income from their creative work. That shouldn't be "Micky Mouse" effectively eternal control, but there should in my opinion be some legally protected "ownership" that a creator has where they can prevent other people copying/recreating/misusing/profiting from their creation. Whether this should ever have applied to softwares something for a more nuances discussion t6hat a website comment section...)

Surely it won't be long before every hyper scalar and even medium sized hosting companies ip address ranges will end up in the block lists for every "questionable" website that is feeling the "chilling effects" from these UK laws?

I used to run my own mail server back until about 2014 or 2015, end even then it was practically impossible to reliably send mail to any of the major email providers from and ip address from Linda/AWS/Hetzner/DigitalOcean et al. I'm pretty sure porn sites and unmoderated web forum type thing that have lawyers advising them will soon be blocking not just UK ip addresses, but the bulk of the easy to identify VPN services and VPS providers.

> It's deeply relaxing to pull the (Internet) plug (I do, literally, physically remove one ethernet cable from a switch right underneath my monitor and I've then got several machines happily communicating only on the LAN: no more Internet).

> Maybe I'm having fun with my latest acquisition: modelling parts to fix stuff left and right around the house by 3D printing them

Isn't California proposing to put you in jail for having a 3D printer without an internet connection to tattle on you and killswitch your printer if some unaccountable internet service decides you're printing something "bad"?

:sigh:

Perhaps consider putting it in public domain instead of using an "open source" license?

There's a decent legal ethical argument that LLM output isn't copyrightable, and for me a "one shot vibe code" definitely _isn't_ "your creative work", so the copyright that open source licenses rely on probably doesn't exist there.

I wonder if a new category of "non copyrighted shared source code" needs to exist for people who use Gan AUI to create genuinely useful software which would ne a net positive to society if shared, but that doesn't risk murkying the waters and undermining the copyright basis that licenses like GPL and Apache and BSD and MIT rely on?

From outside the US, there has been so much "extraordinary" stuff happening in US politics recently that it's almost expected now.

Have we all forgotten PGP already? (Not an API, but certainly not a "physical good")

You can generate "pronounceable" passwords in some tools.

1PW just generated this for me: mimp-rort-jan-mon-kain-sqin

Not as much entropy as 24 random letters/digit/punctuations/capitalisation. But (for me at least) much easier to read end type in situations where copy/paste isn't available (like from my phone to my dev docker containers)