cproctor

I keep dreaming about rigging up some robot arms terminating in large mirrors, which would use inverse kinematics to follow the sun and reflect more light into my office window.

It was carelessness. I know Sen. Wyden has been good on this issue and other issues of digital governance. My comment came originally out of the frustrating irony that id.me was getting heat for commercializing what should be a government service when Intuit's behavior is so much more galling. I originally posted my comment attributing the quote to the IRS, then corrected the attribution to Sen. Wyden without thinking about the broader context. The sarcasm probably didn't add much to the conversation anyway; sorry.

If the IRS (or Sen. Wyden) is looking for a "core government service" which has been inappropriately commercialized, they might start with tax preparation.

That's a good counter-example, and I agree with your suggestion that the value of the analytics probably explains the difference. (The value of smoke detector analytics is probably even lower than that of dishwashers!) So maybe we could agree that adding "smart" results in a more profitable product, whether that's because of a higher sale price, higher ongoing revenues, or both.

I think in the end it's not abut utility--adding "smart" lets you dramatically bump the price. Look at smoke detectors (as an example I was thinking about this morning): the best-rated (Consumer Reports) wired smoke detector costs $31. Ten-year sealed battery models cost less. But the smart smoke detectors start at $130.

These cost another $2 in hardware and some dev (and probably certification) costs to recoup, but they also open the opportunity for subscriptions and who-knows-what-kind-of in-app purchases which can be sold to anxious-complacent-frazzled consumers with extra disposable income.

Hmm, I'm actually not sure. It hasn't happened a ton so I usually just filter out spam after it arrives.

This has mostly been my experience as well. I moved my email and calendaring to Fastmail, keeping my vestigal gmail address. I use this google account for Docs and nothing else. (For academics, do not keep your writing/cv/syllabi/etc in a Google account tied to your university email address!) I still get a personal email addressed to gmail every couple of months despite a years-long process of autoreplies asking family and friends to move to my new email address. It takes a long time but it's worth it.

As I've started hosting more websites (mostly academic projects like unfold.studio or learning-machines.net), I have come to appreciate more and more the ability to point multiple domains' MX records to my single fastmail account. A nice additional benefit is the ability to handle wildcard email addresses. When I log in to ebay, it's with ebay.com@<subdomain>. When I log in to the IRS, it's with irs.gov@<subdomain>. When someone sells an email address or starts spamming it, I can cut it off. And I can hope that maybe a few less rows are getting joined in the big database in the sky.

Where do you go now for "graphic / web design / typography"?

And Henry James!

Well this thread finally convinced me to set showdead=no in my profile. It's scary to see how much damage a few accounts can do to the erosion of discourse on this site, and especially to think I'm reasonable in worrying that some of them are state or corporate sock puppets. I am grateful to the site moderators and to other community members (in downvoting bad-faith comments) for asserting our shared valuation of this discourse space.

Thanks! Academic here, also thinking about using this for notes and lots of reading research papers with not too much annotation.

Can anyone recommend for or against buying a used reMarkable2 on ebay? I'm interested in this for daily work, happy to spend some time in SSH, and have a reasonably high risk tolerance for no-warranty. But I don't want to throw my money away.

Also no eating or drinking during the exam, just because.

I have been thinking about the difference between human users and computational agents. There is a widespread pattern of enforcing that only human users may interact with a service, not computational agents. Running a user-installed extension is one example; additional examples are CAPTCHAs, account verification by phone number, or services which refuse to provide API access such as banks.

Sometimes the reason is to protect users (e.g. banks), sometimes to protect the service from abuse. But often the reason is to ensure value can be extracted from users (e.g. serving ad impressions) or the power that can be exerted over users. Regardless, I believe this comes down to power: computer scientists understand that acting through a computational agent is fundamentally more powerful than acting directly as a human user. Computational agents can operate at scale, they provide virtualization (e.g. throwaway identities), and thereby conserve the ultimate scarce resource: our attention. Many systems seem to have computational power asymmetry as their fundamental principle: as little human contact on the system's side as possible; as much human contact on the user's side as possible.

If there's any path ahead that avoids a totalitarian nightmare resulting from asymptotic concentration of power, it depends on cultivating a more widespread understanding of computational power and developing new social norms and policies. As a CS educator, this is one of my top priorities.

thank you.

I've been using Hugo as well. I used Pelican (Python port of Jekyll) for a long time, but Hugo is so much more performant and has a larger ecosystem at this point.

The main downside is that the Hugo documentation is sometimes terse and snarky.

It's a concern, unfortunately. We read quite a bit about specific local issues before buying our house; our water is pretty good though I also installed a filter. Love Canal, where the Superfund program was born, is in Niagara Falls. In Tonawanda the army intentionally poured Manhattan Project leftovers into dispersed wells to hide the source... [1] And WNY was generally a center of late 19C/early 20C industry which generally left messes behind.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/01/nyregion/big-atom-waste-s...

Can anyone recommend a good framework or analysis of the barriers to open-source, general-purpose computing on mobile devices? I have read with interest the various open-source mobile operating systems posted to HN, but don't feel like I have a good sense of the landscape. Switching to open source feels urgent (mobile has become so important and so privacy-invasive), but it also feels like this is a steep uphill battle; that mobile has been culturally positioned as not-for-open-source.

I'd love to see this problem analyzed in terms of layers. My sense is that one barrier is walled-garden apps. I'm happy to give these up. But I also have the sense that there are hard barriers involving firmware (especially cellular modems?), identity (SIM cards are designed to contain secrets you can't access), and connectivity (you can't decouple a phone number from its client as easily as you can with an IP address).

Actually, Niagara County is surprisingly temperate--warmer and much less snowy than Buffalo and the south towns. It's been famous for apples, pears, and stone fruit since the 19th century; we even have some vineyards. But yeah, maybe we'll add figs and bananas.

Climate resiliency was a primary factor in our decision to move last year to western New York. Farmland, fresh water, and not too hot. Check out Figure 10 in the linked report...

http://uploads.oneregionforward.org/content/uploads/2015/01/...

What if a company actively encouraged its employees to interview at competitors, and to welcome, even expect, external offers as part of discussions around professional growth, roles, and compensation? They could call it "peer review."

The company would offload the work of finding market rates onto its competitors while potentially gaining insights into competitors' operational logic. And as a machiavellian bonus, this arrangement might depress its own employees' market rates because other companies might be hesitant to extend offers to candidates they suspect are not serious.

Thanks! This looks like a really useful contribution to the open community of research tools. One feature which would be a prerequisite for me is a structured export of data I produced through interaction with PDFs.

I recently translated the original 1971 Oregon Trail BASIC source code into Ink (https://unfold.studio/stories/10782/). It was my first time working with GOTO statements and hopefully my last.

This is inspiring to hear. I'm a recent transplant to a small city in Western NY (20k residents). Are there any studies or documents available from your village's deployment? I'm interested in getting involved in this issue in my own city. Thanks!

We just need to accelerate the planet a bit and gradually expand our orbit.

Now that there are (finally) services like Plaid providing API access to financial accounts, it feels like there is an opportunity to separate the front-end (UI, budgeting and reporting tools) from the back-end (interest payments, wire transfers) of banking.

The NPS preservation briefs (ex. historic masonry [1]) are fantastic, and like the grandparent, document knowledge that is largely lost in practice.

[1] https://www.nps.gov/tps/how-to-preserve/briefs/2-repoint-mor...

> If you're not sure [which equality operator] to use, prefer strict equality using ====.

Super-strict!

Can anyone provide an update on the state of open-source transcription packages, with language models? I'd love to have the equivalent of spaCy, gensim, Stanford NLP, or NLTK, but for transcription. That is, packages that will just work at quality comparable to cloud transcription APIs if you generally know what you're doing but maybe don't keep up with the latest literature.

This could really bite you:

> It is currently not possible to use ssh to login between systems on MCT and any earth time zone