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foobar1962on Apple reports fourth quarter results

> ... Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk...

Similar to Apple (and everybody else) using Google maps. They survived.

foobar1962on Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now

That is not the take-away. LLMs are finding potential bugs in code. People are using LLMs to create potential fixes which people then test, confirm and implement.

foobar1962on Jared Kushner Hacked Phone Reveals Secret Negotiations, Millions in Transactions

> You have to think the current administration is completely and totally owned by foreign interests at this point.

... completely and totally owned by private interests, some of which are foreign.

foobar1962on Tesla Roadster

More like 700 years.

foobar1962on Tesla Roadster

All cars can fly, if you put the effort in.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aVjlh_QGKi0

foobar1962on US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams

> ...(‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.)

The intelligence formerly known as...

foobar1962on Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app

> (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)

I saw what you did there.

foobar1962on Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer

Repeatability is more important than accuracy.

Note also that some of the best printers used metronomes to count exposure time and turn the enlarger light on and off manually.

foobar1962on Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine

The fit is (almost) trivial.

foobar1962on A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

That's confusing copyright with patents. The right to publish Newton's books is separate from being able to apply the knowledge which a patent protects. Note that math equations cannot be patented.

foobar1962on AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

foobar1962on Maryland Closes More of Cunningham Falls State Park After Second Beaver Attack

Make like a tree and leaf?

foobar1962on The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

> I liked the film noir voice-over.

I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.

foobar1962on The myth of Snow Leopard

> Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it.

People had difficultly opening the plastic case it came in. I did. Ms added a red pull tab to indicate an affordance, then later changed the case to a simple clam shell for Windows 7.

foobar1962on Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet

You're off a generation. The boomer's kids have kids.

foobar1962on A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median

That's average or mean. Median is the middle value.

From the article:

> It can lead to some discussion about statistics and why you might prefer a median to a mean in most cases.

My best example for median vs mean is property prices, where very expensive properties will skew the mean (average value) upwards but the median (middle value) will remain about the same.

foobar1962on Underarm bowling incident of 1981

So who's on first?

foobar1962on APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief Executive Version.

foobar1962on Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.

foobar1962on Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

Indeed. I just watched a "leak" video that claimed Apple is already releasing the MacBook Neo 2 with A19 chip because they are running out of A18 chips.

foobar1962on Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

A lot of the people that bought iPhones are now buying Macs as well.

foobar1962on Lost Doctor Who episodes found

I worked in a broadcast company archive (doing database work). Tapes were often reused. Fragments of previous recordings -- sometimes just a few frames, occasionally many minutes -- may remain at the beginning or end of the tape. AFAIK tapes were never completely erased before recording over top.

I was invloed in a digitisation project, the scanning companies were instructed to process the whole tape in case there were fragments of older programs at the end. A 30 minute tape may have 15 minutes of program, then a period of blank/black, then the remains of an older program for several minutes after that.

foobar1962on "Scholars Will Call It Nonsense": The Structure of von Däniken's Argument (1987)

The gottcha moment in the article was when the questioner's name was revealed as PLAYBOY.

Myth Busted: Some people really did only buy it for the articles.

foobar1962on The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems

Really? Satisfied people lack the ability to dream?

foobar1962on The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems

> ..the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you... on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?

10, I'm living my best possible life. It's conceivable that my "best possible life" may not be as happy as the lifes of other people, but I have achieved the maximum that's possible for me.

Any other "possible life" would require some combination of different genes, being in a different place and living at a different time.

foobar1962on Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge

Ships were a lot smaller when the bridge was designed and built.

foobar1962on A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool

A bite requires teeth. Sharks bite. Snakes bite. Bees and wasps sting. Jellyfish and bluebottles sting.

Not sure about spiders. Are their fangs considered to be teeth? Platypus have venomous spurs, not sure what that’s called.

foobar1962on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

That or a Windows update.

foobar1962on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

I use the term “unexpected error” because if the code got to this alert it wasn’t caught by any traps I’d made for the “expected” errors.