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guyzero

3,505 karma · joined July 9, 2007

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guyzero··on Carmakers feel chip crisis easing
> Why aren't dealerships just consignment stores for cars?

Presumably because people prefer getting less money now to getting more money later. Also most dealerships essentially "flip" cars (like those people on HGTV flip houses) - they clean them up, do basic service, add a warranty of some sort and that gives them extra margin versus just taking a small fee for handling sale paperwork.

Honestly I'd hate to sell a car via consignment because there's zero incentive for the dealer to do anything with it. They might sit on it for months.

guyzero··on My Mega65 has arrived
I really don't understand the love people have for ${literally anything}.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

guyzero··on A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS
You'll be surprised of the first commercial deployment of Fuchsia then: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/18/22630245/google-fuchsia-o...
guyzero··on Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
try to get your cancer treated in 1960 and let me know how much you like 2010
guyzero··on Quick Start Guide for Flipper Zero
They've shipped 23k devices but their Kickstarter sold 38k, so it may be a while.
guyzero··on My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
the standard response here is to ask which native american tribe you're a member of.
guyzero··on My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
I don't think China and India (or literally any other country) ran saturday morning cartoons for decades talking about the fact that their country was built by immigration. There's a disconnect between America's rhetoric and its actions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQl6XBo64M

That said, as a green card holder, sure, I'm grateful that the US has this process. But I think Americans need to also acknowledge that they've generated trillions of dollars of wealth from immigrants and they could make the paperwork a little bit simpler.

guyzero··on E Ink Gallery 3
This is great less because anyone needs a folding display but because hopefully it won't shatter if you look at it wrong (like all their other displays).
guyzero··on Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2022 Results
Businesses with high long-term customer value and high customer acquisition costs will always dominate these sorts of transactional ad channels.
guyzero··on The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers”
"I believe only one was lost in combat."

I think that means that we lost more to weather than combat, which was their downfall.

guyzero··on Guido van Rossum: Let Web3 die in a flaming ball of fire
every one of my closest friends who are all very successful Wall St finance guys are hugely bullish on Bernie Madoff's investment funds.
guyzero··on California considers a shortened, 32-hour workweek for larger companies
The classic libertarian position that naively assumes that companies and individuals have equal negotiating power.
guyzero··on DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results
Unfortunately I suspect this would be selling gold shovels to dirt miners and the economics of it are not compelling.
guyzero··on Why are some egg yolks so orange?
I have chickens and while the eggs are great, what you have is new pets that also happen to produce eggs as a side-effect. (Assuming you live in a city and not on a farm) You treat them like any other pet. Chickens will live 3-10 years. One of my chickens died a year or so after she stopped laying, another chicken is now 10 and lays one or two eggs a year but is otherwise looking as healthy as they day we got her. I suppose you could kill them or even try to eat them but most layers are pretty skinny and would not make a great meal.
guyzero··on Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
They were profitable in like 2017-2019. Their financials are public, it's easy to see at a macro level where the money is going.
guyzero··on Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
"I don't like it" != financial distress.

From Twitter's 2021 10K:

"FY 2021 Highlights Total revenue was $5.08 billion, an increase of 37%, compared to 2020."

2021 net losses were $221M, which is a big improvement on $1.135B in 2020.

Honestly seems like things are really shaping up @ Twitter.

guyzero··on DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results
Amazon ran A9.com as a search engine from 2004 to 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#A9.com_search_portal
guyzero··on DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results
DDG does run ads just like Bing and Google, so it's just a way for Bing to get more search ad inventory out there.

Once upon a time there were other sites that did the same thing with Google, but eventually Google decided they didn't need third parties to drive search traffic.

guyzero··on The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
That's wild, although it seems to be server parts in a workstation case. I guess none of Intel's "desktop" chips support a dual/quad CPU configuration though, so that's your only choice. Quad 8 TB NVMe drives is definitely one way to get to $30K of parts pretty quickly.
guyzero··on The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
That's just over $31,000 in 2022 dollars. I don't think I can even imagine what kind of modern desktop you could build for that much money.
guyzero··on Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
It simply wasn't super hardened, but I'm no expert on mid-80's UNIX variants, maybe they had all the same issues. The filesystem was questionable as I said. But certainly it was pretty advanced for its time - probably not a lot of high schools had a lab of networked standalone UNIX machines and these were the closest thing you were likely to get.
guyzero··on Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
Tapscott has been a "futurist" for years, probably decades now. Sadly the trouble with being a futurist is that you gotta keep making up a new future every year.
guyzero··on Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
I think they had some sort of GUI but we never got it at our school - they just dropped you into a command prompt on boot like God, Thompson and Ritchie intended.
guyzero··on Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to chop up the sample utterances and make it say other things to some degree. You could redirect these requests over the network and make other people's machines speak during class. There was a basic inode-type file system but it had weird permissions and was pretty closely mapped to the physical disk topology so you could edit directories and reassign file locations to be the locations of other files, like, say, the password file. There wasn't anything to stop you from writing a fake login prompt to capture passwords from the unsuspecting. They had structured pascal, a decent LOGO interpreter and a C compiler so they could support really any sort of sophisticated program that a high school student of the day could write.

It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once upon a time.

guyzero··on You don't ever own an electric vehicle
"- Lots of things are software intensive these days. This is not unique to EVs. Why single those out?"

Very much this. The description in the article sounds like owning a laptop vs a desktop pc. People don't care that they can't upgrade their car if they're just going to get a new one every three years anyway that has better features and twice the range. It's not how I buy cars, but the majority of car buyers don't buy cars like I buy cars.

guyzero··on America produces enough oil to meet its needs, so why do we import crude?
Seems like axe grinding to mention a policy that ended 35 years ago.
guyzero··on In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
Come on, this is a partisan hit piece. Which is too bad because it's a legitimate and serious issue, but any pretense of objectivity went out the door when we get to "Howard Anglin... was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney"

Call me when he starts going after long-standing issues like civil forfeiture: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-administr...

guyzero··on Heuristics that almost always work
This essay, but not ironically.

If you think you have something that no one else in the world has noticed, you're probably wrong. You're going to need a LOT of evidence to prove yourself right. Lots of people & companies spend years, decades even, proving themselves right. You're not going to do it overnight and you're not going to do it with a wikipedia article.

guyzero··on Google Maps now requires WiFi scanning to use navigation
This may be Waze beacons which use bluetooth to help position the user when they're going through tunnels, where there is no GPS coverage.

https://support.google.com/waze/partners/answer/9416071?hl=e...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202359/waze-beacons-nyc...

guyzero··on Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results
GCP is making 10-year sales deals, so it better be around in 5 years.

https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2020/07/31/google-clouds-expan...

"GCP has recently announced a number of ten year transactions including wins at Deutsche Bank, Mayo Clinic, and Sabre."

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