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isomorphicon The 'else' keyword is probably a literal translation from German (2020)

I don't think the article author is concluding what you think they are.

The HN title reads "literal translation," which I didn't take to mean "literally".

The linked article doesn't really have a title. The article author states [...] "I think a carefully-chosen German word was probably translated as an archaic English word and then never revisited. Unfortunately we do not have the original German text to consult."

isomorphicon Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio

With Advanced Data Protection enabled (it's not available globally but it is in the US), Photos is E2EE.

isomorphicon Any window from your Mac, on your iPhone and iPad

It's frustrating that Apple doesn't have their own Screen Sharing (VNC) application on the iPhone/iPad, if even just to provide a basic screen-sharing experience. They have something builtin to FaceTime (that I've never tried) as a kind of remote-support app.

RealVNC did not work from iOS/iPadOS to macOS Golden Gate when I tried it relatively recently, although it may have been updated since. It's possible Apple changed something in their version of VNC's auth.

I used to recommend Screens (v4) when it was flat licensed, as it seemed to work well and was well designed in dealing with smaller screens and input differences. Now (v5) it's $5/month $30/year $200/lifetime, which I can't really justify for my casual use case.

isomorphicon LFM2.5-24B-A2B: Built for fast on-device agents

Another data point: I got 94.74 tokens/s on an M4 Pro Mac mini 64GB with the simonw prompt "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". TTFT was 0.37s. The model thought for 40.75s before answering.

(The resulting pelican was underwhelming.)

isomorphicon Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote

Another: A particular street address only maps to one person, entity, or family. Counterexample: Giant skyscraper with a zillion tenants, each in a different suite. Or a giant apartment building. Etc.

Still another: One particular suite address only maps to one person, entity, or family. Counterexample: Any of thousands of commercial mailbox-rental / package-shipping stores in US strip malls, which tend to have suite numbers (within the mall) and possibly hundreds of tenants, all at one suite.

isomorphicon Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded

I saw this linked from MacRumors during the AT&T iPhone 18 Pro Max lockup news discussions. It was interesting to see what AT&T/Apple did to try to get ahead of the issue. So far it looks like they disabled 5G Standalone mode, possibly just to prevent a bug from literally destroying the hardware (possibly only on one batch of phones).

Apple/AT&T still haven't released any kind of statement addressing the issue other than to replace affected hardware.

isomorphicon What's Earth's dominant species by mass?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/beyond-2

isomorphicon Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort

Holy cow, thank you for this. On that same IBM[1] link, it reads:

Maximum wet bulb temperature (Only LTO-8 and earlier cartridges) / Maximum Dew Point temperature (LTO-9 and later cartridges), all across the board, allowable / recommended / shipping: 26°C (79°F).

In Florida, we like to refer to 79°F dew points as "Tuesday."

More to the point, the time I want those LTO cartridges to earn their keep is during a disaster scenario. The most likely disaster scenario--other than fire--is hurricane. High temperature and humidity, and no power to run the HVAC to mitigate those. (Unless you have generators with fuel to run for days, and your HVAC, generators, and fuel tanks survived.)

isomorphicon Show HN: Strata – an expressive semantic layer that can say no to your LLM

Go up a level in the URL, or click on the logo in the upper-left on the "try" page the post links to.

https://strata.do/

isomorphicon T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97°F

https://archive.is/20260916181240/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

(Even the NY Times gift link requires a login.)

isomorphicon Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes

I think GP and TFA mean that some of the states are afraid of public-key disclosure.

isomorphicon The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

Well, you know what they say. The best time to blow tens of billions you might never get back on a risky memory fab in your home country is ten years ago. The second best time is today!

isomorphicon The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50

The colors may also fade/drift upon exposure to air and humidity, not just light.

isomorphicon The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50

That lander had all sorts of fiddly protrusions on it, so the multiple charts could have been to avoid self-shadowing all of them. Or they were worried about chart stability after shipping it across interplanetary space. Or the test targets were for angles for multiple cameras?

isomorphicon Whistle Synth Mac App

Laurie Anderson, with some of her bespoke live MIDI instruments (no actual cutlery AFAIK), got pretty close.

isomorphicon The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50

These are great, even for manually-adjusted color workflows.

Fun fact, though: You have to replace them every couple of years (or sooner) because no pigment/dye is stable, especially if exposed to bright light.

Having a test shot with one of these in it saves you untold amounts of pain later.

isomorphicon Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

We're still doing it! You've just described the AI labs: They'll trade safety / alignment for +1~2% of any positive metric, any day of the week.

The "ethical" employees will think they'll solve the problem later. The unethical ones won't be encumbered by such thoughts in the first place.

isomorphicon Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle

I've heard this referred to as a "dark sector", or "hidden sector":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_sector

The scary thought is that, were it true that there is voluminous richly-interacting dark matter, we would be the actual dark sector.

isomorphicon CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

Sigh. I want my damn em dash back. I had the Mac key combo memorized back when the phrase "AI winter" was coined. Now everyone thinks it's AI slop.

isomorphicon Qwen 3.8 27B

No agentic harness; I just prompted literally "svg owl" into LM Studio 0.4.21+2. macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Mac mini M4 Pro (14 core, 20 graphics cores) 64GB RAM. (I put the machine config so the 17m12s of thinking has some context.) It got about 12.75 tok/s and used 21,769 tokens.

For comparison's sake, Qwen 3.6 35B A3B MLX, same prompt, same machine, thought for 1.59 seconds, used 2,398 tokens, and hit 80.83 tok/s. It actually output just a straight SVG file of an owl (not a bad owl either!), whereas Qwen 3.8 27B spent a zillion times longer gold-plating everything and output HTML+JS+SVG with interactive animation, sound, etc., etc.

isomorphicon Qwen 3.8 27B

"inclined to overthinking," holy cats you're not kidding! On a Mac mini M4 Pro 64GB I prompted it with "svg owl" and it thought for 17m12s, outputting 36.3KiB of thinking chatter. It did end up producing a 20.2KiB HTML+JS+SVG file with a very nice owl, including cursor-tracking animation, but it ran for more than a half hour!

The MoE models are stupendously faster.

isomorphicon Measured LLM inference speeds on Apple Silicon, with raw data (CC BY 4.0)

Agreed. Here's a start for posterity. Using their prompt, "Write a 300-word explanation of how attention works in transformer models, aimed at a junior developer. Use one concrete analogy.":

Note that my mini is the bigger Pro model, so it will be faster than the mini quoted in the article.

Mac mini M4 Pro (cores: 10P/4E/20G) 64GB Tahoe 26.6 LM Studio 0.4.20+1

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit: 78.81 tok/s, TTFT 0.93s (but note Qwen 35B is really chattery and outputs 3,451 words of thinking for 65s first)

Qwen3.6-27B-MLX-4bit: 14.65 tok/s, TTFT 0.76s (Qwen 27B output 3,027 words of thinking for 361s first, spinning up the fans)

gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-QAT-MLX-4bit: 64.93 tok/s, TTFT 0.44s (Gemma 26B is much more on-task, thinking with 591 words for 15.62s first)

gemma-4-31B-it-QAT-GGUF Q4_0: 12.25 tok/s, TTFT 1.65s (Gemma 31B thought with 404 words for 51.55s)

isomorphicon I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated

Floridian here. WWVB has never worked for me indoors (never tried outdoors). I've tried multiple vendors' clocks in multiple houses (wood frame and concrete). I assume the coverage is fine outdoors or with a sufficiently large antenna, but none of the clocks I've seen even have a mechanism to connect such an antenna. I could hack one, but then it would probably stop being cheap and reliable.

I'd love to buy an off-the-shelf WiFi+NTP clock, but everything I've seen is very expensive, intended for commercial timing applications or synchronizing clocks across a campus.

isomorphicon Nativ: Run frontier open models locally on your Mac

This looks like the Prism folks, who are making binary/ternary versions of popular edge models, so that those models will fit on constrained devices like phones. E.g., their Bonsai model derived from Qwen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910545

Perhaps they got tired of LM Studio, etc., not being able to run their models properly.

isomorphicon TLS certificates for internal services done right

Thank you, I was unaware of that. It looks like it's already support in the acme.sh client, but there is a Let's Encrypt discussion saying it's still pending at LE:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/dns-persist-01-deploymen...

I wonder if the interim version has been rolled out to some CAs.

isomorphicon TLS certificates for internal services done right

I do this exactly, using ACME DNS:

https://github.com/acme-dns/acme-dns

CAUTION, though, the last time I downloaded a binary release, ClamAV triggered on it, so I kept my old version which worked. I was using the 1.0 series (without any problems!), and now it seems the project has picked up development again with a 2.0 series.

isomorphicon Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone

I'm speculating that it's not the selfie; it's where that selfie ends up (or with whom).

isomorphicon Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips

Television resolutions appear to be on the same naming path.

isomorphicon Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior

"Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear." (George Addair)

isomorphicon How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time

> Liminalism (if we can christen this as a movement, and we should) is a form dedicated to the discovery of digital found art. It is important not just because of its content, but because it signals the migration of critical terminology and thinking into popular discourse in a truly democratic sense, independent of the traditional confines of the art industry as expressed in exhibitions, galleries, and museums.

This is not the language of an elitist.

If anything, it sounds like someone defending Liminalism's inclusion in the contemporary canon from arrogant elitists.