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jerlam

4,098 karma · joined March 14, 2012

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jerlam··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
Apple's been trying (in vain?) to sell iPad users a Magic Keyboard for six years and add a windowing system to iPadOS to pretend it's a real operating system, so I suppose they're trying to bridge the gap from the opposite (Macbook) side.
jerlam··on 'I Felt Blind Panic.' They Opened Their New $2k iPhone Duo–and It Broke
Phones are just a blip compared to the auto loan market.
jerlam··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
There's an Airfanta 4Lite which uses laminar flow to achieve that:

https://air-fanta.com/products/airfanta-4lite

However, testing seems to show that the clean air flow is neither wide nor far; it would only be effective right next to your face and you can't really move:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Masks4All/comments/1di1n4t/can_a_po...

There aren't a lot of use cases for it.

jerlam··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
The filter cost for the AirFanta 3 doesn't seem particularly high? In fact it seems cheaper than competitors.

All the purifier companies realized they make more money selling overpriced filters, so $60+ for the OEM filters is common nowadays. Despite it just being a standard HEPA filter cut to a specific size.

Airfanta 3 Pro filters (four) - $57

Coway Mighty Filter - $60

Coway Mighty2 Filter - $70-$80

I'd be concerned about the availability of filters after a few years. Some of these companies have been changing their models and filter type every year to add some nebulous feature. Others just go out of business.

jerlam··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
The linked PC-fan purifier has been tested and shown to purify air faster than the conventional alternatives, and are not makeshift, so I'm not sure what you are referring to.
jerlam··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
Yeah, it's a completely different kind of air purifier than the "tape a HEPA filter to a fan" ones, which is why it costs $1,000 instead of $150.
jerlam··on Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines
Doesn't even need to be during the summer.

Wind blows smoke around. There are currently fires in northern Michigan that are affecting the air quality in Chicago, which is 350+ miles away.

https://data.usatoday.com/fires/

jerlam··on A farewell to Arc browser
I think development was halted on Arc, and Dia was announced before the acquisition.

Arc Development stopped (May 2025) - https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-browser-company-stops-active...

Acquisition (Sep 2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45126358

jerlam··on Subaru is killing off gas cars and will only sell EVs in Europe
I wouldn't call it sustainable, but Subaru can persist for quite a while without an EV platform. Their main markets are the US (72%) and Japan (11%), neither of which have significant EV penetration. They are, and will continue to be, a bit player worldwide.

EV development also gets easier every year as it becomes more common. Companies don't have to have cutting-edge technology to compete, and Subaru has plans to release their own EV platform in 2029. I do not expect it to be cutting edge, but loyal Subaru owners won't be expecting that either.

jerlam··on Subaru is killing off gas cars and will only sell EVs in Europe
The idea that Subaru could build a viable electric car 20 years ago seems like a stretch. Many other companies may have had electric car concepts that were scrapped because they could neither figure out how to build them, nor was there a strong market for them.

Subaru is not a large car manufacturer. Toyota sells over 10x the amount of cars and Nissan sells 3x-5x, they are not equals. And Nissan did build an electric car 16 years ago and the company is currently circling the drain.

jerlam··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
In Berkeley, CA, restrictive zoning in the early 1900s was used to reinforce and codify those outcomes that separated the rich and the poor. Those laws stayed in place for over 100 years, far longer than the term of a single elected official. So you have to be careful what kind of laws you pass.

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/07/23/berkeley-zoning-has-...

jerlam··on Report Fraud Collect $30K
1% reward, up to $30K, sounds kind of low, especially considering the enforcement is likely to be politically biased.

For tax evasion, the IRS will reward whistleblowers 15-30% of the amount recovered. People have gotten millions of dollars.

jerlam··on New Walkman $5,899.99
I thought this must be a halo product that's not intended to be sold in volume, it just exists to make their cheaper products look normal. But here's all their MP3 players:

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorde...

Their cheapest branded "Walkman" is $1900. Their cheapest "digital media player" is $400. And they all just look like Android phones with extra buttons.

jerlam··on Europe EV sales rose 70.3% in September, 32.6% of market share
> It’s sad to see that in the US the ev incentives are gone.

After the incentives were cancelled, many of the EV manufacturers simply cut the prices of their cars by a large amount, some as high as the incentive, in the following months and model years. EV sales still fell but are recovering now. It's hard to know how many people shifted their purchase early to 2025 instead of waiting for 2026, where they may have gotten the same price.

jerlam··on The Fatal Flaw of 911
That news article is over ten years old.
jerlam··on Accenture Tells Employees to Spend Only $29 on Claude per Month
> Meaning, if an employee goes over the allocated $29 — and $29 is nothing compared to the costs some Accenture employees are raking up — workers have to find a specific project or team (called a Work Breakdown Structure or WBS at Accenture) to fund the rest of the usage.

It sounds like they need Claude usage to be tied to a paying customer so they can bill that customer for that usage. That's how many services organizations work.

jerlam··on We are entering a period of overlapping crises
Sometimes it's hard to tell if a well-formatted blog is popular or it's just a single person screaming into the void. We don't have pageview counters anymore.

I didn't see any comments on this page, nor did the linked Mastodon accounts have much engagement, and that suggests the latter.

Also, both the number of and length of posts started increasing dramatically in 2024, which might just be a strange coincidence.

jerlam··on Do dentists know what they're doing?
Those cosmetic derms probably don't spend the bulk of their time dealing with health insurance.
jerlam··on Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees
So many stores around me have switched to cashless that the city had to pass a law requiring that they accept cash. Theft is a big concern, both from employees and robbers.

Dealing with cash, which is a dwindling percentage of sales, has become more expensive than the card fees.

jerlam··on SF could have dense, fine-grained, family-friendly Neighborhood, Not Megaproject
Reinventing an HOA from first principles.
jerlam··on Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees
Others have already mentioned that the credit card surcharge is something that the customer has control over. But in regards to the other fees:

> Why not add on an additional fee for every other thing like, fuel surcharge on delivery costs, employee surcharges (I don't live in a place where tipping is expected), or even energy surcharges?

A lot of companies already do this. As long as those fees are mentioned somewhere before purchasing, it's legal here:

https://abc7news.com/post/what-are-surcharges-bill-when-eat-...

California banned all these surprise fees, and then the restaurant industry got their own exemption:

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/06/california-restaur...

jerlam··on We Asked Starbucks Why Their 'Sugar-Free' Drinks Have Sugar
We also have "nitrite-free" ham and bacon that have nitrites: "No nitrates or nitrites added except for naturally occurring nitrites in celery powder."
jerlam··on Plastic Waste and Oceans: Banning Straws Won't Help Much
(2018)
jerlam··on Google's AI Phone Calls May Soon Chat to Your Mom for You
And you can send voice messages if you want that personal touch.

Having AI make a phone call and then be unable to say much else doesn't seem too useful.

jerlam··on Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees
And the US already capped debit card fees back in 2010:

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

This is explicitly about credit card fees.

jerlam··on AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots
> My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution

If I was confident that an AI couldn't do my job, I would happily sign up to do this "training" because it's free money and my job is at zero risk.

jerlam··on Advanced Stats and $500 Bats: Why Baseball for 6-Year-Olds Is Breaking the Bank
syndicated link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/baseball/advanced-stats-and...
jerlam··on California closed the Montana license plate loophole
Non-enforcement of laws might be its own separate subject in CA.
jerlam··on Florida weighs ditching property taxes and sticking Canadians with the bill
It makes sense if you want to prioritize a population of landowners who don't work.
jerlam··on Disney World has a better underground cable infrastructure than most cities
Disney World also has a better public transportation infrastructure than most cities: https://www.disneytouristblog.com/walt-disney-world-is-ameri...

> By international transportation standards, there’s only one great ‘city’ in the United States: Walt Disney World.

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