mrexroad

You touched a nerve for me — folks hiking with Bluetooth speakers. My god that grinds my gears. I can see an argument for playing music (at reasonable volume) while relaxing at a camp site, but on the trail it’s as aggravating as a dirt bike or snowmobile ripping along near by.

These two concerns do not need to be mutually exclusive. Either one can be recognized as a threat to our liberties without diminishing the severity of the other.

The more relevant discussion is the lack of policy/legislation to prohibit government agencies from sidestepping the 4th amendment and purchasing access from private corps, like Flock, to surveil individuals without a warrant. It’s ICE today, maybe DEA tomorrow, and the FDA in some broken future. In a decade or two, when nearly all vehicles are inherently advanced optical sensors with wheels, what stops auto manufactures becoming real-time surveillance companies, like Flock?

I reread Neuromancer last month and there was a line about how the AI had to recruit a human for its plan b/c the final step had a mechanical lock that needed to be picked by feel. I’m glad to see this is a brute force approach and that us humans still have some use for a while more (not sure if my comment is /s or not).

Bingo.

Sprinter vans, utility vans, or even minivans are far, far more useful for trades than modern pickups. Heck, my minivan was the goat for home renovations—it’d easily fit a dozen full 4x8 sheets of drywall/osb/ply/mdf/etc and I could still close the rear gate. I always got chuckles from guys awkwardly wrangling/securing sheets onto a pickup’s bed at the supply yard when I’d easily slide the sheets off the cart directly into the van by myself.

A heavy duty pickup makes sense when you have regular towing, or large bulky transport, needs. While on this topic, I’ll take a moment to lament the demise of the light duty pickup that provided a bit of extra utility while still fitting in a normal parking space.

My library is large too (roughly a third larger). After years of far more complicated storage/backup solutions, I settled w/ a second Photos library on an external hdd w/ optimize storage disabled. I plug the drive in and open this library every so often to update and then duplicate the drive for an off-site copy. Day to day, I use a Photos library on my primary drive with optimize storage enabled.

I’ve found unreasonable value in being able to search through hundreds of thousands of photos from my phone, so I went all-in on Photos.app. Though one enabling factor is that my photography workflow has drastic simplified in recent years to doing very little post (except for astrophotography, which I try and keep wip out of Photos.app anyway).

I personally look for the 1,000x overpriced space marine spec so I can get it in white.

I consider myself a fairly slow reader (see other comment) and nothing on this list took very long to read, other than LotR and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my goals for 2025 was to replace parades of endless distractions (social media, hn, Reddit) with books. I found that if I only read even for just 5min during morning coffee, I was far, far more likely to open a book when waiting while my car got smogged, kid at dentist, school pickups, etc. Those little between moments are so easily stolen from us and monetized, and they add up to a frightful total.

Similar to other commenter, after the first third, I felt it devolved into a long, overly drawn out and predictable slog. Glad to have finished it, but it’s probably not on my re-read list.

FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).

To each their own… but what’s the point? Just to know the plot / sequence of events?

Someone recommend H.M. To me a few weeks back. Started w/ Kafka by the Shore and then finished Norwegian Wood a few days after that. Couldn’t put them down, both were terrific.

Read Diaspora last year w/o knowing anything about it. Easily one of my favorite sci-do books to date—I can’t believe it was there waiting for me the entire time. Permutation City is one of my next 3 reads.

Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.”

“Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami

“A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens

“Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas

LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien

“World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann

“Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson

“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander

“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon

“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury

“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut

“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson

Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.

> It clearly wasn’t ’that bad’ for most human history given how prevalent it was. But in the modern world we are trauma merchants.

What in the actual fuck kind of logic brought you here to that conclusion? I worry for you and whatever content you’ve consumed over the years that allowed you to build up this theory.

That’s what I’ve always heard, and said.

My daughter asked for a record player for Christmas. My wife and I picked a few albums to gift her… knowing that she’ll be captive to them for a short while. Starting her off with Nirvana’s mtv unplugged, Miles Davis kind of blue, and abbey road. She’s got great taste in music, so I’m looking forward to her to slowing down and deliberately experiencing an album, rather than fragmented playlists sprinkled with “Alexa/siri skip” every few minutes.

I was recently surprised to sell an old portable MiniDisc player on fb for close to $100. (FWIW, it was mint). I’m still nostalgic for them, and have another portable player and recording deck, but I’m left scratching my head at how much folks are willing to pay to pick up their first player. Shrug

+1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service.

Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench:

- Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters.

- Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so).

- Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle.

- Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc).

- Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.

> As of 2025, The Medog Dam, currently under construction on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Mêdog County, China, expected to be completed by 2033, is planned to have a capacity of 60 GW, three times that of the Three Gorges Dam.[3]

Meanwhile, “drill baby drill!”

> “Rest assured, though, the image is almost exactly what the phone looks like, except with a bit more 8 and a bit less 3.”

:)

Thanks, I’m a little embarrassed I somehow I missed that!

Personally, it’s highlighted the value of physical books and helped me spend less time getting sucked into rabbit holes on devices. I’ve been much more deliberate about what text I choose to read. Been burning through classics that have been on my shelf for decades.

If only Sherlock didn’t get sherlocked…

I applaud their intent to be repairable, but would really like to see a commitment to open sourcing the software under specific conditions (time, EoL, acquisition, closing down, etc).

> “Is Knokke open, repairable, and long-term supported?”

> “Absolutely. We're committed to building a scanner that lasts decades. All schematics and repair manuals will be publicly available, replacement parts can be purchased directly, and the software will remain supported for as long as possible.”

As a UX designer that always gives guidance on URL design/strategy, I’ll say it’s not always well received. I’ve run into more than a few engineering or PM teams who feel that’s not w/in scope of design.

Thank you.

Not having to expose data to mega corps is one part of the solution, but more so there should be a solution where government can’t so trivially circumvent 4th amendment by purchasing the data from corps they’re not allowed to collect w/o a warrant.

Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.

Moon landing, probably. /s

I normally leave flippant remarks like this to Reddit, but this make-nasa-space-again b/c earth-science-is-lies narrative is so fucking stupid it deserves a stupid response.

> how do you write a 5 why's that explains how you'd typo'd a flag

Seriously? Even without knowing any context, there’s a handful of universal best practices that had to Swiss cheese fail for this to even get handed off to devtest…

- Why are you adding/changing feature flag changes the day before handoff? Is there process for development freeze before handoff, e.g. only showstopper changes are made after freeze? Yes but aales asked for it so they could demo at a conference. Why don’t we have special build/deployment pipeline for experimental features that our sales / marketing engineers are asking for?

- Was it tested be developer before pushing? Yes - why did succeed at that point and fail in prod? Environment was different. Why do we not have dev environment that matches prod? Money? Time? Politics?

- Was it code reviewed? Did it get an actual review, or rubber stamped? Reviewed, but skimmed important parts only — Why was it not reviewed more carefully? Not enough time — why is there not enough time to do code reviews? Oh, the feature flag name used underscore instead of hyphen — why did this not get flagged by style checker? Oh, so there’s no clear style conventions for feature flags and each team does their own thing…? Interesting…

Etc etc.