pm

I noticed this when it was first announced on HN as well. Hoping to give it a try as well shortly.

Hey Alex! Just wanted to say I came across Slicer three or so months ago, researching automatic provisioning for RPis (and other devices in the homelab). It piqued my interest, as I was also researching solutions for partitioning and distributing workloads. I hope to give Slicer a go within the next quarter, however I'm still getting to grips with the fundamentals of distributed computing. Either way, it's interesting work.

It is possible to exist in both camps. The quality of the process affects the quality of the product, and the quality of your thought affects the quality of the process. It's a cycle of continual learning, and from that perspective, thought, process and product are indivisible.

Treating code as a means to an end doesn't guarantee success for your product anymore than treating code as a craft.

The company cares about neither. People inside the company will care about a great many things. The people who care about users either don't have the power to act or no longer care enough to do so.

If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.

This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.

Quality is 2nd best to what? And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS.

Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.

It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.

When you mentioned offline sync and graft, I mistook you for the author of this project:

https://github.com/orbitinghail/graft

However, they're clearly two different projects.

I don't want to take away from the work you've done, as you're clearly knowledgeable, but as someone else observed, heavy use of AI assistance can be observed in all your public projects. It's worth explicitly addressing, especially considering the foundational nature of your project: it's not easily replaced if it turns out to have to have subtle bugs.

Though I rarely use it myself, I'd like to know, simply because I'm curious as to how other engineers have incorporated such assistance it into their process.

It was specifically for the M1 mac minis, so not too fussed about everything else, but judging from the comments, experiences are mixed.

I'll try to sign up again in a week or two.

I won't comment on the reliability of their services, as I've not experienced it. I was signing up specifically to provision a M1 mac mini, and couldn't navigate it. It was unfortunate, but worth a comment, in case others experience the same issue (or someone else could point me in the right direction).

Glad to know you've got good experiences though.

I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.

I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.

I don't think wpa_supplicant.conf has been used for sometime, as they moved to cloud-init for bootstrapping. It requires the network-config file instead, the format of which is documented on the cloud-init documentation page.

I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks. I offer my own network-config below, though I've only tested it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have two 3B+s).

  network:
    version: 2
    renderer: networkd
    wifis:
      wlan0:
        regulatory-domain: "AU"
        dhcp4: true
        dhcp6: false
        optional: false
        access-points:
          "<access-point-name>":
            password: "<password>"

The important parts are:

1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server). It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet.

2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't remember about quoting the string, however).

3. Disabling IPv6 may be relevant, though unlikely. It was just in a working configurations I found; I just haven't had time to confirm it. The relevant line in my user-data file is as follows:

  bootcmd:
  - sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

The rest of the configuration is standard, though I purposefully made the wi-fi non-optional so I could confirm that wi-fi worked (my only Internet at the moment is through my iPhone hotspot, which was another source of issues, but that's a whole other story).

NB. According to someone else, the imager has the respective command line options for user-data and network-config, which I didn't know.

What were some of the technical challenges you experienced while reverse-engineering the wallpaper system? I've been reverse-engineering (for lack of a better term) some of macOS' and Xcode's poorly-documented functionality prototyping a personal developer tool. My investigation isn't sophisticated by any means; it's just been trial-and-error, but I haven't found much online in the way of resources for people going down this route.

Cool project!

This article is yet another reminder I need to learn Haskell (I've been meaning to for a decade), although the code from this article is approachable considering the topic. However, I've just started using Rust for professional projects, so the code you've posted is a bit easier to read, if more verbose, though the concepts are still unfamiliar to me.

I'm assuming this isn't your first go at writing a compiler?

Ignoring its negative connotation, it's more likely to be a highly advanced "stochastic parrot".

> "You don't do that without some kind of working internal model of mathematics."

This is speculation at best. Models are black boxes, even to those who make them. We can't discern a "meaningful internal representation" in a model, anymore than a human brain.

> "There is just no way you can get to the right answer by spouting out plausible-sounding sentence completions without understanding what they mean."

You've just anthropomorphised a stochastic machine, and this behaviour is far more concerning, because it implies we're special, and we're not. We're just highly advanced "stochastic parrots" with a game loop.

Swift evolution and governance is open and publicly documented. It will always be dominated by Apple engineers, but the evolution of the language is largely orthogonal to Apple's OS releases.

I'm not sure how much of the standard library is available on the server side. However, I it's more about the engineers' interest than it is Apple's, and in that respect, the Swift ecosystem has been evolving constantly, e.g., the Swift toolchain was entirely divested from Xcode a month ago.

I can't speak for the .NET ecosystem, but your fears are unfounded. Whether Swift is useful in a cross-platform context is another question, however.

My understanding of CVE is superficial at best. I thought it was just an acronym publicly identifying vulnerabilities; I didn't realise there was a political structure behind it all.

While the article presents good food for thought, certification isn't a practical solution to the problem at hand. This database seems like a reasonable alternative.

This is fascinating, but I don't know enough biology to understand the concepts at play. Could someone knowledgeable in the field explain it further?

I may have come across your app before in passing, but hadn't checked it out. I playtested aspects of a "productivity system" (grain of salt) with paper earlier this year.

"Spontaneous productivity" mirrors some of my own thinking on the subject, especially the JIT and bubbling aspects and how they work together. I haven't seen how it works in the case of Nestful, but I'm keen to try it out. It may adjust the design principles guiding development.

I hadn't seen Toca Boca. My friend's niece plays on Everskies, which I believe is something similar.

I didn't intend for what I wrote to be a criticism; that's on me. I just found it funny the most interesting step was akin to "... and now you've drawn the animal", if you understand the reference.

This is cool, but the most interesting part is the part that requires investigation, i.e., what do the compatibility tools write to the card to make it iOS-compatible? I've done some work with iOS NFC, but not enough to have experienced the undocumented quirks.

This is what I was thinking, but stated much clearer than I'd have managed.

Thanks for that, it looks like my research today is cut out for me.

I'd been researching Kalman filters to smooth out some sampling values (working on mobile: anything from accelerometer values to voice activation detection), but hadn't got around to revising the mathematics, so I appreciate the explanation. Out of curiosity, what other ways might this be achieved? I haven't seen much else beyond Kalman filters.

Congratulations! Pardon my ignorance, as my understanding of mathematics at this level is beyond rusty, but what are the applications of this kind of functionality?

Irrespective of the quality of the product, you shouldn't be using obvious sock puppet accounts to try and boost your post.

> The fact that trauma is now everywhere sort of de-legitimizes it to the point where there's no way of knowing in the average case.

I can tell you that trauma is very real for the person experiencing it, and it's this kind of flippant dismissal that stops people from seeking help.

Trauma everywhere, in what fashion? Perhaps because more people are talking about it, more people are getting the courage to talk about it.

> Sounds like you're saying: become emotionally pure or else.

Emotionally pure? What does that even mean? It was phrased as a warning, because I've experienced this attitude within my family, and seen the damage it's caused, and continues to cause. Eventually, the damaged start damaging others, people put their hands over the ears pretending nothing's happening, and the cycle continues.

> Personally I'd rather have "trauma" than play this little head game.

What head game is being played?

> If anything, we're doing significantly more damage by teaching upcoming generations to trust the pharmaceutical industry.

The argument I was making had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry. It was about how trauma gets suppressed, and how that can institute a cycle of trauma, so be wary of how you approach it. It's all about taking care of people.

You might think it's getting by, but you've got no idea of how much damage this attitude unwittingly propagates the trauma on succeeding generations.

I've seen this firsthand in my own family, a family beset with undiagnosed ADHD and trauma from a violent patriarch, who was no doubt subject to the same abuse, lying about his age to join armies on BOTH sides of the conflict in WW2 to escape and eventually emigrate.

As for the difference in psychological resilience: it's more much more likely those who have been traumatised are seeking understanding, rather than healthy then traumatised by their curiosity. Conversely, it's been shown religious people are, as a whole, more psychologically resilient, largely due to community and the accompanying support system it provides. However, there is also a strong element of suppression within those communities, which directly contributes to the very trauma of which I speak.

If there is no communication, the abused, very often, become the abusers. And so the wheel turns.

It depends on your product, and what you expect your customer to do with the results.

  * What does the product actually do?
  * What do they get for a "use"?
  * If the usage-based pricing is an add-on, what value does the product provide without it?

I suspect you're better off with subscription-based pricing in an emerging product category of AI-native solutions. But it really depends on the product.

I don't think there's an issue. Discourse on HN can be daunting for anyone. Sometimes it helps to know there are people your own age doing cool things. It makes it more accessible, which is a good thing.

I was diagnosed with Stage 3 rectal cancer in 2017, and a doctor doing a research study told me incidence for people under 50 had risen 20% in a decade. I imagine diet plays a significant role, insofar that our diets have changed dramatically in the last 50+ years. However, I also imagine the food production chain is a contributing factor. How much is anyone's guess.