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stefanv

198 karma · joined May 6, 2011

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stefanv··on Japan's trains are great. Why is booking one so hard?
I have a different opinion about this after visiting Japan for the first time this summer. I think they need to accommodate an aging population with technological advancements. It's a classic problem of making old systems work with new technologies. And this in itself is a great achievement if you look at it holistically. Yes, young(er) people can complain that is to hard to buy train tickets or have to interact over the phone for things that can be accomplished online, while old(er) people will probably have harder times adjusting to things like contactless payments, but in the end they managed to make the entire society, as a whole, function and move forward. It can be done better? Yes, definitely, but I think this is iterative and it will improve over time.
stefanv··on Mechanically Actuated Optical Surfaces for Switchable Appearances on 3D Objects
And a video demonstration/explanation https://youtu.be/KJK-DvgmRNs?is=k5HtcI5fsvnMAIyY
stefanv··on The first watch featuring computer functions
Just to add on “The rise of Grand Seiko has leveled that playing field quite a bit”: there is also Credor. Owned by Seiko and (maybe) not that well known outside Asia
stefanv··on The first watch featuring computer functions
I became interested in Seiko watches after recently buying a Seiko Astron while visiting Japan. It’s amazing how much they shaped the watch industry. With the Astron series they buried a lot of Swiss manufacturers when it was first launched. Also, their “Spring Drive” technology is amazing. It’s basically the perfect hybrid between a mechanical watch movement and a quartz crystal. The movement is mechanical, with the spring releasing energy and powering the quartz crystal (there is no battery), which in turn acts as a “referee”, applying an electromagnetic brake and regulating the mechanical movement.
stefanv··on The first watch featuring computer functions
A bit more info about this watch https://hackaday.com/2024/07/16/seiko-had-a-smartwatch-in-19... or https://www.namokimods.com/en-eu/blogs/namokitimes/seiko-ori...
stefanv··on Building an electric wind-up plane [video]
Printing on baking paper is an amazing idea, not only for planes, but also for other decorative items
stefanv··on Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker
I’m unable to access the website directly from Romania (I tried different connections). Is there any reason why this region is blocked in CloudFlare?
stefanv··on Celestia – Real-time 3D visualization of space
Mobile downloads: https://celestia.mobi/download
stefanv··on The Timmy Trap
What if the problem is not that we overestimate LLMs, but that we overestimate intelligence? Or to express the same idea for a more philosophically inclined audience, what if the real mistake isn’t in overestimating LLMs, but in overestimating intelligence itself by imagining it as something more than a web of patterns learned from past experiences and echoed back into the world?
stefanv··on [video] Raspberry Pi based dual screen cyberdeck
All you need to build it: https://github.com/sector07-dev/RPI_DEV
stefanv··on Neuromorphic computing
And still no mention of Numenta… I’ve always felt it’s an underrated company, built on an even more underrated theory of intelligence
stefanv··on The Antique Toaster that's Better than Yours [video]
It was “you will hate your toaster after watching this”. It’s actually a quote from the video and I found it funny, considering the content
stefanv··on Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks
I could not find any official English translation of the report, but Romanian can be easily translated with online tools. This link (found in the article) seems to have more technical details https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/romanias-elec...

“The Romanian intelligence agency says that the 85,000 attacks continued until November 25th, the night after the first presidential election round, and the goals ranged from gaining access to the election infrastructure and compromising it to altering election information for the public and denying access to the systems.

SRI notes in the declassified report that the threat actor tried to breach the systems by exploiting SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities from devices in more than 33 countries.

The agency is also warning that Romania's election infrastructure is still affected by vulnerabilities that could be exploited to move laterally on the network and establish persistence.”

stefanv··on Romanian court annuls result of presidential election first round
There are two separate issues: (1) TikTok favoring one candidate even after the campaign was over, and (2) an IT systems breach.
stefanv··on Romania cancels election after systems targeted in cyberattacks
The underlaying news is the same, but my link focuses more on the technical reason (IT system breach), while the link you posted emphasizes the political reasons
stefanv··on Turn your Android phone into a modern ham radio transceiver
Or you can just use something like https://shop.sharkrf.com/shop/srf-ose-pro-openspot4-pro-digi... with any mobile phone (Android or iOS) to do talk with any ham operator over the internet (I know, different use case)
stefanv··on Being Raised by the Internet
As a self-taught developer who ended up making a living from this, I can only join the author in thanking all the people who shared their knowledge online during the 90s and 00s
stefanv··on BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
Are there any instant on/boot to REPL systems available today?
stefanv··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Because I work with a lot of currencies and I used to do a lot of multi-currency calculations, I’ve built a convertor (https://4ex.ro) that accepts formulas and displays the results in all selected currencies. The rate is the one offered by the National Bank in Romania (a legal requirement for transactions that happen between companies in Romania - maybe I’ll add different data sources in the future). Oh, and you can add a formula in one field and then continue in another field using the previous result. Something really easy to accomplish, but there was no solution doing this a few years ago. Almost nobody is using it, but I do and this is a sufficient reason to keep it (a)live.
stefanv··on Jailbreaking ChatGPT with Dan (Do Anything Now)
that was already patched https://twitter.com/stefanvaduva/status/1622513815173619713?...
stefanv··on Challenge: Pixel perfect design
Just a thought: what if this some kind of teaser for a new device Apple is preparing? Maybe some e-ink device? Ok, I know we are in 2022, but I would really love to see some “low-tech” device from them. I’ll try to wake up now :)
stefanv··on Starlink for RVs
What are the differences between residential, business and RV? It's only a matter of allocated bandwidth and pricing, or there is more to it?
stefanv··on Show HN: Slow Social, a social network built for friends, not influencers
My first thought after reading the frontpage: this is my “liberation” from Facebook and all the things that FB is doing wrong. I click on “join today” and I see “continue with Facebook”. Why?
stefanv··on Songdata
Some time ago I wanted to see how many songs have bass notes that go bellow 50Hz and I quickly realised that it way over my expertise to do that, but I'm still curios: would it be possible to display the frequencies for a particular track?
stefanv··on Whole body regeneration in marine life
Full text link https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2021.6524...
stefanv··on M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
The only real (but small) downside (and just for some of us) is that you can't daisy chain two external monitors to the new M1 laptops. It's true that the mini can use two external monitors connected to separate ports or that you can jump through hoops and use more than two external monitors and that is why it's not such a big deal.
stefanv··on Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples
It may be a type of Redlove apple. The smallest ones are called Redlove Lollipop
stefanv··on What kind of machine learning is this (a flowchart)?
I would replace "you're looking at the wrong flowchart" with "it's machine intelligence"
stefanv··on Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
The latest one for me was "On intelligence". It made me understand that intelligence is not that hard to understand on a conceptual level. The book is about machine intelligence, but the most impressive thing for me was the simplicity of how Jeff Hawkins defines intelligence
stefanv··on Designing a Quantum Computing Board Game
Wouldn't a professionally manufactured set infringe the license terms? From what I can see, the game and it's assets are released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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