swdunlop

For me, it is:

1. Yes, the size. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "do I really want to bother with this in my pocket, I'm just going to the store."

2. The ecosystem. There's a lot of different firmware forks, people tinker and optimize. Which is important, because that helps with..

3. The UI. There's only a few buttons, no touch screen, so the power on experience sends you straight into the last page you were reading, and there's not a lot of farkles trying to drive engagement.

4. No touch screen. The buttons aren't very soft, and there's no touch screen, so you can just toss it back in your pocket, without turning it off, and pick it back up.

5. It's cheap, and it is not linked to my accounts. I'm not terribly worried about theft or someone accidentally knocking it out of my hand.

All that comes down to just.. no ceremony. No unlock the screen, push past the notifications, find the app, wait for Kindle to pass some advertising back and forth with Amazon. Nothing. Pick up the book, read the next page while you are waiting for coffee to steep.

That said, there's some suck to be had:

6. No frontlight. You can't read in the dark without a separate light.

7. No, the font rendering is not perfect, the DPI is pretty low. This is not the most beautiful screen. But it's pretty readable. I got over it.

8. It's a pretty small screen. If you have awful eyesight, you're going to go through a lot of page turns. But if you are prone to skipping ahead and scanning, you might actually read more of the book this way.

9. It is not fast. The firmwares I have used all do some indexing at the start of each chapter, and it can take a few seconds.

10. The vendor either doesn't quite understand its customers (it seems like xteink got lucky sometimes) or is scrabbling through parts bins and unable to communicate with its customers. The X4 Pro really confused its fans.

I think it really just comes down to "this thing is too simple to become more fucking adtech pretending to be useful."

Oh my yes. EVE Online can experience issues when a conflict in a solar system exceeds a certain number of players. Each system in EVE is a monolithic process, so, if a conflict gets out of hand, things get slow.

This is referred to as Time Dilation (TiDi) in EVE -- https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Time_dilation -- it's an interesting engineering rathole, Fenris f/k/a CCP has been pretty open about their stack, and the challenges that have built up.

Anything that speeds up EVE lets more players cram in without experiencing TiDi, and this might let the devs escape Stackless Python, which is another interesting engineer rathole. (It's ratholes all the way down, and this is the one that got EVE on my radar, and has kept it there.)

Amusingly, when a coworker was looking for this postmortem, they found a different postmortem of three Claude issues that caused decay. This one was in the platform, not in Claude Code:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

I think there's a certain amount of running with scissors going on here. I appreciate the transparency, but the time to remediation here seems pretty long compared to the rate of new features.

I was thinking the same thing. There are OLED USB-C monitors on Amazon for dirt cheap that are light if a little fragile.

Add the following to your settings.json:

  "assistant": {
    "version": "2",
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620"
    }
  }
  

Once this is done, you should be able to use Anthropic if you have an API key. (This was available before today's announcement and still works today as of Zed 0.149.3)

And that is where the drama is frequently found in the Culture series — when Fluffy the Pet Human meets Spot the Feral Human and disaster ensues.

When Iain (M.) Banks published science fiction (or essays about science fiction), he used “Iain M. Banks.” Other works he used “Iain Banks.”

You can sometimes separate the fans and the topic by how they refer to him.

It's hard for me to read the Culture novels and not hear Porno for Pyros' "Pets" on loop in my head.

It is amusing that this essay starts with "Government" and does not get down to the intelligences until halfway through -- in my mind, it's all just the intelligences watching the funny monkeys play at still having meaningful role in the Culture and the surprising things they do at the edges of its influence.

I was expecting electron in there somewhere.

I think of contexts as being Go's answer to dynamic variables in earlier languages, like Lisp, and less like thread local storage (like Pthreads). Much like how Go works with errors, explicit is favored over implicit -- being able to see the context pass through, and whether a function expects a context, tells you a lot about the function you are about to call.

If a function does not take a context, you know it probably cannot be interrupted, just like when a function does not return an error, you know it should not fail. In my work projects, this is also a cue that the function does not do any logging since we always carry a zerolog.Logger in our contexts enriched with trace information about the request and handler.

This also makes life easier for me as a reviewer -- I can see the context passing, I can spot when there is a bad pattern, like retaining a context, or failing to handle an error. It does not require me to maintain a detailed mental map of which functions employ dynamic variables or can throw exceptions.

You can bypass a Nushell command by prepending "^". To use MacOS open, this would be "^open cat.gif"

This tic drives me nuts when I hop between fish (which I use for two features, better tab completion and background jobs) and nu. With 0.86, it might just be for background jobs, which is something Nushell has avoided dealing with entirely. CTRL-Z and "bg" is just muscle memory for me, much like "open."

Good microsd cards are cheap as dirt and easy to use with a Steam Deck. I do not regret getting the lowest storage model and just using a card.

You can also get a non-customized version without resorting to dead trees -- the Economist is also published on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/The-Economist-US-Edition/dp/B0027VSU9...

This trick probably works for other periodicals with a shady-as-hell internet filter bubble "feature."

Ditto. I came to HN after seeing the email, looking for the best way to migrate my passwords out of Lockwise.

Well, still looking. They are outta here.

That is like saying Scheme does not have exceptions, except in C, we have setjmp instead of call/cc. It is technically correct, but there is something more flexible that can be perverted into doing the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setjmp.h#Exception_handling

The actual image is linked from https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/nud0y0/if_there_we... if you are frustrated with the tiny images in the Big Think article.

Same. I cancelled last week for one too many link-bait articles on the front page. After the usual page or two of pleas to stay, they let me go.

Goes further back than that. I used to refer to the Powerbook G4 as a liquid cooled laptop -- where the liquid was the user's circulation.

This is also hitting meat processors very hard. Fabrication (the processing of slaughter to produce cuts of meat ready to ship) is human labor intensive and must be done in refrigerated spaces, so the work is elbow to elbow in many places because space is at a premium.

They may mean "Open Source Intelligence" as in OSINT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

Do bicyclists have an organization like the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF)?

Most of what I understand about motorcycle safety was taught by various MSF courses. In many states, the MSF is the most direct way to get your motorcycle endorsement. This makes them fairly sticky in the community.

That's a great question, but it does not invalidate the point that there is nothing about Nix that states that binary packages cannot and do not happen.

NixOS (and NixPkgs) is great, but there are still plenty of binary only packages from difficult to build projects like PhantomJS in the ecosystem. It takes a serious commitment to build complex projects in Nix and maintain them.

(edit) An example of binary packages in Nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

See http://blog.racket-lang.org/2019/01/racket-on-chez-status.ht... and scroll down to “Performance of Compiled Code.” That was back in January, so things may be even better now.

Mostly disappointment after hyping themselves up for a PC sequel to Diablo. I am not outraged, but just cynical:

From the article:

"it’s a fully fledged Diablo experience on mobile, which everybody will get to play, and hopefully, which will bring new heroes to Sanctuary as well as welcoming our community back into it and something we’re very excited about."

Blizzard has simplified their games to grow their customer base, such as the Cataclysm expansion to World of Warcraft. These simplifications have not been well received by the existing players. My reaction to Diablo Immortal is skepticism about how much crunch there will be. Diablo 3 was not terribly interesting for me after you got past the first few playthroughs, compared to Diablo 2 or more modern ARPGs like Path of Exile.

It's not really anger, it's disappointment; if Immortal turns out to be a great game, I'll happily buy it. The noises Blizzard are hearing from the fans are basically a reminder that they have lost customers when trying to get new ones.

The only value I see is reminding people how much Julia has improved since 2014.

Julia 1.0 will be rough until major packages have caught up with the deprecations introduced in 1.0 and 0.7. 1.0 does not tolerate these deprecations, while 0.7 will warn about them.

This makes a poor first day impression for new users who expect Plots.jl, IPython.jl, Juno.jl or other prominent packages in 1.0. The package maintainers are scrambling to catch up. I recommend using 0.7 for a couple weeks until the community catches up unless you are proficient enough to contribute PRs and help out.

(edit) To be clear, 0.7 was released at the same time as 1.0.

My favorite (mis)use of Dosbox was using it to drive Symate for PLC programming. That let me switch to using a Linux netbook instead of dragging a laptop booted in DOS around a factory.

My notes from the time: https://sites.google.com/site/waspvm/runningsymate374underdo...

Hopefully, that will change in 16.9.0 with Office for Mac sharing a codebase with Office for Windows:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/office-for-mac-final...