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ubermonkey

6,019 karma · joined March 14, 2017

Can be reached off HN at chet@nogators.com
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ubermonkey··on A Health Update
That is a profoundly silly and counterfactual thing to say.
ubermonkey··on Do dentists know what they're doing?
I feel the dental frustration, but I'm pretty put off by how weirdly leery the author is about the female dental professionals involved.
ubermonkey··on Worlds more habitable than Earth?
I mean, could be!

But also irrelevant.

ubermonkey··on Now that information is free, what's a college campus for?
What a profoundly dumb question.
ubermonkey··on US proposes $100k charge for international students to do post-graduate work
We are committing suicide as a nation.
ubermonkey··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
"which was perfectly correct for someone not being used to computers."

I disagree.

Even someone with no experience with computers understands, generally speaking, that the mouse is tracking the surface of the desk somehow. I have had this conversation many times (or did, back in the 1990s when mice were more novel for most people). Nobody picked it up.

The ones who do in these anecdotes are, IMO, examples of the sort of people who absolutely shut their brains off in protest when asked to work with new tech. I have been blessed in that I have only very, very rarely been asked to work with or even know such people.

ubermonkey··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
It's shocking that, apparently, in addition to making awful coffee, Keurigs are also data sniffers?

Good lord.

ubermonkey··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
What the hell are we doing?

There is no good goddamn reason for a coffeemaker to talk to the Internet.

I have a VERY VERY nice coffee machine. The model was somewhat controversial b/c it DOES have integrated circuits in it, but only for the PID and the auto on/off. It has no wifi, bluetooth, Ethernet, NFC, or any other such tomfoolery because literally NONE of that would be useful.

ubermonkey··on Sorry, I'm in a meeting
So?
ubermonkey··on What is going on with ceiling fans
We've been buying fans for our home reno, and the selections get super thin once my absolute position of "NO FING REMOTES" is factored in.

I do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea. I especially* do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea when the remote is intended to be the ONLY WAY TO CONTROL IT.

ubermonkey··on Shimano Bicycle Museum Review
I'm a fairly enthusiastic road rider, and while I'd never trade the tech on my modern bike there's a beauty to those early derailleurs that is lost in modernity.
ubermonkey··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
It's funny you think that CBP has any real professional standards that any of their agents would possibly be held to if it were inconvenient for the agency, at least under this administration.
ubermonkey··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
I'm finding it quicker and more responsive than Tahoe, but I've run into a couple bugs that vex me. None are super troublesome, but I notice them.

The biggest one is that moving application stacks in Mission Control no longer works. In Tahoe and prior systems, if you invoked Mission Control with the "group windows by application" option turned on, windows belonging to a given app were "stacked" under an icon for that application.

This allows the user to move ALL of an app's windows from one display to another, or from one Space (Mac virtual desktop) to another, without having to drag them one at a time.

This broke in GG. I'm sure it'll get fixed in the .1 release, but it's annoying for now.

ubermonkey··on What About Rails?
You would be incorrect.

It's also wild that you are attempting to correct me while also admitting you don't "keep up with DHH (at all)." What was that thought process like? "I don't have any data with which to rebut this assertion, but it just FEELS false, so I'll go with that!"

ubermonkey··on You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner
I'm not sure how big a deal that really is in a broad sense.

My friend circle in our old city included both Falstaffian omnivores and vegans, and we entertained often. It's not hard to ensure there's food available for folks on a more restrictive diet, and even my friends with UCI racing licenses generally ate like normal people at social events.

Mileage varies, obviously.

(I will say, however, that after having made a vegan "bolognese" once, I have no need to do so again. It was much more effort than the already time-consuming genuine article.)

ubermonkey··on What About Rails?
>Calling DHH a fascist is allowed and encouraged because

...it's true, based on his own words.

ubermonkey··on What Sun got wrong
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,

We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.

They're awful.

ubermonkey··on What Sun got wrong
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?

We didn't think so.

I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.

ubermonkey··on Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster
This is going to get very entertainingly ugly, I suspect.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Hilariously, he already has -- but was downvoted to oblivion.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Look, a brand new account taking photomatt's side. Neat.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
This is a completely reasonable take and I'm stunned you're getting downvoted for it.
ubermonkey··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
A huge chunk of the web is WP.
ubermonkey··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.

I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.

ubermonkey··on AirPods 5
This is, in my experience, absolutely true.
ubermonkey··on AirPods 5
"It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today."

I'm trying very hard to understand what you mean specifically here.

The AirPods Pro I use every day for casual listening are far and away better headphones than the wired earbuds I used in that context in 2005.

The regular Airpods I bought my wife 3 months ago were a categorical improvement over the ones she'd lost in a move this summer, and they barely have ANC.

Even the first iteration of Airpods exceeded the quality of equivalent wired in-ear buds available at the time. I recently came across my old Etymotic in-ear headphones, which were at one point a gold standard. The sound from my AirPods Pro is better, and the Apple option is FAR more comfortable in my ears.

I'd argue that cost per unit of fidelity is lower now, in 2026, than it's ever been before. The level of playback a person can enjoy for, say, $500 today is wildly better than what was available for an inflation-adjusted equivalent amount of money in 2016 or 2006 or 1996.

I also have Headphone Acquisition Disorder, for which there is no known cure. As a result I've had a number of fancy wired setups over the years, sometimes requiring a headphone amp.

Owing to a lot of air travel, I bought the AirPods Max soon after they were introduced. I intended them to be airplane accessories for the most part, but the fact of the matter is that my $500 Sennheiser setup that required cables and an amp wasn't obviously superior to the Maxes. Once you factor in convenience, the Apple over-hear setup won the comparison in a walk. In the runup to our x-country move last summer, I sold off or gave away nearly all of the rest of my headphone horde; now, if I'm using headphones, it's one of the Apple options.

ubermonkey··on iPhone Duo
Your average HN reader is very very bad at understanding that they are NOT the mass market.
ubermonkey··on Coyote v. Acme (1990)
Ha! I remember reading this in print.

In other news, I am old.

ubermonkey··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
You know why.
ubermonkey··on Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch
SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.
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