wanda

It exists for casual, potentially older users, outside of dev/IT profession, to do grocery shopping and simple games on a couch while they watch TV after work.

I've never bought an iPad or found use for the one I was once given as a present, I have seen older people transition from using cheap crappy laptops to iPads with only positive feedback, probably because it's easier for them to use.

It's largely the same UI as their smartphone which they'll be familiar with by now, it's easier to pick up and put down, smaller form factor but not so small that they'd be pinch-zooming frequently as they would on a phone, etc.

Anecdotal but it makes sense. Also marginally easier for a layperson to hold an iPad up and show a partner what they're buying, than a laptop.

Personally, I'm in the industry, and I've been playing with computers for 27 years. I have a phone for reading stuff like this on the go, and a laptop for working on things home or at the office. I have no professional or recreational use for a tablet. I have a laptop and I'm very glad it doesn't have a touchscreen. But I can understand why non-laptop products exist.

Couple of other developers I know have iPads, but they have them in the same way they have an electric toothbrush — they didn't need it, but they bought it anyway. Mostly see them use it for browsing the web or shopping after work. I suppose if your stuff's at the office and you just want to cruise the web, an iPad is lighter than a personal laptop, but I just use my phone /shrug emoji.

Some illustrators I know have iPads but I'm pretty sure they'd survive without them. For actual work they have a proper setup (wacom, magic trackpad), and if you need to sketch something on the fly, pen and paper is still a functional and low-cost solution, as is a phone since you have one already for a dozen other reasons.

Designers don't need an iPad at all, mouse is sufficient.

I'll second that. Though I have rarely logged into it the last ten years, I used to be more active on SA before that.

Lots of people have complained about moderation there but I think it's just a case of avoid the designated spam areas, and don't post nothing.

The latter part is how the HN community tends to self-curate comments anyway.

I also regretted giving mine away in favour of something that represented a considerable hardware upgrade, but was nowhere near as pleasant to use.

Get an IBM ThinkPad 380XD, swap out the screen for a Chromebook Pixel's 2560x1600 screen, then swap the board out for the Macbook M2's silicon along with as much RAM and as many ports as you can fit in the chassis.

Port Windows 2000 to it, hit me up and name your price.

Ah that Thinkpad 560E reminds me of my first laptop -- the perfectly chunky Thinkpad 380XD.

I adored that laptop. I loved how it felt, how it looked, how it sounded. I loved the beeps, I miss computers beeping and chattering to confirm that they are indeed powering on.

I loved the fan periodically revving every 30 minutes or so, reminding me that it was still alive but also putting into perspective that it had been utterly silent until that moment.

I still remember how the keyboard felt. Granted I wasn't doing much on it besides trawling through newsgroups and homework, but I haven't really come across a keyboard I've enjoyed typing on more.

The Filco keyboard I'm composing this comment on now isn't bad by any means, and I'm fairly happy with my Macbook's keyboard given its other strengths... but if I had the time, I'd find a way to get the 560E's keyboard on a laptop with a Chromebook Pixel's 2560x1600 screen and an M2 under the hood.

The reality is that we can only have a sensible conversation about, or write sensibly about, concepts and facts within the context of our epistemic limit as a species.

You may have noticed that a lot of the cliché philosophical questions haven't really shifted for as long as people have been asking them. It isn't because there is no answer, but rather the question itself is null and void. It's answer is beyond our ability to find or compute because you would have remove yourself from the human frame of reference to find it.

The meaning of life? Doesn't make sense outside of the context of human life. In that context, it's whatever you want it to be or decide it is to you. Outside, well, you'd have to die to see if there's anything beyond, and as Spock points out in ST4, it would be impossible to discuss without a common frame of reference with someone who hasn't died.

~~~

To claim that math is a human invention or a noumenal language of nature is futile, the answer is not within our ability to determine. It is, for all intents and purposes, undefined. Unknowable.

That's not to say that the conversation is meaningless, as the logical positivists would claim, as this is also a leap too far.

Early Wittgenstein, big influence on the logical positivists, didn't try to claim that philosophy was meaningless, just that if you try to talk beyond the facts, you won't get anywhere.

Bradley aways summed it up nicely for me: "anyone ready to dispense with metaphysics is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of his own"

In other words, to rule out metaphysics (defined as concepts and ideas that lack empirical data or basis in fact) is to make a metaphysical proposition, since by definition, there is no data to disprove the metaphysical propositions, just as much as there is no data to validate them.

Most metaphysical philosophies caught on because they can be presented rationally as a chain of propositions and conclusions, but they only add up within their own framework that is upheld by an unprovable assumption or set of assumptions.

Example, cogito ergo sum makes perfect sense, provided that you accept that the speaker is I, that the speaker thinks rather than simply utters, and that to be means anything at all. In the end, cogito ergo sum can be accepted intuitively within the framework of "let's not be sceptical of every thing" but what can you conclude from it?

"I think therefore I am" well, I is a thing that thinks

-> "I thinks, therefore it exists" I think presupposes I's existence

-> "I thinks"

That is a definition of I

I = thinks === I is a consciousness

which is a tautology. And that's why is makes sense, because it doesn't go anywhere than where it started, it's algebra.

It starts off as a = b where b = a and can be reduced to simply a

Math is privileged in that its algebraic statements can be used to model things in the world because it's numbers and functions of numbers, but ultimately the usefulness emerges from proving that a equals a very complicated statement that isn't obviously tautologically equal, or not equal to, a.

Math is a tool. It's a way of reasoning that comes bundled with reasonably standardised notation that enables boosted productivity compared to reasoning about the same problems in regular languages.

~~~

It's the same reason why I find "simulated reality" questions rather dull. If the world is a perfect simulation, we have no way to distinguish it from the real thing, and so to our frame of reference, there is no difference about which we can have a discussion that makes any sense.

If there are cracks in the simulation, sure, then you have a fact to talk about. But then the discussion isn't philosophical, it's practical: We've been brain-hacked, what do we do? and the conversation ends rather abruptly.

Hm, and he was me thinking myself unburdened for not hanging on to paper copies of books, and yet digital copies could be edited surreptitiously or even very obviously to completely change or "sanitise" to prevent offense, while paper copies would be safe in my bookshelf.

Guess I'll keep a few physical copies of books after all.

How do you think we got to where we are today?

I see. Perhaps I'll give it a try!

I have heard good things about Syncthing but it depends on your use case.

https://syncthing.net/

Based on your comment, I'll give SNW a try.

I had not bothered based on 2 seasons of Discovery and 3 episodes of Picard. I just went back to DS9.

Also, from the same source as OP:

https://www.mewho.com/trek/

I remember installing a Windows XP LCARS theme, back when I was watching Star Trek every day as soon as I got back from college – and I remember strongly regretting the decision immediately.

Needless to say, it looked kinda cool, but not quite right for obvious reasons, and the actual experience of using it was... not great.

To borrow an expression from House MD, it wasn't a unicorn, it was a donkey with a plunger taped to its forehead.

I settled on making myself an LCARS new tab web page instead. That was pretty cool, I've often given thought to remaking it... but I'd probably get sidetracked too heavily from my actual work and end up an insomniac with an LCARS Linux distro and a very full inbox.

Aside: I really miss the Windows Classic look. I know you can sort of get it back in Windows 10 but I'm not on Windows these days, I just miss how Windows 98/2000/XP looked and behaved... well, maybe behaved is a bad word.

Aside 2: It appears the author of this simulation has made a few of these LCARS simulations https://www.mewho.com/

I stopped after season 2, and I have not been compelled to look into further seasons.

For me, Discovery just misses the point and panders to the demands of a wider audience. The production value us excellent, very talented cast and likeable characters, but they carried the weak writing hard. The series emphasis on action and war was also punctuated mainly thanks to the characters rather than any semblance of Star Trek.

Unfortunately, this is the destiny of virtually everything, provided that the target is to maximise profit and maximising profit is equated to maximising volume and minimising risk.

Funny, now that I think about it, Quark wouldn't struggle to find a place in our society today at all. He would probably work at a big movie studio.

One of my favourite Voyager episodes. While being an action two-parter, which I wouldn't normally care for over ethical/exploratory stories, they were careful to look at the practical and emotional implications of surviving in a battered starship with a skeleton crew throughout.

Tuvok and Seven becoming acquainted through her assistance with the consequences of his injury and sharing perspectives on their shipmates was fun.

Other scenarios like being trapped in a damaged turbolift, The Doctor struggling with the more utilitarian ethics of emergency medicine, all refreshing to see.

Living on "spiced up" rations while hiding in a nebula – that they can barely get out of afterwards – was another nice touch.

Actual combat was not the focus and I appreciated that.

In general the glimpse of Voyager as a story where state persists over time rather than reset each episode was compelling. It's not the only example of a kind of statefulness, but it reserves a place in my heart for Year of Hell, even though the actual time paradox A-plot is silly.

Dropbox's specific popularity on HN may partially stem from its original backing by YC. It will have enjoyed additional exposure here thanks to that, and to be fair to Dropbox, it was a good product.

I say *was because I cannot speak for how it is now, I do not have any data to judge how it is now.

I stopped using it a long time ago – not because I disliked it, I just picked a different solution.

I think the first lesson here is that the term "force" is pretty unhelpful. I think the term "interaction" is generally preferred to avoid confusion.

What I would say is that to bundle gravity in with electromagnetic, strong and weak interaction as "four fundamental interactions" – without explaining the rationale for doing so – is also pretty unhelpful.

The reason the other three fundamental interactions seem distinct from gravity is that, theoretically, we can "unify" them at a high enough energy scale. That is, at an energy scale that reflects conditions within a fraction of a second after the big bang, these three interactions can be understood as one interaction, and only as energy distributes and temperature decreases do the forces become distinct.

If I am not mistaken, we have experimentally demonstrated that the electromagnetic and weak interactions unify at high enough energy, and we have theories that make predictions towards unifying the strong interaction at higher energy scales.

Gravity doesn't slot into this picture quite so neatly at all because gravity resists definition at extremely high energies, and by extension resists any effort to understand it as a component of a unified interaction.

I think it is a mistake to dismiss unified interaction as impossible because 'gravity is not a force'. Whenever anyone says this, they make an analogy to the centrifugal force and local reference frames, and that's a fair point to highlight, but I think this indicates more of a linguistic problem in the context of gravity as a fundamental interaction.

Similarly, people are quick to dismiss the graviton because it is impossible to detect and philosophically counter-intuitive – how can the effects on matter by the curvature of spacetime be mediated by a particle?

But remember: there is no particle. The graviton is a mathematical abstraction, it's not some magic ball of gravity that you can fire from a gravity gun or surround your spaceship with. A graviton is just a... I don't want to say "position" so I'll say "probability density" of spacetime at a QM scale where uncertainty is part of the business. (Someone will correct me if that is wrong).

It makes sense that we should want to use that as way to describe gravity because it would use the same framework and methods that we use to successfully describe the rest of the universe.

Of course, there are deep seated problems with gravitons, and that's another thing that sets gravity apart, but I wouldn't say that these problems arise because the notion of the graviton is in any way absurd.

Gravity is different, and it perhaps doesn't help that at human-relevant scales, Newtonian or "classical" gravity is usually sufficient for our needs in application. It lets us believe gravity is intuitive, simple, and then when we look at galaxies and subatomic particles, and we encounter consequences of GR and QM – which can be rather surprising.

But all we have to bear in mind is that at relativistic scales, the uncertainty aspect of QM is still there, it's just incredibly improbable that any quantum weirdness will occur at the macro scale. Similarly, relativistic effects are accounted for at low energy scales, but their influence is so minute that we can remove them from our equations and leave ourselves with classical solutions that are faster to reason about.

As for why gravity is different to other interactions, I think any insightful answer to that question would probably require more ground than has yet been covered in efforts to develop quantum gravity.

At the moment, the difference is technical, it's different because our tools and methods don't account for it very well as long as we're trying to fit it into our current, well-tested models of physics, and to try and fit all of our physics into a model that makes gravity more sensible is even more daunting a task.

--— [IANAP but I am keen to learn so please please please correct me if I am wrong]

Perhaps it will simply return in search of The Kirk, The Creator, and offer to purge the infestation of irrational, disorganised organic units.

I think the parent is suggesting that protecting and developing the team is the only important task for a manager that doesn't fail at being a decent human.

The frequent incompatibility between morality and business, even down to simply shipping a shitty product to release at all, right up to building products that are designed to force purchasers to buy a replacement, is a matter that leaders must weigh.

A similar issue also applies to the people they lead. The line of professional detachment, between being too friendly and too military, is very thin indeed.

Generally speaking, while I fully agree with the parent that protecting, developing and coaching team is of paramount importance, I would say that, at the very least, hiring is equally important.

Hire the right people and your job as a manager is the easiest thing in the world.

Of course, in order to be good at any of the above, you must have a solid understanding of the business. It isn't simply a matter of being the people's champion.

Some very basic mock-up images on this seemingly related page: https://ubports.com/supported-products

Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm hoping to see as well. Something useful, light enough to wear for extended periods of time and provides a sharp, clean picture comparable to, or better than, current monitors.

Even if it's low resolution, as long as it's something I can look at and wear for extended periods of time without my eyes falling out or ears falling off, it'd be interesting.

What I'm not interested in is a face-attached TV/games console/billboard/social media interface. Yet that's what I fear most firms are looking to create, because it benefits them.

You're not even close to baseline!

16:10 was mentioned in a comment somewhere, no mention of a specific resolution.

Framework 13 has a resolution of 2256x1504 (3:2)[0]

[0]: https://frame.work/gb/en/laptop-comparison

Hire the attitude.

I usually explain it to people like this:

  The Host knows which box 
  has the prize. 

  You choose box A, leaving B and C.

  The Host opens box B and,
  revealing it empty, gives you 
  information about box C 

  that you don't have about your box

  since the Host cannot choose your box 

  and must choose an empty box

  from an information
  perspective, box C has
  better odds.

Sure, the cheeseburger is bad for you if you eat 10 every day, never exercise etc. But that kinda goes without saying right?

Just like you might say that a lawnmower is compliance tested against electrical faults before sale and is thus safe to use, despite having some sharp rotating blades on the bottom that could ruin your day pretty quickly if you put your head in it and turned it on.

The way EM radiation works is that it's classified as ionising if it's sufficiently energetic and penetrative (read: high frequency/short wavelength) to enter human tissue and detach electrons in the atomic structures that make up that tissue.

The danger that ionising radiation presents is that detaching electrons in DNA can cause carcinogenic mutation i.e. cause cancer.

Radiation in high-frequency ultraviolet and above in the EM spectrum is considered ionising, and everything from low-freq UV below is considered non-ionising. This is because the energy carried by EM waves of lower-than-UV frequency is not sufficient to ionise atoms in human tissue.

I don't know the exact numbers on that, but I do know that the lowest threshold for ionising any atom is 3.9eV (low f UV) to ionise a caesium atom — and obviously we aren't made of caesium.

And this is backed up pretty well by the fact that if visible light were dangerously ionising EM radiation, life would not exist as we know it, and even if it made it this far, we'd all have a lot of cancer.

And since visible light is ostensibly higher frequency/higher energy than this "terahertz radiation" (presumably a buzzword for high freq microwave/infrared?) we can safely say that it won't hurt us in the way that a thousand chest X-rays might.

Now it's true that you can burn your food in the microwave and you can blind yourself with a laser, but this isn't because you ionised your chicken beyond core cooked temperature, it's because you subjected it to intense microwave radiation which excites the atoms.

Sufficiently intense visible light will burn your skin, but it won't mutate your skin. You get skin cancer from excessive exposure to ultraviolet, not from light.

Cellphones, wifi and 4G/5G have all been used by those who profit from scaremongering, but if you think about it, if any of it were true, there would have to be some new science to describe the mechanism by which they cause harm.

我想昧耳，昧心，变石头

The recent BBC/Amazon adaptation of King Lear featuring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson was pretty good. Worth watching for sure.

I tend to avoid video games until I'm on proper vacation time. For diversion between programming boring stuff I tend to do some graphic design stuff or occasionally I'll go on StackOverflow and answer some Perl/JavaScript questions.

During vacation time I'll typically play one of the Fire Emblems or Halo (3, Reach or Infinite).

Last vacation I quite enjoyed Dirt Rally, nothing quite like nailing a stage at speed in Lancia 037. I don't care for driving games usually but these games are fun even just on a gamepad.