Animats

5 ms·

61.
by Animats 20d ago
"It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy." That's the most significant line in the articl
62.
by Animats 20d ago
> These days though i wonder why we don't have [semi-]autonomous control there. The US does. That's what Positive Train Control does.[1] For a long time, there was reluctance to apply automatic train stops to freight trains, be
63.
by Animats 21d ago
The snubber only has resistance in one direction. There's a check valve that lets air flow easily in the other direction. An ordinary dashpot without a check valve provides the same damping in both directions. Dashpots and snubbers are
64.
by Animats 21d ago
He was a national security adviser under Biden.
65.
by Animats 21d ago
This has to stop. Ask candidates how tough they're willing to get on corruption. A good starting point for the next administration is to offer an amnesty on criminal prosecution to government employees who report anything of value they
66.
by Animats 21d ago
Chromium, or just Chrome?
67.
by Animats 22d ago
This guy was a senior national security advisor in the White House. This isn't some nut. It looks like everybody in this business reaches similar levels of performance within a few months of each other. Who gets to some level first is
68.
by Animats 22d ago
> repair (which is a completely different topic from soldering) Yes. There's repair, rework, build and debugging. Repair is mostly diagnosis, followed by cleaning and repair of mechanical damage. ICs themselves don't fail much
69.
by Animats 22d ago
Right. Search "surface mount soldering practice kit". For about $4, you get a board and some parts to practice on. Get a few of those kits, and keep doing them until the result looks really good. I went through about three of thos
70.
by Animats 22d ago
The protection mechanism to give the AI agents "read only" access to the Internet seems to have been just restricting them to HTTP GET requests. Then they found a site where GET operations could cause a write to a wiki.
71.
by Animats 22d ago
The amount of downtime the big AI companies are showing doesn't help. Do you want your company's sales and customer service to shut down every time OpenAI or Anthropic goes down?
72.
by Animats 22d ago
Because, in the original installation, the elevator machines were at the bottom. That's rare today, but in 1907, getting the heavy machinery up to the top of the building was much harder. Some old elevators have a winding drum at the b
73.
by Animats 22d ago
Yes. Startups which started with office space above one of his carpet stores include Logitech, Google, and PayPal. Plus, one of the carpet stores became the first Apple Store location, before Apple built the glass box. This guy was really g
74.
by Animats 22d ago
> What would make images harder than anything else? Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.
75.
by Animats 23d ago
Right. I knew those people back when Autodesk owned Xanadu. The fundamental problem was that tracking and paying for text ownership and viewing down to the word level isn't really very useful. The Xanadu people were libertarians into m
76.
Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
257 points by Animats 23d ago|136 comments
77.
by Animats 23d ago
I used to think that all those Persian carpet stores on University Avenue in Palo Alto were a way to get immigrants jobs in the US. But no. Turns out the carpet store guy had been renting upstairs office space to startups in exchange for an
78.
by Animats 23d ago
There's a whole genre of YouTube cartoon videos about this. Dry cleaners.[1] Parking lots.[2] 7 boring businesses.[3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0cASirKyE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
79.
by Animats 23d ago
> Like a lawn mowing device that also spots weeds and can spray them. That's available as a tractor-pulled implement for farms. Deere and some others make such things.
80.
by Animats 23d ago
> It’s rare for museums to keep artefacts operational. The Living Computer Museum tried until the money ran out. Here's the auction list from when the Living Computer Museum was liquidated.[1] [1] https://onlineonly.chri
81.
by Animats 23d ago
A marker of progress will be when Amazon converts to automated picking. They've been trying hard for almost a decade now. They had an annual competition for years. They have a decent picking robot developed in house.[1] It's not b
82.
by Animats 24d ago
That's under very light CPU load. So an async approach, with no preemption, can work. If there's any significant compute going on, it won't work as well. A useful number to measure on a scope is worst case interrupt latency.
83.
by Animats 24d ago
I have no business-based "apps". If it's not on F-Droid, I don't have it. Google Play Store is turned off. So far, the only thing I've found that absolutely requires a Google account is Waymo. This is probably a vio
84.
by Animats 24d ago
Fluorescent lamps are already RF noise sources. Modifying a tube to modulate the noise would be a useful eavesdropping device. If you used a digital modulation mode with a scrambler (the pseudorandom device that makes the number of 1 and 0
85.
by Animats 24d ago
Oh, sort of like a LED wand.[1] Those were a popular toy for ravers a few decades back. Hard to find now. [1] https://tinkersphere.com/soldering-level-i/3355-magic-messag...
86.
by Animats 25d ago
The whole point of the Magic Eye tube was that it was cheaper than an analog meter. So it was the consumer-grade replacement for one. On pro gear, you'd find a meter movement and pointer, which is harder to make than a vacuum tube. In
87.
by Animats 26d ago
The cool kids went to Wasteland Weekend as of a few years ago. Don't know what the cool place is now.
88.
by Animats 26d ago
I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere. The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else. For a time
89.
by Animats 26d ago
It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism, as set down by Milton Friedman.[1] and Lewis Powell.[2] Friedman set down the theory: In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual ca
90.
by Animats 27d ago
> But if we just end up unable to have offspring? Just not having enough offspring means humans fade out. Breakeven is about 2.1 children per female. We're already on that path. It's not a projection. "Peak Baby", t

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