> Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads
Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.
Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.
AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).
Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.
> A series of 13 cameras, six radar sensors, and four lidar sensors dot the Ojai's exterior, and are fitted with onboard heaters to reduce ice buildup and small wipers and fluid to clear away dirt. These features will be critical as Waymo expands beyond warm-weather cities and into gnarlier climates in the northeast United States.
The whole point of this article is that the new vehicle is better suited to more climates.
All the cities above already have service, the expansion in the title refers to the new markets that should (hopefully) be unlocked with this new vehicle.
I believe the GP was referring to most quality rips originating from physical media (ie. 4K UHDs).
In a world without physical media, the best piracy can deliver is no better than the best encoding streamers have available (and that assumes DRM circumvention remains forever possible, otherwise we're gonna get worst quality from re-encoding decoded playbacks)
> the quality of ahem copies is often no worse than you'd get from an official streamed source
"No worse than streamed" is a far cry from a quality high-bitrate 4k UHD physical release.
I've done a few all-nighters in my 30s and 40s, and they generally feel the same as my 20s. Still get that clear headed, high focus second wind around 4am that carries through until noon or so.
But, I definitely crash harder than I did in my 20s and need longer to recover after. In my 20s, would be fine if the next night was a normal one, now it takes multiple days.
It's definitely something I try to avoid at this age, as opposed to just being standard procedure back in college.
Now I'm kinda curious what age cohort is most likely to be Reddit memers
Do you think 30s is peak Reddit, yet you manged to be a lucky outlier? Or that peak Reddit skews older/younger and you're of a lucky age?
As an older Millennial in my 40s, I see this a lot in my 35-43 friend group. And always figured peak Reddit was younger Millennials (now in their 30s).
The Internet itself is the loophole in this analogy.
Minors shouldn't have unfettered + unsupervised access to the Internet, that's the solution.
The open Internet isn't a kid friendly place, isn't meant to be, and won't be no matter how many laws you pass.
Children grow up to become adults, and spend most of their lives as adults. It's important to weigh the lifetime cost of safety laws.
A child with unfettered access to the Internet at say 8 years (IMO, way too young should be 15+) is only protected for 10 years. Then goes on to spend ~60 years negatively impacted, fighting ever growing censorship and risking extortion/blackmail when data leaks. It just doesn't seem worth it in this case.
I'd much rather laws mandate special child-safe phones/laptops that could only access a subset of the Internet, rather than forcing every website/app to collect PII and inconsistently enforce age verification for all visitors for all time.
And all of this is besides the point anyway. Social media and cyberbullying are the real threats to minors online. Porn access isn't good, but it's not causing suicides and mental health crises left and right.
Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.
Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.
Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?
Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.
TBH, its not even middle/high-school era Internet I miss most either. While I have fond mid-90s memories, I think peak Internet is somewhere in 2008-2012 range.
The Internet was mostly additive up to that point. New tech, sites, services existed alongside what came before.
I can appreciate Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and even Twitter (it was huge for distributed systems/database community ~2009-15) at different points in time.
It was really the photo-first, later video-first, shift that happened mid-2010s + big tech dominance that strangled old Internet. No longer being additive, but shrinking the Internet into fewer properties, with everything just being "content".
Yes, I spent a ton of time playing games, compiling the Linux kernel, and screwing around on the Internet back then. But outside of summer vacation (which I do miss dearly), I spend just as much or more online today as then.
I absolutely do miss the old Internet, not just that time period.
But, there's bright spots in the modern Internet too. The rise of online D&D via Discord during the pandemic was amazing. I play far more D&D thesedays then I ever did since the 90s. Discord also scratches the MUD/IRC itch. But, not sure Discord will survive the next decade either.
> I'm saying the market for what TRU provided had disappeared
The market still exists, doesn't it?
Kids still exist, kids still play with toys.
People simply buy toys from Amazon now, not TRU.
Just like people buy electronics from Amazon, not Best Buy/Circuit City.
And shoes from Amazon/Zappos, not Payless.
Seems like most retail markets still exist, they've just been cornered by the giant "Everything Store".
IMO, physical toy stores should be competitive to e-commerce with the right strategy. Simply going to the store could be an exciting adventure into itself, with higher fidelity discovery than a screen provides. Esp. post-COVID where people are opting more for analog/offline options after online/lockdown burnout.
Claiming TRU's market disappeared feels similar to claiming the bookstore market disappeared, yet Barnes and Noble had a well documented and surprising comeback by shifting strategy:
Is "Measure of the Universe" the book you're thinking of?
Alternatively, chapter 8 of "Realm of Numbers" touches on logarithms, and "That's about the size of it" chapter from Assimov on Numbers" includes a log-scale table of animal weights (from blue whale at 8.08 to Rotifer at -8.22)
The official French hosted instance requiring some French-specific stuff seems pretty normal. Likely specific to that instance's authentication system, not the Docs software itself.
You should be able to emulate close to CRT beam scanout + phosphor decay given high enough refresh rates.
Eg. given a 30 Hz (60i) retro signal, a 480 Hz display has 16 full screen refreshes for each input frame, while a 960 Hz display has 32. 480 Hz already exists, and 960 Hz are expected by end of the decade.
You essentially draw the frame over and over with progressive darkening of individual scan lines to emulate phosphor decay.
In practice, you'd want to emulate the full beam scanout and not even wait for full input frames in order to reduce input lag.
Mr. Blurbuster himself has been pitching this idea for awhile, as part of the software stack needed once we have 960+ Hz displays to finally get CRT level motion clarity. For example:
> Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you.
OLEDs are still behind on motion clarity, but getting close. We finally have 480 Hz OLEDs, and seem to be on track to the 1000Hz needed to match CRTs.
The Retrotink 4k also exists as a standalone box to emulate CRTs and is really great. The main problem being it's HDMI 2.0 output, so you need to choose between 4k60 output with better resolution to emulate CRT masks/scan lines, or 1440p120 for better motion clarity.
Something 4k500 or 4k1000 is likely needed to really replace CRTs completely.
Really hoping by the time 1000 Hz displays are common we do end up with some pass-through box that can fully emulate everything. Emulating full rolling CRT gun scan out should be possible at that refresh rate, which would be amazing.
I know this is meant to be tounge-in-cheek and not serious, but still fun to mull over.
IMO, main issue is the assumption that GDP/capita is independent of population size.
I suspect most economies would hit a saturating point where most people are underemployed and there's no productive work left for new entrants.
While South Korea shrinking 1/4x each generation is bad, growing 4x would probably also be bad.
Seems like the best case would be hitting some optimal population size + age distribution then maintaining that each generation -- not shrinking but also not growing.
This really hits home and makes me happy to see on the HN front page.
Nearly 10 years later and I still consider my time working on Riak at Basho the highlight of my career.
After leaving, my original plan was to found "Basho 2.0" after my non-compete expired. But, unexpected personal/family hardships in 2015-2018 made big-tech money the better choice for awhile, and Cloud/competitors continued to chip away at the market.
Often stil regret not taking that path.
But, happy to see technology I'm very fond of still living on and providing value to the world.
TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing.
The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine.
(Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary author of strong consistency work, lead riak_core dev from 2011-2015)
I think another 18 months would have been enough too. But it just wasn't the right environment after the hostile take-over / leadership transition.
Writing software one-offs to scratch an itch was historically one of my most enjoyable past-times. AI trivializing that has been a very real theft of joy in my life.
Solving the actual problem was never the point, it was just motivation to do geek-out and craft some code.
AI is rapidly diminishing many interesting hobbies (coding, art, music, writing).
Having more free time when there's nothing fun nor exciting to do with it isn't really a benefit.