Animats

7 ms·

31.
by Animats 8d ago
> The cruel irony is that the very trait that makes you valuable - awareness of what’s possible - makes you incapable of enjoying what you have. Brought to you by the HR department's retention section.
32.
by Animats 8d ago
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1] But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be look
33.
by Animats 9d ago
The Longaberger Building, the giant picnic basket, is for sale, and currently abandoned.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE
34.
by Animats 9d ago
Here are LG's contract terms for appliances.[1] They are awful. Not only can they listen in. You have a contractual requirement to tell everyone in range of an appliance that they may be eavesdropped upon. CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You ack
35.
by Animats 10d ago
The NYC subway system now writes, on X, "Customer care has moved to the MTA app, chat with us there 24/7. Get service status, arrival times and more all in one place. Visit MTA.info/apps". The web page with similar data
36.
by Animats 10d ago
Surplus stores have been replaced by online auctions.[1] If you have something really obscure, you might find a buyer on online. Piling the stuff up locally means most of it sits there for years. Weird Stuff Warehouse. Haltek. HSC. All gone
37.
by Animats 10d 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
38.
by Animats 10d 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
39.
by Animats 11d 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
40.
by Animats 11d ago
He was a national security adviser under Biden.
41.
by Animats 12d 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
42.
by Animats 12d ago
Chromium, or just Chrome?
43.
by Animats 12d 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
44.
by Animats 12d 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
45.
by Animats 12d 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
46.
by Animats 12d 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.
47.
by Animats 12d 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?
48.
by Animats 12d 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
49.
by Animats 13d 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
50.
by Animats 13d 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.
51.
by Animats 13d 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
52.
Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
256 points by Animats 13d ago|136 comments
53.
by Animats 13d 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
54.
by Animats 13d 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=
55.
by Animats 14d 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.
56.
by Animats 14d 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
57.
by Animats 14d 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
58.
by Animats 14d 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.
59.
by Animats 14d 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
60.
by Animats 15d 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

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