ErigmolCt

10 ms·

1.
by ErigmolCt 10d ago
Apps, browsers and "smart" features are disposable software, but a good panel can remain useful for a decade. Makes you wish manufacturers treated the smart layer as optional from the start.
2.
by ErigmolCt 10d ago
I'm inclined to believe the shutdowns were a bug rather than an extremely patient friend waiting for the perfect gameplay moment. But modern TVs having enough remote-management machinery that the prank theory isn't immediately abs
3.
by ErigmolCt 10d ago
At that point network isolation stops looking like a privacy preference and starts looking like an adversarial relationship with a product you own
4.
by ErigmolCt 23d ago
I wouldn't sell yourself short on the last one... the comment itself is a decent example of it :)
5.
by ErigmolCt 23d ago
Maybe the failure mode isn't the PhD itself, but environments where publishing becomes the objective rather than a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
6.
by ErigmolCt 23d ago
You probably aren't building the next Airbus in a dorm room, but you might build a weird propulsion prototype, simulation tool, control system, manufacturing technique that eventually becomes the reason a company exists
7.
by ErigmolCt 23d ago
I think side projects still matter, but maybe in a slightly different way now. They don't necessarily have to become the company themselves. They can be how you discover the problem, test an approach, meet the people you eventually bui
8.
by ErigmolCt 23d ago
The irony is that universities are probably best at producing founders when they're not explicitly trying to produce founders. Teach difficult things, put smart people together, give them access to equipment and enough free time to bui
9.
by ErigmolCt 27d ago
I suspect rare here often means out of print or commercially obscure, not unique
10.
by ErigmolCt 27d ago
Copyright holders are certainly responsible for keeping unavailable works inaccessible, but shredding is mostly an industrial scanning decision, not a copyright requirement
11.
by ErigmolCt 27d ago
A genuinely useful project would identify publications that are actually rare, poorly catalogued, or held by only a few libraries, then prioritize those for careful preservation
12.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Bluesky trick exposes how strange the abstraction is
13.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Once apps can present one thing to the user and another thing to the captured image, there are some pretty weird possibilities
14.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Agreed… yet I meant "needs" in terms of product features, not maintenance or moderation
15.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Yeah, 2009-2014 feels more like the old social web to me
16.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
2009 is old web now, and this is how we find out we're old... Yet I think maybe "middle-aged web" is the more accurate term
17.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
HN is a good example of how little a website actually needs once you remove the requirement to constantly squeeze more engagement out of it. Though to be fair, its audience is unusually self-selecting :)
18.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
I think the audience could absolutely shrink back to something resembling the old web. I'm less sure the old web itself comes back
19.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
The interesting number here isn't 76.7% dead, it's that 23.3% alive is an upper bound. A server answering HTTP doesn't mean the thing somebody shared in 2011 still exists
20.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
I think the revenue number needs a lot more context for exactly this reason
21.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
And I'm writing my comment to understand it better...
22.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
The really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsed
23.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
A landscape does not become "pristine" a decade after millions of people disappear. The human influence would still be everywhere, but it would not necessarily look like European agriculture
24.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Europeans often failed to recognize Indigenous land management because it did not resemble European cities or farms
25.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse
26.
by ErigmolCt 1mo ago
Finding hundreds of previously unknown earthworks is a major archaeological result. Extrapolating from them to millions of inhabitants is where I would slow down...
27.
by ErigmolCt 2mo ago
A machine civilization could probably spread into many environments that biology cannot tolerate, but it still has to be invented somewhere first
28.
by ErigmolCt 2mo ago
I do not really believe the wormholes or computronium scenario, but letting my mind run through those possibilities resets my sense of scale
29.
by ErigmolCt 2mo ago
Yeps. The target-selection problem will likely solve itself long before the engineering does
30.
by ErigmolCt 2mo ago
I went through almost exactly the same thought process reading this :)

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