Recent submissions

Comment · 13 days ago
I enjoy the warning in the footer:

"WARNING: This site has been known to cause a mind blowing experience. We recommend you prepare yourself mentally and if possible be sitting down. Side effects may include saving money, letting out a chuckle, and sporadic oinking."

Domain related: I regret getting a .io domain for my email and website; with the price increases, it's not far from $100/year. I'm looking to move from Namecheap to Porkbun and to move to a .com domain.

Comment · 3 months ago
Excellent article; the argument towards the end for allowing distillation for US companies is compelling:

> To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?

> In fact, this paradox is the solution. I believe that open weight models are good for innovation (and, per the above, I think that labs on the frontier will be fine), but it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else.

Comment · 4 months ago
I noticed emojis in the top-right corner the other day; I thought, “oh, that’s interesting”, and continued browsing – even though Indeed has more jobs, like Marketplace (1) has more for sale, I far prefer Craigslist for being simple and easy-to-navigate.

1: How many people don’t delete Facebook because of it? When I left Facebook for good, losing access to Marketplace felt like a real sacrifice.

It was worse in a rural village here in Alaska, where everything was on Facebook, much to my dismay. But the upside of a small community is that I heard about things anyway via word-of-mouth.

Comment · 5 months ago
My Kindle Touch, judging by the plastic, is old, on its second battery. I love that the reading experience has not changed at all in the time I’ve had the device. I never thought of it as a bookshelf, but that’s a great way to put it.

In contrast, my iPhone changes with each update, but often I find not for the better – I hated the new control center at first, and while I made it mostly match the old one, the tap targets are smaller than they used to be, on my 4.7” display.

Comment · 5 months ago
Different context, but I sent a message like that in Signal the other day to a family member with a link to my IP, pointing to `Python -m http.server` running in a directory with a file for them to try (1). Easier than having them open my Samba share.

1: To get an Android app working that has been delisted and requires a 'key' app that you purchase. We did purchase it, but didn't think to make any backups.

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson:

“Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer's disposal is his own pair of eyes. [...]

If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom's enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there. There is a lot of talk about camera angles; but the only valid angles in existence are the angles of the geometry of composition and not the ones fabricated by the photographer who falls flat on his stomach or performs other antics to procure his effects.” (“The Mind’s Eye” p34, 1999 Aperture ed.)

Comment · 6 months ago
I transfer books by running `python -m http.server` on my phone or computer, then opening my Kindle’s browser to my IP and downloading my .mobi book. It doesn’t take long, and I can do it all over Wi-Fi.

I can mount it via SSHFS for anything more than copying a single book.

I stopped buying anything from Amazon on principal a couple years ago, books included; and anyway, most books I read these days are in the public domain – Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove!

Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
It says the distance from Earth right now is 154,000km, but the other trackers, including NASA, say 30,000km (numbers rounded). The velocity is different as well, 7km/s vs NASA's 4km/s.
Comment · 7 months ago
More on what astronauts found “objectionable” and “distasteful” with Apollo's system, from the PDF linked in the OP (1):

"In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks. The principal problem with both the urine and fecal collection systems was the fact that these required more manipulation than crewmen were used to in the Earth environment and were, as a consequence, found to be objectionable. The urine receptacle assembly represented an attempt to preclude crew handling of urine specimens but, because urine spills were frequent, the objective of “sanitizing” the process was thwarted.

The fecal collection system presented an even more distasteful set of problems. The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces. The fecal collection process was, moreover, extremely time consuming because of the level of difficulty involved with use of the system. An Apollo 7 astronaut estimated the time required to correctly accomplish the process at 45 minutes.* Good placement of fecal bags was difficult to attain; this was further complicated by the fact that the flap at the back of the constant wear garment created an opening that was too small for easy placement of the bags.** As was noted earlier, kneading of the bags was required for dispersal of the germicide.

*Entry in the log of Apollo 7 by Astronaut Walter Cunningham.

**The configuration of the constant wear garments on later Apollo missions were modified to correct this problem."

1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760005603/downloads/19...

Comment · 7 months ago
Me and my brother just saw the movie tonight and we stayed for the credits. I thought the images were beautiful.
Comment · 7 months ago
I laughed at this bit, because I've also tried to debug things only to find it wasn't telling me what was wrong with my code (my own error, perhaps - a forgotten --verbose or -v):

> Turns out macOS's IOHIDManager silently blocks the longer HID++ report format you need to actually write to it. The OS just drops the packets. No error, no explanation, nothing. I found this out after writing a pile of probe code and staring at empty responses for longer than I'd like to admit.

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