LeifCarrotson

Joined 11 years ago

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4,081
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
> They've been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, "when are you ever gonna use these?" was today. Don't ever let anyone take your Big Box of Cables away.

The fact that you haven't used those cables in 10+ years doesn't mean that you haven't used the Big Box of Cables in 10+ years. "Declutter" advice doesn't work for needs like cables, auto maintenance, or cooking where doing the thing means you need a huge variety of tools/supplies on hand. Maybe you haven't used a USB 3.0 micro cable in years, but you use some cable every day.

If you pull some cable from the big box (multiple drawers labeled separately as USB, network, display, audio/RF, serial, AC, wall warts, and misc for me), you're using the box. If you haven't made a recipe that requires majoram in forever, but you cook and eat every day, it's perfectly reasonable to have a bunch of spice jars. And maybe you haven't used that 3-jaw gear puller you "customized" for a tight fit with an angle grinder since that timing belt change in 2019... but cars still need constant maintenance.

If you have given up the hacker lifestyle, and have decluttered your devices to a single iPad and a phone, both with wireless chargers, and think you'll never need a cable again...I pity you. But sure, give up the box of cables. But if you're constantly connecting and disconnecting things from other things, the combinatorics go up really fast and you need lots of cables.

Comment · 2 months ago
The intentional cruelty must be visible because they're doing it to gain support from those who want to see immigrants mistreated.

They're not trying to change the rate of immigration, they're just looking to score political points.

Comment · 2 months ago
There was a lovely window of a few years when processors were fast enough and low-power enough that real development work could trivially happen on a Macbook Air in a lounge.

That window is waning as more and more memory and graphics processing power is being used locally.

I suppose the future is most likely going to involve farming out AI requests to your desktop machine, your company's compute farm, or a cloud endpoint, but if you're expecting to run an AI offline on your lap with a battery...your lap will get warm.

Comment · 3 months ago
No, we can't. It's an ultra-low-power embedded ARM Cortex-M33 (successor to Cortex-M4) processor, the right language to use when programming it is C++. You want a minimum of abstractions and a close-to-the-metal programming environment to maximize battery life.

Be grateful it's C++, it could be raw C.

Comment · 3 months ago
Neat! I've got a slice that's under 10 miles long going south into town, but I've also got 14 slices to the north (the ones that don't intersect with a couple up-state cities) that are over 3000 miles long.

Vancouver is similarly interesting, a lot of great-circle 2000+ mile segments that reach over towards New England, but everything west or north is invalid.

Would be neat if instead of a single yellow petal to 100k, each petal was a color gradient to 1k, 2k, 10k, 20k, 100k, 200k, or 1M people!

Comment · 3 months ago
This is a comparatively small one: 40.25mm diameter screen, 14.4mm thick, at 50g.

My Fenix 6 Pro has a 47mm face, is 14.7mm thick, and weighs 80g (but as a Fenix that's the stainless bezel one, the plastic bezel watches are closer to 50g).

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
It matches my lived experience.

My body battery and stress often starts declining for no apparent reason and then 12-24 hours later I feel the symptoms of an illness. Similarly, when in a tough training block, HRV is a great tool to gauge how hard I ought to be able to go: I've tried to push through and just do a tough workout anyways when it's out of range, but failed to complete the workout in good form, or felt superficially crappy but had good training readiness according to the watch and was able to do better than expected.

The same holds true in the other direction, I don't log into Connect or scroll through the multitudinous widgets of data often enough to really keep tabs on this stuff, and when I get sick or feel good or bomb a workout or succeed at a workout when I felt off, the metrics consistently back up the actual results.

Personally, I've been thinking about jumping ship to a Coros Apex 4 if my battered Fenix 6 ever gives up the ghost - Garmin's prices are insane these days. At $270, this is cheap enough in comparison to a $1200 Fenix 8 Pro to take the chance. I could buy this and a $480 Apex 4, and then decide I didn't like either of them and go back to a used Forerunner 955, before spending as much as a new top-end Garmin.

Comment · 3 months ago
There are only about 400 units in existence, and they just started shipping June 30:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unawatch/meet-una-the-m...

so it's been out for less than a month. That's why you've seen zero reviews on websites, it's an indie Kickstarter. They don't have the marketing budget of a big wearables brand.

It has a GPS, IMU, and heart rate sensor: That's enough, obviously, to track activities, workouts, and health which their competitors do with the exact same set of sensors. It remains to be seen how accurate those are, or how well the manufacturer and community can develop useful algorithms to turn raw sensor data into activity logs and actionable health insights, but step 1 is to release an MVP to get people wearing the watch and logging data, and step 2 is to use the data to improve the algorithms.

Comment · 3 months ago
That's not precisely how I remember that quote... But it's on the Internet, so my memory must be faulty.
Comment · 3 months ago
You can't view a random imgur screenshot in the UK?

What image hosts work for you? Imgbb? Postimages?

Comment · 3 months ago
In my experience, a spec is often public (or available for purchase by the public from a standards committee for a few hundred dollars, close enough in business terms), but the source code for your competitor's implementations is not available for any price. The first barrier to entry to become a competitor in many industries is to implement an 835 page (note that those are rookie numbers) spec, building software that is compatible with existing data formats or legal frameworks or network protocols or hardware or whatever.

This is another example of the many invisible silos that developers end up in:

1. Some are developing enterprise software for use by their own employer, the spec only exists because it's useful to help the dev team manage the project. In this case, it's totally reasonable to expect the spec to co-evolve with the code. If the release gets pushed out to Q3 or the target has to be adjusted due to unforseen implementation difficulties, so be it.

2. Some are developing contract software for their customers. The spec exists as a communication tool and requirements that allows the developers to know what to build and to inform the customer that what they've built has reached a certain phase of the billing process (including completion). You're on a clock, and if you're late or you don't do what you said you'd do then your customer isn't going to pay you.

3. Some are developing software for abstract customers - either B2B or B2C. Often, the specs here are regulatory or industry-standard, implementing the spec is the function of the business. You're releasing updates and new products to make year-end sales targets or snipe announcements by your competition, and advertising compatibility with various standards is a crucial bullet point in the sales presentation.

Bug reports, feature requests, and especially deadlines have different meanings in each context. The way AI development agents can be used in each silo also varies enormously!

Comment · 3 months ago
If you're willing to put a little time into video editing, a 360 cam is great. The insta360 tools can make that a little easier if you want something simple.

If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.

Comment · 3 months ago
Low power electronics are all about low duty cycles: if it can be worn but asleep and drawing next to no power for 15 hours and 59 minutes, and recording audio for 60 seconds, they only need enough battery to run the processor for 60 seconds.

No one is using the thing like a dedicated microphone to record their entire day's audio, it's a note-taking tool.

Comment · 3 months ago
On the other hand, reducing competition and consolidating the market within the combined organization is good for the misshapen franken-org that comes out at the end...

The question is whether or not they can weaponize the regulatory system to prevent smaller competitors from taking advantage of their confusion.

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