ccamrobertson

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
1,287
Submissions
246
Member since
Mar 2
Founded Lockitron (prev), Arx Research, Inc.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ccamrobertson; my proof: https://keybase.io/ccamrobertson/sigs/M6XNRcRemSoA86SE-NEcS3ju8v2bveHQ65LI8cCrR1c ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
It feels like there could be a middle ground here where the Pi would show some annoying error message at boot that the RAM doesn't match the CPU's anticipated spec.

Any sellers caught doing this would quickly be flagged by the community as unreliable; also purchase protection is pretty strong these days.

Comment · 1 month ago
While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.

The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.

Comment · 2 months ago
The electromechanical television got me in trouble with my 5th grade teacher. When she stated that television dated to the 1940s, I (obnoxiously) had to correct her that in fact it was invented the late 1920s as I had seen one of the original Baird televisions in the British Museum.

I wish there was a photo of the writer's setup, I would love to see a modern version in action.

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
...and I still make the Last Word with subbed-in Génépy des Alpes to this day.
Comment · 3 months ago
I think a lot of these concepts are fun/interesting, but I like that email today functions more like a mailbox than WhatsApp or Telegram. Whilst digital (or paper) spam is obnoxious I dislike the idea of binning every sender into a "unread" box until I approve them. I miss unreads all the time across apps like X and Telegram.

As a first step I would focus on something like broad S/MIME support. Unfortunately I suspect that the biggest email providers are disincentivized from doing this as it would disrupt their business models.

Comment · 3 months ago
As someone still smarting from the loss of Google Domains, I would consider this advice carefully.

When domains are not the profit center the company might just arbitrarily turn them off as a feature.

Comment · 4 months ago
This is really cool, time to dust off an old PowerPC. I've been thinking about building apps for old Mac OS versions for a while with the advent of LLMs, glad to see someone is doing it.
Comment · 4 months ago
Yes, same. I am now really curious for someone to culture bread tags, milk tops and fruit stickers.
Comment · 4 months ago
...and further imagine the science that could be done if we mass manufactured probes rather than using experimental engineering for each one. We could have had dozens of Voyager probes in the outer reaches of our solar system by now.

I would have loved to see more Huygens probes dropped to the surface of Titan or more New Horizons zoom past Pluto.

I don't think human spaceflight is to blame, rather it's what connects taxpayers to space exploration as an inspirational human pursuit. But, I do agree that can be more efficient with how we spend those dollars all around.

Comment · 4 months ago
Agreed. Phrases like "journalists are currently gooning over OpenAI and Anthropic" really put me off. It's a poor attempt at modern muckraking; cheeky yet offering little substance.
Comment · 5 months ago
It's difficult to take articles like this seriously when they use hyperbole like "...the most evil industry the planet has ever seen [oil]", never mind things like chattel slavery.

I don't own an EV and am sympathetic to the idea that other road users are far more damaging and thus should pay more, however, I would much prefer a flat tax over some insidious Federal tracking device that monitors how much I drive.

Comment · 6 months ago
Worse yet, you might not have a choice; the article notes that “sprinklers are already required in all new California homes built in 2011 and later.”
Comment · 6 months ago
I've found that releasing and maintaining production Android apps has become more difficult in the last decade as compared to iOS which (surprisingly) has improved slightly.

Google Play removed a perfectly functional NFC utility app we released after a year of no updates (despite the fact that it didn't require any to work on the latest Android version at the time). By contrast, the App Store doesn't care as long as we continue to pay the annual developer fee.

We opted to open source the app and let users sideload the app as an alternative; now that will be far more difficult as we are no longer "verified" Google Play developers.

Really unfortunate, glad I'm not an Android user myself.

Comment · 7 months ago
Make rice and beans, accept founders, hire batch partners and launch founders via demo day...to take over the universe.

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