Hacker News: blacksmith_tb

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Microsoft patents system to freeze games and inject ads during downtimes"

blacksmith_tb — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:17:06 +0000

Can we hope that they'll defend this patent, and no one else will be able to abuse their customers in the same way? (More likely the obvious prior art means it's dead in the water, but we can dream).

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Sublime Text Build 4213"

blacksmith_tb — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:42:29 +0000

Different horses for different courses? I wouldn't open a 100MB logfile in VS Code, but ST or Zed handle that fine. I use all three, though my ST license was for a version or two back, so I have mostly switched to Zed for those giant-file-don't-need-any-bells-and-whistles tasks.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Negativland, Culture Jamming, and the Art of Making Something New"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:43:50 +0000

They played at my college freshman year (1989, cough, cough) and stayed in an empty room in my dorm, right next to mine. The show was great, though they were personally a little awkward (or just weren't sure what to make of a bunch of kids). Escape from Noise will always be my favorite as a result.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:30:37 +0000

I have had zero luck trying to get gMaps updated to remove an imaginary address they added for my garage. I might as well just put up extra address numbers and another mailbox.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Apple Unveils iPhone Duo"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:49:48 +0000

I gather that for many people, their smartphone is their only computing device. Doesn't have much appeal for me, but if that was the case, I could see that nudging people towards bigger devices, even if it makes them less practical as phones you carry around / try to grasp with one hand.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Unified Arabic"

blacksmith_tb — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:24:39 +0000

It's easy to see how it could simplify typesetting, I would think computers though have that mostly covered now. Making Arabic easier to read is interesting, it would help new learners potentially, but I am not surprised that existing readers and writers might not warm to the idea. I wonder if Simplified Mandarin isn't a little similar, mostly accepted, but with a little pushback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "'Mad honey' that can stop your heart is being sold online"

blacksmith_tb — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:11:22 +0000

Or oleander [1], which people occasionally poison themselves with by burning its wood.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month"

blacksmith_tb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:29:53 +0000

Now DO has to plow those loss-leading Marketing dollars into paying for memory I expect...

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation"

blacksmith_tb — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:06:27 +0000

Except that the study is from France?

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer"

blacksmith_tb — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:36:56 +0000

I have a fair number of badly designed / implemented usb-c devices with this problem (not all from fly-by-night companies, my Philips water flosser is a glaring example). I have a couple of small metal-enclosed male C to female C adapters (which don't have an exposed circuit board) that do the same thing as the Adafruit version.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Production Imminent: 40 Solar-Charging Aptera EVs Coming Soon"

blacksmith_tb — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:11:59 +0000

It also charges like any other EV, leve1 1 or 2 at home, and they say they intended to support faster DC charging in their FAQ[1]. I would be fairly skeptical of the 46mi / 74km a day from the built-in solar, that sounds optimistic given the small surface area.

For me the bigger problem is that it's classified as a motorcycle, which may mean wearing a helmet, and needing to have a class M license. Insurance may also be interesting. And of course sharing the road with giant heavy vehicles.

1: https://aptera.us/discovery-center/

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:23:21 +0000

The cynic in me says that the visible presence of people dying on the street is very much intended to send a message, "work hard or this will be your fate".

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

blacksmith_tb — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:17:36 +0000

Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:40:44 +0000

Which of course means they should use heat pumps, since the copper lines don't need nearly as much room (I suppose you'd still have to put a drywall wall in front of one brick wall potentially). Even just putting a bunch of mini-splits on the roof (instead of individual window AC units) would be an improvement, seems like.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "An AL mother killed herself to fulfill a ChatGPT prophecy, lawsuit alleges"

blacksmith_tb — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:11:17 +0000

When AI sycophancy kills - "We ride not into darkness – but into the brilliant unknown."

An AL mother killed herself to fulfill a ChatGPT prophecy, lawsuit alleges

blacksmith_tb — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:11:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/chatgpt-alabama-suicide-22356367.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050605

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Which streaming service was that on again?"

blacksmith_tb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:24:15 +0000

But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Notable Knot Index (2016)"

blacksmith_tb — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:45:55 +0000

NASA uses knots instead of cable ties, for example on the Mars rovers [1] so they remain with us (I use a half dozen regularly myself)

1: https://www.planetary.org/articles/20120905-knots-on-mars

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

blacksmith_tb — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:38:57 +0000

Give it a generation, and readers will ask "what was a TV?" and/or "what is a channel?"

For us though, it's an evocative phrase - right place, right time.

New comment by blacksmith_tb in "Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel"

blacksmith_tb — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:10:23 +0000

That background is useful, though it seems more like "how" than "why" - my instinct is James C. Scott-style rebellious hinterlands[1] but I haven't gotten a sense if the bandits are the product of social dislocations, or just opportunists. My naive assumption would be all of the above, some conflicts along the edges of Sahel being ideological or about lack of resources or political participation, and others being just smash-and-grab (not that they're mutually exclusive).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...