I didn't realize the email field wasn't persisted. I assumed it could be used in some type of account recovery scenario.

What is the AI PC platform? The experience on windows with windows 11 for just the basic UI of the start menu leaves a lot to be desired, is copilot adoption on windows that popular and does it take advantage of this AI PC platform?

Ryzen AI 400 mobile CPU chips are also releasing soon (though RocM is still blah I think)

Nvidia is still playing in the AI space despite all the noise of others on their AI offerings - and despite intel hype, Nividias margins at least recently have been incredible (ie, people still using them) so their platform hasn't yet been killed by intel's "most widely adoptoped" AI platform offering

For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I got totally sick of the "expert" language designers with no real world code shipping responsibilities lecturing me. Every post about this stuff was met by comments from pedantic idiots. So every string had to have a helper function around it. Total and absolute garbage. They still haven't explained to my satisifaction why not support u"..." to allow a transition more easily to 3.

Luckily sanity started prevailing around 3.5 and we started to see a progression - whoever was behind this should be thanked. The clueless unicode everything was walked back and we got % for bytes so you could work with network protocols again (where unicode would be STUPID to force given the installed base). We got u"" back.

By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

Are there QT or GTK competitors crushing them?

I always hear how terrible electron apps are, but the companies picking electron seem to get traction QT or other apps don't and seem to have a good cross platform story as well.

Kind of mindboggling it's still sometimes DNS maybe.

Be interesting to understand cause here. Pretty big impact on services we use

Tradespeople sometimes request cash payment or provide a good discount for cash payments (well above any fee they would be charged). I guess where you are no one considers this dubious (really???) but at least in discussions with family the feeling is that the request for cash only payment is dubious.

We also have a local retail establishment that is cash only. I think it's looked at dubiously.

I personally have experienced it. Someone wanted to split payment on something between cash and a check so they could report the value of the item was lower because it would save them taxes every year. Again, the use of cash was I think a bit dubious.

Note: Cash allows you to avoid all sorts of obligations (tax / family support / debt collection and garnishment etc etc), ineligiblity for banking (europe is pretty strict in some cases for example with folks with no legal status with banking) and is still used in things like the drug trade. Even if everyone around you considers large cash transactions reasonable that might be naivety or they may simply not have been exposed to larger cash transaction activity.

I do like and carry cash.

Many other billions have the same issues - I think no one knows how to actually hoover this the way the big co's do?

We've had much faster broadband happening because of commercial competition from scrappy startups and WISPS and fiber folks (think sonic)

I think something like 94% of RDOF/BEAD locations in california were defaulted (ie, awarded but customer actually never got service)?

It's crazy given the 100+ billion or so spent on USF / RDOF / BEAD / etc that they couldn't do $5b - $10b for something like starlink which at least in rural areas is able to serve folks pretty quickly and push hard on that for a bit. The unsubsidized commercial starklink services is already outcompeting the insanely subsidized buildouts (that cost insane amounts per person). Starlink was awarded the funds but then they were revoked.

The "Kids for Cash" scandal involved two Pennsylvania judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, who took kickbacks from the builder of two for-profit juvenile detention centers to send children to these facilities.

They got 17 year sentences and Biden let them out nearly immediately. Dem gov Josh Shapiro I think came out strongly against Biden actions

Are the bands really so crowded (think on 70cm?) that we can't afford the bandwidth for something a bit more HD?

Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong).

Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap.

A noticeable thing is

https://www.redhat.com/en

Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.

The change in definition to 100/20 was in March 2024. Well after the RDOF auctions.

Even ignoring that - the shenanigans are pretty clear :) The FCC claimed that starlink couldn't meet the standard because it currently does not deliver that speed. The irony though is all the competitors (who got lots MORE money) basically haven't deployed anything AT ALL, and are at 0/0 AND are very very very unlikely to ever deploy to the hardest to reach rural locations. It's all going to be games playing and cherry picking in near rural areas or crazy high build out costs.

The proof is actually in the pudding. People are chosing to pay to use Starlink and not the subsidized RDOF deployments in part because the cost per deployment is so high to very rural areas they simply are not out in all of alaska etc yet (and starlink is going to be not only in all of alaska but on most bigger boats and many planes and more).

Note the awards are pretty comical

"The CCA paper argues that funding was unfairly awarded to areas like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; parts of downtown Chicago; some of the largest and busiest airports in the world; and tech-heavy locations such as Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif."

“This whole thing is a sham,” Settles said. “Having the 477 data is a joke, because you’re basically self-dealing to the incumbents because they influence what the information is.”

Settles added there should be more accountability on how FCC broadband money is used after it’s awarded. Billions of FCC dollars have been given out for many years. “And what do we have to show for it? I would contend that we have little to show for it,” Settles said.

A 2018 study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance indicates that Form 477 reporting enables “de facto monopoly providers” to “overstate their coverage and territory to hide the unreliable and slow nature of their service in many communities.”

Starlink has repeatedly been pooh-poohed. It's impossible, it'll never work, no one will want to use it.

If you have ever travelled internationally the potential game changing nature of Starlink would be immediately apparent.

This is a test. If nothing else, spacex is known to iterate. Starlink satellites have intentionally low lifetimes in space, they are all going to be replaced relatively soon with later generations.

Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks.

The FCC "concluded that Starlink had not shown that it was reasonably capable of fulfilling Rural Digital Opportunity Fund requirements to deploy a network of the scope, scale, and size required to serve the 642,925 model locations in 35 states for which it was the winning bidder."

You'd sort of expect hacker news folks to be interested in the science of potential benefits of this sort of thing (even if they doubt it'll ever happen). T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul.

And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas.