Hacker News: jsz0

New comment by jsz0 in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

jsz0 — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 18:55:15 +0000

It's not as straightforward of a choice as it may seem. In theory Linux would be a better choice but there simply isn't the infrastructure or IT staffing in place to manage millions and millions of Linux desktops. I'm not saying it can't be done but for various reasons it hasn't been done and that's a major practical roadblock. Just from a staffing perspective alone if you hand millions of Linux desktops to life long Microsoftsies you're begging for disaster.

New comment by jsz0 in "Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand"

jsz0 — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:41:19 +0000

I stopped going to StarBucks when all the employees started looking like the carnival freak show was in town. I just don't trust people who look that way to handle buy food and beverages.

New comment by jsz0 in "The short, happy reign of CD-ROM"

jsz0 — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 04:16:00 +0000

As corny as they seem now the early FMV CD-ROM games felt like a gigantic leap forward at the time. Being able to interact with a photorealistic environment was a completely new experience. Being too ignorant at the time to understood how they worked it seemed like pure magic. Of course they were nothing but a novelty in retrospect but the illusion was very real at the time.

New comment by jsz0 in "Are animals conscious? New research"

jsz0 — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 14:53:58 +0000

Here's one of the most simple practical examples that proves to me cats are conscious. When my cat sleeps in my bed occasionally I accidetanlly kick or bump into her in the dark. Instead of fleeing, hissing or attacking me she lets out a very unique earnest meow that clearly means 'hey I'm here' and she goes back to sleep like nothing happened. She clearly understands my motivation wasn't to harm her. She clearly understands we share a common motivation of sleeping in the comfy bed. She clearly understands a concept of the future where she lets me know her position and expects me not to accidentally bother her again. If I continue to bother he she will simply get up and move just far enough away to avoid further trouble.

New comment by jsz0 in "Apple keeps flogging 8GB RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse"

jsz0 — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:04:49 +0000

To put this into perspective it's a small enough amount of memory that merely running a web browser with a dozen tabs open is often a choppy laggy experience.

New comment by jsz0 in "How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)"

jsz0 — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:16:52 +0000

Winamp was doomed to be a relic of a simpler time. Even if you take the iPod and iTunes Store out of the equation Winamp's file-centric approach was a limitation as people's music libraries increased in size and complexity. All their attempts to add more modern features just made Winamp worse for the people who did like its simplicity and file-centric design.

New comment by jsz0 in "Ask HN: Why did Apple stop working on EVs?"

jsz0 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 22:52:43 +0000

As a casual observer it seems to me they were simply too late to the party and probably didn't have anything that fantastic or high margin justifying to bring to the table. It's like if back in 2005/2006 there were lots of 'almost as good as the 2007 iPhone' phones on the market they may never have entered that market either.

New comment by jsz0 in "The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)"

jsz0 — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 05:56:08 +0000

I'm not sure I ever actually bought a box of blank floppy disks. Instead I would call up software companies and ask for free demos instead. I did it so often the postal service warned may parents they would stop delivering mail to the house.

New comment by jsz0 in "Apple TV's Fantastic "Silo" Plays Out Like Great Sci-Fi Literature (2023)"

jsz0 — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 18:07:15 +0000

As far as adaptions for the illiterate masses go I thought the series was pretty good. I couldn't personally get past the stink of soap opera SciFi Channel quality acting and writing myself but if you have no plans to ever read the books it's better than nothing. One positive thing I can say is the art design was pretty good especially the computers and their interfaces.

New comment by jsz0 in "Atari Falcon030"

jsz0 — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 19:04:18 +0000

There was a time when the Atari ST was the perfect home computer. It was cheap, easy to use like the Mac, and offered a 'next gen' 16bit gaming experience before any of my friends had a Sega Genesis. I continued to be a diehard ST fan until the exact second I first saw Doom running on a PC.

New comment by jsz0 in "Reddit's long, rocky road to an IPO"

jsz0 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:37:02 +0000

Seems like a very risky investment to me. Unsupervised non-employee mods have a tremendous amount of power over the day to day user facing operations. Why would anyone invest money in a site that could be quickly destroyed due to a fashionable political trend at anytime? For example if the mods band together and decide Jews can no longer use Reddit or something equally ridiculous the stock will plunge.

New comment by jsz0 in "Ask HN: How do I grok networking concepts, as a software engineer?"

jsz0 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 07:03:38 +0000

Just focus on the fundamentals. Ignore the obscure edge case stuff until it's relevant to what you're doing and chances are it never will be. There are experienced network engineers who don't know most of this stuff off the top of their head. If you can get to the point where you can read a packet capture and understand what's happening you're way ahead of the game.

New comment by jsz0 in "Dr. Dobb's Journal – Vol 1 (1976)"

jsz0 — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 14:05:17 +0000

Back in the 90s the only book on programming my school library offered was Dr Dobb's Toolbook of 80286/80386 programming which was a compilation of articles from the journal. Even though most of it was way over my head it was the only thing I had at the time so I studied it religiously. Purely out of scarcity of knowledge this led to learning basic assembly because the only thing I had access to was this book's code snippets and Microsoft Assembler on the school computers.

New comment by jsz0 in "Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue"

jsz0 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 07:02:34 +0000

The best advice I can give anyone trying to appreciate jazz is to think of it like listening to a conversation in an unfamiliar foreign language. You don't have to understand the literal meaning of the words/notes to infer their emotional tone, pacing, and the ebb and flow of the conversation. Jazz in this way is an abstraction of spoken language. It communicates a vibe or general emotional landscape that you can interrupt for yourself in a personal way.

As a more accessible starting point I'd actually recommend Miles Davis's Porgy and Bess album. It's a hybrid of Gershwin's composed music and jazz. Being more structured than most jazz recordings it will give you some context/framework to enjoy the jazzy parts. Most of the songs are short and digestible.

New comment by jsz0 in "New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip"

jsz0 — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:15:03 +0000

I use my M1/8GB Air pretty much exclusively for web browsing and run into 'out of application memory' errors on a regular basis. Relaunching Safari generally solves the problem. It's just such a bad look for Apple to be selling premium priced products that can't do the most basic task people want them for without throwing errors.

New comment by jsz0 in "New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip"

jsz0 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 21:45:35 +0000

I dunno about Chrome but a single YouTube tab in Safari can use over 1GB of RAM these days. It's absolutely insane to sell a computer in 2024 that's gonna struggle to open 10+ browser tabs.

https://imgur.com/a/VzCQ4zF

New comment by jsz0 in "New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip"

jsz0 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 21:37:02 +0000

Obviously a planned obsolescence tactic. If the base models were 16GB there's a fine chance Apple wouldn't see another dollar from those customers for another 10+ years at minimum. The average customer doesn't understand their memory requirements and cannot be expected to predict how they may change in the future. It's the only thing they got left they can use to trick customers into buying a machine that will need to be replaced sooner.

New comment by jsz0 in "Is Everyone on Adderall?"

jsz0 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:18:27 +0000

I experimented with it as a productivity enhancer and ultimately found it was too much of a happy hamster wheel effect. It makes you feel more productive even if you're not actually doing anything constructive. Just as often it can lead to short sighted bad judgement that is actively destructive because you're just looking for busy work to flip bits for a dopamine rush. I wouldn't recommend it unless you actually need it or at least use it very sparingly and strategically.

New comment by jsz0 in "Every default macOS wallpaper"

jsz0 — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:02:06 +0000

I'm not a big fan of any of the modern macOS or iOS wallpapers. They're so busy it's hard to even read text labels on top of them. My goto background for many years was Leopard Server but it was eventually replaced by the Linen tile texture that IIRC wasn't a default wallpaper choice but could be copied out of the system folder.

New comment by jsz0 in "McDonald's pushed customers to the brink on price. They're starting to push back"

jsz0 — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 02:52:12 +0000

My local Mom & Pop burger/pizza/grinder places actually cost the same or even sometimes a bit less than fast food these days and the quality is much better. Most of these places actually need about your repeat business so they haven't been as greedy on jacking up menu prices.