Hacker News: steve_taylor

New comment by steve_taylor in "Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'"

steve_taylor — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:02:57 +0000

It depends on why the tutor is hired. If the student is easily distracted, the presence of a human tutor will prevent them doom-scrolling brainrot videos, whereas an AI tutor won't have that effect on them. I have an ASD level 2 son approaching year 11 and this is why I'll be hiring a human tutor next year.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Meta VR Glasses"

steve_taylor — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:05:13 +0000

Its lighter form factor is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The AVP has some unnecessary extras such as the outward-facing display. If Apple wanted, it could make an Apple Vision Air with the latest A-series chip, a much lighter form factor and a much lower price - just like Meta VR Glasses.

New comment by steve_taylor in "I said no and Apple said yes"

steve_taylor — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:59:07 +0000

I was referring to Ubuntu's Snap.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Meta VR Glasses"

steve_taylor — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:51:13 +0000

It's essentially a cheaper and lighter AVP without the Apple ecosystem. There's nothing revolutionary about this device.

Every time a major tech company comes out with a new headset, I check one thing: Does it have a light field display? (In this case, no it doesn't.) In 5-10 years, headsets are going to be much better. Your eyes will be able to focus on objects like they do in real space and you won't have to deal with the hassle of an external battery.

New comment by steve_taylor in "I said no and Apple said yes"

steve_taylor — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:07:26 +0000

Linux distros would never do something as egregious as, let's say, unturnoffable app updates, would they?

New comment by steve_taylor in "Brood War Bench"

steve_taylor — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:00:55 +0000

We're probably seeing only the cherry-picked results.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips"

steve_taylor — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:22:12 +0000

This is very different. The Raspberry Pi 5 RAM upgrades are arbitrage, involving soldering on dodgy RAM, at the expense of the unsuspecting retail buyer vs. people upgrading their own Mac Minis for themselves and without any soldering.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Brood War Bench"

steve_taylor — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:32:02 +0000

Fable's effort level is a significant omission, given it was ranked 3rd behind Astra xhigh and Astra medium.

New comment by steve_taylor in "English: A vs. An"

steve_taylor — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:42:42 +0000

It really grinds my gears when someone says “an year”.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"

steve_taylor — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 20:31:16 +0000

The Triune Brain model is poo-pooed by modern science, but this study partially vindicates it.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The Coming War on General Computation (2011)"

steve_taylor — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:32:42 +0000

I think China's waiting until the US is so broke it can't raise the money to rescue Taiwan. Based on the 40T debt, 2T deficit (not counting the 1.3T mid-term election bribe) and recent bond market jitters, that could be quite soon.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Study: Blue light impairs the eye's ability to distinguish fine detail most"

steve_taylor — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:34:39 +0000

It's technically possible to achieve a 100 CRI score with a broad enough range of frequency spikes rather than the continuous range of frequencies you get from incandescent bulbs. So even the best LED bulb isn't going to match incandescent.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Study: Blue light impairs the eye's ability to distinguish fine detail most"

steve_taylor — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:10:27 +0000

I'm trying to get my hands on some decently high wattage (100W ideally) incandescent bulbs because it's really been bugging me lately that while I can still focus just fine, I have trouble making out details and some colours in artificial lighting. I've come to the conclusion that there's really no substitute for light generated from heat.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027"

steve_taylor — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:31:41 +0000

Sounds like a cheap way to get my hands on some floppies.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

steve_taylor — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:43:30 +0000

Devices get slower over time due to their operating systems becoming increasingly complex as they're updated. This increased complexity is due to the OS developers taking advantage of the newer models' improved hardware. This leaves owners of older models facing a decision between staying on the older OS version and retaining the current performance vs. updating to the latest version and risk performance degradation. But it's not even that simple. Over time, app developers stop targeting older OS versions, which means you could be stuck with old versions of apps, some of which will refuse to do anything until they're updated.

The way to solve this is for device vendors and their OS developers to simply stop updating the OS in a way that takes advantage of new models' improved hardware because that same code slows down older devices.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

steve_taylor — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:53:53 +0000

Finger was only part of the social network. The multi-user aspect of Unix itself combined with standard tools such as who, finger, write, mesg, talk, mail, biff, etc. combined to form a fairly complete text-based social network.

New comment by steve_taylor in "TinySol, a tiny solitaire game for DOS"

steve_taylor — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:08:38 +0000

> Not quite. The rightmost one initially has 6 closed cards and 1 revealed card which can be a king, so you can put 12 more cards on top of it, for a total of 6+13 = 19 cards. So I'd make 7 arrays for 20 cards each, just to be safe. Or just use 52-long arrays for every table slot, that too is an option.

You're right. And I hadn't considered tracking the index of the first revealed card.

Anyway, my point is that you can map out the memory allocation quite easily and it's static and small, so you don't have to worry about malloc and free.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

steve_taylor — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:02:23 +0000

So we're going to ask them to not advance their operating systems and apps to take advantage of newer hardware?

New comment by steve_taylor in "Hyperspace"

steve_taylor — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:54:46 +0000

How does this compare to diskDedupe, which has been around longer and is much cheaper?

New comment by steve_taylor in "The UK's war on anonymity has come to America"

steve_taylor — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:15:31 +0000

Parents can stop giving kids smartphones.