Hacker News: twoWhlsGud

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:48:35 +0000

The surface pro argues otherwise. Using Lightroom classic on the Pro is largely best done from the keyboard, but there are certain workflows where using the touchscreen or a stylus is much better than a touchpad. The fact that it's limited doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:49:38 +0000

Is there a write up of this somewhere? Curious to read more...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:28:22 +0000

And birds didn't invent jet engines, so obviously we don't need those either, right?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:41:21 +0000

Interesting! Is there a pointer to an issue where this feature is described by chance?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "PRC elites voice AI-skepticism"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:56:53 +0000

A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):

In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "There Goes the American Muscle Car"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 22:02:15 +0000

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "'Rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 22:56:18 +0000

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-...

I don't see what's funny about 4 inches just in the last three decades. 8 inches over the last hundred plus years at seattle

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....

seems very much in line then (given the lower rates before 1992). "Further investigation" was perhaps motivated by the search for something besides truth?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:45:36 +0000

Budget car buyers aren't driving the market - especially not the market for new cars. In the US income inequality has gotten to the point where most new cars are bought by upper income customers. And they want fancy SUVs. Budget car buyers purchase their cars in the used market. For them it would in fact make sense to purchase less expensive more efficient vehicles. But they don't get a vote (in theory a lower depreciation for such vehicles should flow up, but I don't think that signal really gets anywhere now.)

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Living with an Apple Lisa [video]"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:40:48 +0000

I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:05:36 +0000

Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.

When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.

It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.

I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:15:34 +0000

If you have a corpus of documents you are working with (say thousands of pages of related standards docs), Notebook can be handy for doing targeted summaries of aspects of the docs with pointers back into the actual docs to the relevant source material. That's something I end up needing a lot (I've never used the podcast feature) and so it feels very differentiated to me...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015)"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:56:44 +0000

Pro tip look for an industry that works for big capable customers that can defend themselves. Helps to create a structure of accountability inside a company that you can connect to as someone trying to have a positive career. Doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it is easier than pushing against the stream in a company that "serves"[1] a disaggregated (and thus mostly defenseless) customer base.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zon...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Discworld Rules"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 19:55:16 +0000

Unfortunately, MAD likely requires that you can't let Putin have Ukraine. And if MAD fails, well then we're all screwed anyway.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "The withering dream of a cheap American electric car"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 04:09:56 +0000

Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?

Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.

The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Apple Acquires Pixelmator"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:45:45 +0000

that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I used to have with new versions of software...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:35:32 +0000

And especially if it generates bugs in ways different from humans - human review might be less effective at catching it...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "We Can Terraform the American West"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 22:49:16 +0000

And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta, Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship. So refrigerators look pretty good right now...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Collapse of key Atlantic current could have catastrophic impacts"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 18:13:15 +0000

That was written when the effect of big tech's attack on the information landscape hadn't been digested yet. Now it's much more clear. The current future is correspondingly much more grim.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations"

twoWhlsGud — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 06:08:02 +0000

I went to public schools in middle class neighborhoods in California from the late sixties to the early eighties. My teachers were largely excellent. I think that was due to cultural and economic factors - teaching was considered a profession for idealistic folks to go into at the time and the spread between rich and poor was less dramatic in the 50s and 60s (when my teachers were deciding their professions). So the culture made it attractive and economics made it possible. Another critical thing we seem to have lost.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 [pdf]"

twoWhlsGud — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 01:31:03 +0000

Capitalism + ever more powerful cannabinoid drugs => problems. Many states (including the one I live in) are struggling to limit advertising, in particular.