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cptcobalt
Joined 1,260 karma
alexguichet.com

I work in renewable energy, and I build mobile apps for consumers joining the renewable energy revolution. We need to do more to address climate change, today!

I'm here to talk about renewable energy, apps, EVs, LGBTQ+ identity, leadership, games, realtime rendering, AI & Tech politics and policy, curating content, and...whatever else seems interesting.


  1. I think it's a pretty reasonable wish for more macOS + Apple Silicon support of games, including more native FEX & Proton ARM support within the steam client. (We're lucky Steam works, it's a better games client than the Mac App Store dreams to be, but that's also not saying much either.)
  2. I’ve been following this game on twitter, and I’m probably going to lose my entire weekend to playing it. We need more sweaty simulators like this—the genre doesn’t have enough entries.
  3. > Last Update November 2024

    Would be cool to read more!

  4. Is this not going too far? It's a pretty weak "let's save the kids argument" that only serves to improve mass-surveillance outside of the argument presented. Like, this is the advent of strong thought policing and thought monitoring over the wires—oh no, you can't use a VPN because it's bad for "the kids"!
  5. I think this is an example of above average but not great AI writing. I still read it to the end because the subject is interesting and there is enough focus (and, seemingly) expertise on the topic.

    I think the telltale for me that makes me count as heavily AI-assisted is the lack of inclusion of real, inline examples of actual fares & their restrictions. I know I've seen them broken down before in other content. But not once here was there a full readout of an actual fare bucket & its rules. I think a human writer would have been tempted to include even one of those as an artifact, but an AI as a topic reviewer/summarizer/collator won't unless explicitly instructed.

  6. classic tribes!
  7. It seems like this new PNG spec just cements what exists already, great! The best codecs are the ones that work on everything. PNG and JPEG work everywhere, reliably.

    Try opening a HEIC or AV1 or something on a machine that doesn't natively support it down to the OS-level, and you're in for a bad time. This stuff needs to work everywhere—in every app, in the OS shell for quick-looking at files, in APIs, on Linux, etc. If a codec does not function at that level, it is not functional for wider use and should not be a default for any platform.

  8. Prototype is not a charitable interpretation of the product. If you've been part of hardware, firmware, and software development processes, you'd really truly understand what prototypes are.
  9. How kind of Microsoft to feature Arc, an end-of-life browser, in their screenshot for browser defaults.
  10. I think the point of BlastDoor, as covered in the post, is that Apple is indeed working to prevent injection at the cost of silently failing & poorly handling legitimate messages.

    > By being pedantic about the formatting, BlastDoor is protecting the recipient from an exploit that would abuse that type of issue.

    So, not impossible, but less likely than you think

  11. Perhaps this is a reactionary question, but: shouldn't this be recall worthy? Or is it inherent to Lidar itself?

    This has the potential to damage safety-critical sensors used in backup cameras or autonomous vehicles—and, obviously, inflicts damage on personal property like smartphones.

    Volvo even states online that their sensors can damage cameras: https://www.volvocars.com/uk/support/car/ex90/article/47d2c9...

  12. These counterfactual comparisons are a slippery slope and not as helpful as you think. I hardly think that you, I, or most others have an intuitive understanding for what happens when a 1 gram meteor hits earth. Have you ever witnessed that?

    The average failure state of a battery is not similar to detonating a handful of TNT on an airplane, which is a more instantaneous explosion. Sure, some battery failure states are violent and would unquestionably be a cause for an airplane to call a mayday and land, but something like puncturing a soft-cell battery is still a slower release than TNT.

    We should just expect people to get better at understanding useful units — I'd prefer someone learns Wh since it is indeed a useful metric—kWh is the usual major unit of energy at home, and Wh is just smaller than that.

  13. I would like to see more DF on HN. The something rotten in Cupertino was a shattering post—people in my circle who do not read DF were discussing and sending it around, and I work at a place where so many dang people read HN. So I agree with Gruber’s concern.

    I’m surprised this post too is already flagged.

  14. Yeah, at this market tier 60Hz is a perfectly usable target.
  15. Whoa is just older. https://www.dictionary.com/e/whoa-or-woah/

    Dictionaries are descriptive of actual use, not prescriptive rulings. Both spellings are completely valid, the pedantry is incorrect.

  16. Do signs point toward Apple adopting a unique, new cell chemistry for what will be their high-volume budget product for the next few years? It would have probably been a marketing line if so, similar to the C1 modem. A bigger battery doesn't imply new tech.

    (Yes, the phone expensive now, but these SE-tier phones typically get discounts pretty quickly after release through carriers/non-apple retail; and then a bigger & formal sale price decrease when the next phone generation comes out.)

  17. Less latency is a feature, not a bug. We've just grown too used to latency in everything we use.
  18. This era of new experimental apps from Apple (Invites, Journal, Sports) has me excited about the future of app design. Vibrant colors, bold personality-driven typography, etc. The SwiftUI style onboarding screen that features the carousel is really fun. This approach feels very Apple'y, but gives me more freedom to explore designs for my own app to have its own unique voice on iOS, while still feeling in-family with Apple's other more experimental UI.

    There are a few misses.

    - I already declined a friend's invite, but that doesn't get auto filtered away, so my "decline" is still the primary thing the app has to show me. It's still my only invite, so maybe it gets filtered to the back of the card stack if there are multiple?

    - I also don't seem to be able to see friends I know who were invited to the party (but have not yet responded). Perhaps it was because it was shared as an invite URL in a group chat rather than manually inviting everyone?

  19. Card sleeves are now generally required, at least in Magic the Gathering, because of double sided cards.

    I have a (casual, goofy) deck with some proxies and I earnestly cannot tell the difference when they're sleeved.

  20. This is really exciting—the 12-32b size range has my favorite model size on my home computer, and the mistrals have been historically great and embraced for various fine-tuning.

    At 24b, I think this has a good chance of fitting on my more memory constrained work computer.

  21. It's also just harder to support because of the sheer fragmentation.

    I give my engineers different Android phones as their primary development devices and yet the weird Android issues that keep cropping up are near constant.

  22. As an adult with too much disposable income and a 3090, it just becomes a local LLM server w/ agents when I'm not playing games on it. Didn't even see the potential for it back then, but now I'm convinced that the xx90 series offers me value outside of just gaming uses.
  23. Anecdatally (& disregarding political SMS), my spam call/text frequency has substantially skyrocketed to about 2-4x that of around 2020, to the extent that I am tempted to change phone numbers.
  24. This is a nifty idea. I bet there'll be a HN-correlated pop in fridge whiteboard sales from this.
  25. Below 50v is considered "low voltage". Higher voltage would require different safety considerations.
  26. It would be even cooler if Amazon also encouraged and built a "Kiosk mode" browser view of the kindle for this sort of display hacking.
  27. You can easily use a plugin like https://www.continue.dev/ and configure it to use Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
  28. This article reads with the tone & pacing of AI slop.

    Edit: coverage with better reporting & screenshots of the problem: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258693/ps5-update-news-..., https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-homescreen-now-replaces-uni...

  29. This article reads with the tone & pacing of AI slop.
  30. I think this counts as flight time, not paperwork & preparation time on the ground.

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