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In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3

(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"

So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.


That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.

1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.

2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).


Americans think they're "free and democratic" in the same way that aristocrats think they're better than everyone - it's been inculcated in them since birth, by every aspect of the culture and their upbringing, and as an axiomatic belief, it's not something they challenge.

There's nuance, of course, with people who are worse off in America seeing some cracks in it, but that's how you get the idiom about "Americans vote like temporarily inconvenienced millionaires" - they are so convinced the game isn't rigged against them that they vote assuming they will win at the casino one day.


There exist a great many people in the world who think that the only important thing is having a good enough idea, and everything else is almost valueless by comparison. You've probably met them, people who say things like "I just need someone to code it, can you sign this NDA, what do you mean you want to be paid, it's just coding?"

They exist in other formats too - blogs in the vein of "for exposure" cover the same premise, mostly.

Vibe coding has allowed them all to try and show everyone how right they were.


Right, but most of them don't already work as software engineers, at least it hasn't been my experience of my colleagues. However, companies that are aggressively adopting AI coding tools aren't (at least nobody has shown it) getting better by any metric. So, what gives? Why, generally, isn't this kind of success story common?

Because most tasks aren't "refresh this code from 10-20 years ago"?

If you needed an old piece of code at $WORK, you probably already paid the tax of refreshing it or replacing it.

This sort of task is similar in nature to something like "I have a 25yo unmaintained Linux driver, let's refresh it for modern Linux" - a great demonstration of the efficacy of these tools if you have the right-shaped task, but not a task that comes up repeatedly in most people's days.


That's a good point, this does seem qualitatively different. Like dialect translation. In that case the specification is really precise, it's just the old code. Building something new or adding functionality to existing software the spec is almost guaranteed to be more vague.

EDIT: this specificity seems important for language models but the harder I think about it the less sure I am that it's the right intuition..


My intuition is that what makes them well suited is that the transformations on the input desired are well-defined and frequent tasks - e.g. any other software that migrated from, say, SDL1 to SDL2, or had to move from gcc 3 to 4, or Sun cc to gcc, had to have these transformations in their source history.

IOW, "there is probably very little stopping you except time from having written Coccinelle patches to mechanically do most of these transformations".


How have you found syncthing's scaling?

I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.


It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.

On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).

They say pretty directly in the post that they didn't want to deal with the hassles around dongles and uncommon ports for using this as a Linux PC in their pocket.


is usb-c really an uncommon port these days? I think I have more usb-c to hdmi cables lying around than actual hdmi cables


Imagine you check into a hotel, and want to use the in-room TV as your display. There is probably a set top box there with an HDMI port going to the TV. You would be able to unplug that and plug it into your Flipper One because it has a full-sized HDMI port.

Go to any store, and look at what cable they use to connect their POS computer to the display. It's probably HDMI.

For better or worse, HDMI is extremely ubiquitous.


In contrast, I have never owned a USB-C to HDMI cable, and I don't know of any device except perhaps my phone that might be able to make use of one.


They do appear to be trying to build something a bit more bespoke than that, where they want something like Fedora Silverblue or what systemd seems to want to present, in terms of contained overlays for snapshotting when you make changes and then going "oh no" without requiring a full reinstall.

God knows if they'll end up scaling back their goals, but the vision isn't "just" a few custom integrations.


They mention in the comments intending to have modes that solely run on the microcontroller, so I imagine that might help somewhat.

This also feels like the target market is people who said they dangled this off an RPi-alike to do something that the microcontroller simply did not have the processing to do.


From my understanding, the problem is volume.

You want to land a substantial amount of, ahem, shit in there, since don't just want it to colonize one portion of the gut, and it's got quite a lot of competition.

So you would be talking a truly astonishing number of pills, I think, to compare to the volume you can manage with a tube.

WP suggests that it's about 100g (or 100000mg) of actual feces then mixed in a larger volume of saline or milk, and you'd probably need to have additional volume for assumed losses and whatever coating you think would work.

That is a _huge_ amount to put in pills.


Good point, but shit seems to be made of a lot of stuff- ~75% water, undigested food and fiber, fats, inorganic matter... Bacteria seem to be about ~30% of the dry weight. So of those 100 grams, you'd get maybe 7/8 grams of bacteria? If so, these could possibly be delivered by a number of small capsules taken in the course of several days.


I think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism.

If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.


Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length.

So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.

Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.


A personal pet peeve of mine as well, and a good example of when a product is trying to be too clever. I think (suspect) what is happening is that it is remembering partial matches and your selection, but like you I find it has the opposite effect.

If I type `f`, the first item on the list is Firefox, if I then type `fi`, it selects Figma instead. Keep typing, `fig`, now it has a Safari tab selected instead for figma.com. Pinnacle UX.


Yes, there have been some obvious race conditions - especially with the web results or on gnome/linux with the listing of open browser tabs.

In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.

Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.


Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything.

Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"

I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.

I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)

And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.


Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?!

Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the predictability of "never doing what I expect or want").


Everything is an absolute gem. I literally cannot survive on the work computer without it. At home on Linux, this is one of things (probably the only one even) I really missed from Windows.


Have you seen FSearch? https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch It's quite similar to Everything.

Btw, there's also fooyin which you may say is "modeled" after foobar2000 https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin - another piece I miss from Windows.


Ah yes, FSearch is what I'm using right now. Although, correct me if I'm wrong, it relied on a search database and is slower? I remember reading somewhere that Everything is so quick because of NTFS - not sure about the technical details, though.


That's annoying, but I think what's worse is these:

Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.

And

Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.


Yes, I've had a number of these.

One of the most annoying ones combined these two properties, so depending on various internal races, typing a four letter word would either open one program, the folder that program was installed in (!?), or attempt to Bing the common word


I must say, for a library advertising handling of streams of data, the absence of a stream utility to [input] | fc | fc -d surprised me.

I understand this is more the primitive that you would build such a thing on top of, just that the first question I always have for novel compressors is "how do they do on these example streams of data".


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