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avar commented on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android   9to5google.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/kotaKat
pjmlp · 2 days ago
I really would like to have been payed to use Windows phones, especially as former Nokia employee.

I was in Espoo, the week following the burning platforms memo.

However it represented a third option, to a percentage no Linux phone distribution has ever achieved since Open Moko.

Maybe Maemo could have been it, had not been for Nokia's board decision to bring in Elop.

avar · 12 hours ago

    > I really would like to have been payed
    > to use Windows phones
I meant paid in the indirect sense of being the beneficiary of a loss leader for Microsoft.

I.e. I'm poking holes in your (somewhat unstated) premise that they'd already reached around 10% of marketshare, and could have just organically grown from there. As reporting at the time shows[1] the average selling price of these phones was €72.4.

So Microsoft (Nokia, but we all know who was really running/paying for the show) were spending a lot of money to buy themselves into the market, and just barely holding on to double digit market share for a bit there by subsidizing entry level phones.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/01/microsoft...

avar commented on Starship's Tenth Flight Test   spacex.com/... · Posted by u/metalman
dotnet00 · 2 days ago
The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.

It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.

avar · 2 days ago
If "rapid reusability" was a proxy goal for maintaining a given launch pace we wouldn't need any of this.

We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.

The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.

avar commented on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful   iflscience.com/the-wow-si... · Posted by u/toss1
fny · 2 days ago
Here's a related thought experiment for those hoping for interstellar kumbaya:

On planet Jung dwell the Jungians, sapien-like beings who need only a single cup of a rare liquid to live an entire lifetime. For humans, that same cup grants twenty extra years of healthy life.

Human just landed on the planet Jung and discovered the liquid--what happens next?

avar · 2 days ago
The "2 sentients 1 cup" thought experiment?
avar commented on What happens when ambassadors are summoned by the host country?   politics.stackexchange.co... · Posted by u/azeemba
averageRoyalty · 2 days ago
> The US has some disagreements with Brazil (or, rather, Trump does, because they're putting a former national leader on trial).

That seems an odd clarification. Do you not believe a democratically elected leader represents a country? Every country has people who disagree with their leaders views, however this clarification on every statement would get tiring quickly.

avar · 2 days ago
It's because before Bush invaded Iraq it would have been redundant to clarify that Bush said such and such in an official (written) capacity, as opposed to describing what the foreign policy goals of the US were at that moment. The two were synonymous.

Whereas when Trump was making overtures to annex Canada, it was useful to the rest of the world to explain that that's something the president was talking about that weekend, as opposed to signs that this might be something the US would actually do.

avar commented on What happens when ambassadors are summoned by the host country?   politics.stackexchange.co... · Posted by u/azeemba
tln · 2 days ago
What does this mean "to encourage French Jews to do their ahria with free money"

Despite Googling, I'm lost on what "ahria" means

avar · 2 days ago
It's a misspelling of "aliyah", which is a term for jews outside of Israel immigrating to Israel.

They're saying Israel's currently spending advertising money in France hoping to convince French jews to move to Israel.

avar commented on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?   righto.com/2025/08/Cr2Ge2... · Posted by u/freediver
jessfyi · 2 days ago
Getting a compound incorrect is not an "unimportant" error (for example the difference between sodium nitrate & sodium nitrite is small but critical) and seeing "small but blatant" errors actively propagated is the entire reason why the record should be corrected. The only upside of these little artifacts like "vegetative electron microscopy" [0] is that it's a leading indicator that the entire paper and team deserve more scrutiny--as well as any of those whom cite it.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...

avar · 2 days ago
I believe they meant that it's "unimportant" because (to use your example) sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite actually exist, whereas there's no element with the chemical symbol "Gr".
avar commented on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android   9to5google.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/kotaKat
pjmlp · 2 days ago
Microsoft was stupid, in EU they were slowly reaching 10% when they decided to kill WP, it was getting momentum as the alternative for those that didn't want Android and weren't going to spend Apple money for a phone device.

And actually the development experience was much better than Android to this day.

But that isn't coming back, especially after they killed all developer good will on Windows OS for everyone that invested into WinRT as platform.

avar · 2 days ago
How much of that 10% was them basically paying OEM's and consumers to use Windows, which is what the Nokia deal amounted to? It wasn't sustainable.

Whatever benefit we'd have from a Windows Phone today, it's laughable to think that Microsoft wouldn't be doubling down on exactly the sort of locked-down devices Apple (and now Google) have or are moving towards.

Their only vaguely "open" platform (Windows) is like that because of legacy compatibility and customers, but for anything new Microsoft always wanted to sell you an Xbox that could make phonecalls. Try writing and deploying an app on that without a developer account.

avar commented on Google's Liquid Cooling   chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
liquidgecka · 3 days ago
> > CDUs exchange heat between coolant liquid and the facility-level water supply.

Oh interesting I missed that when I went through in the first pass. (I think I space bared to pass the image and managed to skip the entire paragraph in between the two images so that’s on me.

I was running off an informal discussion I had with a hardware ops person several years ago where he mentioned a push to unify cooling and eliminate thermal transfer points since they were one of the major elements of inefficiency in modern cooling solutions. By missing that as I browsed through it I think I leaned too heavily on my assumptions without realizing it!

Also, not all chips can be liquid cooled so there will always be an element of air cooling so the fans and stuff are still there for the “everything else” cases and I doubt anybody will really eliminate that effectively. The comment you quoted was mostly directed towards the idea that Cray-1 had liquid cooling, it did, but it transferred to air outside of the server which was an extremely common model for most older mainframe setups. It was rare for the heat to be kept liquid along the whole path.

avar · 3 days ago

    > not all chips can be
    > liquid cooled.
Why not? It's just a heatsink except with water running through cavities within it, instead of a fan sitting on top of the heatsink.

avar commented on Git-Annex   git-annex.branchable.com/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
kajika91 · 3 days ago
I'm using my self-hosted forgejo. I don't see any benefit of git-annex over LFS so far, I'm not even sure I could setup annex as easily.

Digging a little bit I found that git-annex is coded in haskell (not a fan) and seems to be 50% slower (expected from haskell but also only 1 source so far so not really reliable).

I don't see appeal of the complexity of the commands, they probably serve a purpose. Once you opened a .gitattributes from git-LFS you pretty much know all you need and you barely need any commands anymore.

Also I like how setting up a .gitattribute makes everything transparent the same way .gitignore works. I don't see any equivalent with git-annex.

Lastly any "tutorial" or guide about git-annex that won't show me an equivalent of 'git lfs ls-files' will definitely not appeal to me. I'm a big user of 'git status' and 'git lfs ls-files' to check/re-check everything.

avar · 3 days ago
Annex isn't slow because it's written in Haskell, it tends to be slow because of I/O and paranoia that's warranted as the default behavior in a distributed backup tool.

E.g. if you drop something it'll by default check the remotes it has access to for that content in real time, it can be many orders of magnitude faster to use --fast etc., to (somewhat unsafely) skip all that and trust whatever metadata you have a local copy of.

avar commented on Git-Annex   git-annex.branchable.com/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
ttiurani · 4 days ago
Relevant discussion 9 days ago about the new native git large object promisers in "The future of large files in Git is Git":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916783

avar · 3 days ago
Thanks, also not-so-relevant, for the reasons I noted in a comment in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44922405

I.e. annex is really in a different problem space than "big files in git", despite the obvious overlap.

A good way to think about it is that git-annex is sort of a git-native and distributed solution to the storage problem at the "other side" ("server side") of something like LFS, and to reason about it from there.

u/avar

KarmaCake day16607March 11, 2010
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http://github.com/avar and at avarab@gmail.com
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