musicale (u/musicale)

musicale commented on The Fancy Rug Dilemma epan.land/essays/2025-8_F... · Posted by u/ericpan64

musicale · an hour ago

I always assumed that the rug shops were for money laundering.

Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.

Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.

Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.

musicale commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

echelon · 9 hours ago

Both platforms are closed. There is no choice.

Do you know how difficult it is to exercise your freedom to install software on an Android?

Both of these companies know what they're doing. They've co-opted computing and have locked it down and owned it.

musicale · 2 hours ago

> Do you know how difficult it is to exercise your freedom to install software on an Android?

Download the APK, open it, and tap past the warnings?

https://www.androidauthority.com/how-to-install-apks-31494/

Isn't that about the same difficulty as installing an app from a .zip on Windows or a .dmg on macOS?

musicale commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

echelon · 9 hours ago

Phones aren't rinky-dinky little games. Games, that mind you, have over a dozen choices in terms of platforms and are highly competitive.

Phones are used for everything in life. Finding jobs, finding romance, ordering food, paying for things, navigating. You can't even pull up a menu at a modern restaurant without a phone.

Phones are the entirety of computing for over 50% of Americans. Are we going to let two companies own the entirety of that and tax it?

Imagine if our cars were like phones. When you take your Honda out for a spin, if it couldn't visit certain destinations. Or if your car taxed McDonalds (which passes the cost onto you) every time you stop by. Imagine if it shoved its view of what it wants you to see in front of you, forcing you to take detours or miss your objective entirely. That's what our lax regulatory environment has allowed to happen to computing.

musicale · 2 hours ago

> Imagine if our cars were like phones. When you take your Honda out for a spin, if it couldn't visit certain destinations

What web sites are you seeing that are blocked on Android (or is is just an issue in Chrome?)

Have you tried turning off "Safe Browsing"?

It's arguably a legitimate safety feature, but I believe you can turn it off and visit any web site.

I think sites presenting forged or expired SSL certificates are blocked (probably a legitimate security feature), but it may be possible to add them manually if desired.

musicale commented on Determinants and causal effects of admission to selective private colleges [pdf] (2023) nber.org/system/files/wor... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

mistrial9 · 4 hours ago

years ago I had no interest in this old football rivalry stuff.. very, very smart people work&play hard individually at both places. However once things get more organized, the differences are indeed profound for example, the rise and concentration of capital on the one hand, and the Nobel prizes and social contracts on the other. Agree that both places are large enough, active enough, stable enough such that simple comparisons are certainly refutable. However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two. The inward and enduring commitment to certain (polarized) politics, in both cases, is evident to me. Both institutions can claim societal-level accomplishments in the pure sciences..

musicale · 2 hours ago

Berkeley has more Nobel prizes (and actual elements in the periodic table); Stanford has more Turing awards (with MIT at #2 between Stanford and Berkeley).

> However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two

This is true. Stanford isn't too far removed from Berkeley by grad student enrollment (10K vs. 12K) but the undergraduate enrollment is tiny by comparison (7.5K vs. 33K).

musicale commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

johnecheck · 19 hours ago

The 30% cut hurts every developer, not just the minority building bad games that make the world worse.

musicale · 18 hours ago

Smartphone game stores aren't the only option for game developers. They could go with Nintendo eShop (30% platform fee), or Sony PSN store (30% platform fee), or Xbox store (30% platform fee). Hmm, maybe there's a trend here?

More seriously, Android does allow sideloading and alternative game stores. There are also subscription services like Xbox game pass, Amazon Luna, and Apple Arcade, though I don't know their exact payment models. And PC gaming still exists - there are popular game stores like Steam that take a smaller cut.

I think it's hard to make money on games on any platform, but Steam does seem to have a vibrant indie game scene.

musicale commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

ivape · 20 hours ago

30% is not skimming.

musicale · 18 hours ago

It's a platform fee.

musicale commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

georgeecollins · 18 hours ago

You are 100% right! The difference is that a phone is necessity that tends to a monopoly, unlike say a PlayStation or a handheld game platform. But no question in the game space where you can choose platforms, a walled garden is great. That's why Steam is really good, and if it wasn't you could get your games from the Windows app store, or the Epic Store..

musicale · 18 hours ago

The phone/necessity part of smartphones seems largely independent from the game store part, since you can usually choose from multiple wireless providers, sms/mms (and now rcs) all work, email works, and web browsers also work.

musicale commented on Build Log: Macintosh Classic jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

tom_ · a day ago

If you used them when they were current, the emulator experience is never quite the same. The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT (and even now you're no longer 15-25 years old), and there's always at least a bit of sound latency. Also, you're using a modern keyboard and mouse.

On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)

The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!

musicale · 18 hours ago

> On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect

Fortunately there are FPGA implementations, though you might want a non-USB gamepad and keyboard, and a CRT (or maybe a 120Hz or better HDMI display?) to get closest to the original performance.

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/

musicale commented on Build Log: Macintosh Classic jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

tom_ · a day ago

If you used them when they were current, the emulator experience is never quite the same. The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT (and even now you're no longer 15-25 years old), and there's always at least a bit of sound latency. Also, you're using a modern keyboard and mouse.

On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect. CRTs, floppy disk drives, floppy disks, hard disk drives, key switches, mice with balls, aging capacitors, batteries, little plastic bits inside the keyboard that you didn't even realise were there until they crumbled into dust - they all go bad in the long run, and the repair always eats up at least a bit of time. (Even assuming it's actually repairable! Battery damage can be literally unfixable. Parts supply generally can be an issue. Mouldy floppy disks are time-consuming to rescue, and can damage the drives as you attempt it. Those little plastic keyboard bits are theoretically 3d printable, but you'll need to figure out what shape they were originally and how to glue them into place. And so on.)

The long-term prognosis for modern computers is uncertain too - but the nice thing about them is that you can always just buy another one. Turns out they're always making more of them!

musicale · 18 hours ago

> The input latency is always detectably worse, especially without a CRT

Apple 2e for the win! 1 MHz is (apparently) enough for anyone. ;-)

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290118