nexuist (u/nexuist) - Readit News

nexuist commented on Iowa City made its buses free. Traffic cleared, and so did the air nytimes.com/2025/11/18/cl... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

6510 · 3 months ago

Some countries have cameras on public transport with security people watching the footage live. If someone misbehaves ever so slightly (like drinking alcohol) the doors wont open until enforcers arrive. With modern AI you can have one person monitor countless cameras. They could even retract before the doors open so that you cant smash or spray them and run away.

nexuist · 3 months ago

Assuming a perfect system this still fails because you have now locked in all the law abiding citizens with someone who has proven they are ready to break the rules, effectively inventing a hostage situation out of thin air whereby a miscreant can terrorize their fellow passengers for the duration of the police response time.

nexuist commented on More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad daringfireball.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/dotcoma

grishka · 7 months ago

Except the way some system notifications worked on iOS was always disrespectful. The kind where you unlock your device with a clear goal in mind and a modal alert pops up telling you that your battery is low, or that something "important" happened to your Apple ID, or that a system update is available, or asks you to set up iMessage again, or some other shit that of course has no relationship to what you're trying to do this very moment. It's rudely diverting your attention, interrupting your train of thought. That isn't respectful by any stretch of imagination, and they've been doing it since at least iOS 6.

Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.

nexuist · 7 months ago

This is a legacy design decision all the way back to iOS 1 before notifications existed. SMS messages used to be delivered through the same modal system. I believe the Apple ID and update messages are now banner notifications, and the battery alert gives you an easy way to turn on Low Power Mode, although I agree there should be a way to make that a banner notif as well.

nexuist commented on Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was -280° F / -173° C arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/01-_-

areoform · a year ago

If you take the time to study the documentation from the 1950s & 1960s, the engineering culture of that era appears to be markedly different from the engineering culture prevalent today. And I think it's deeply rooted in the symbiotic relationship between computing, Baumol's cost disease and our obsession with precision, results-oriented, MBA-style-min-maxing, "good enough for government work" engineering.

Robert Truax, the designer of the Sea Dragon, loved to promote the design paradigm of Big Dumb Boosters. Instead of many small, sophisticated rocket engines, what if we made one big robust one that can take a lickin' and keep on kickin'.

The idea was to relax the mass margins and to create big. dumb. boosters. It's the approach TRW explicitly followed for the Lunar Module engine,

   > "There was an amusing but instructive side to this program. TRW farmed-out the fabrication of the engine and its supporting structure, less the injector that they fabricated themselves, to a "job-shop" commercial steel fabricator located near their facility . The contract price was $ 8000. Two TRW executives visited the facility to observe the fabrication process. They found only one individual working on the hardware, and when queried, he did not know nor care that he was building an aerospace rocket engine."

   > " I had arrived late to witness the test, and only saw the firing. I was told by others who witnessed the entire test procedure that the engine was pulled out of outdoor storage where it lay unprotected against the elements. Before it was placed on the launch stand, the test crew dusted off the desert sand that had clung to it. This unplanned inlcusion [sic] of a bit of an environmental test also demonstrated hardware ruggedness of the kind no other liquid rocket eingine [sic] could approach."

The Surveyor program managed to make it "just work" 5 out of 7 times by adopting this approach. It had robust landing legs and RADAR. They would decelerate and then shut off the engine 11' above the surface. The wide, sturdy legs would then absorb that final impact of coming stand still from free fall.

These programs had a lot of capital behind them. Some components required precision engineering, but there's a very clear through line and embrace of the "we gotta make stuff that can take a lickin' & keeps kickin'" philosophy.

Modern engineering approaches seem to be the opposite of that. I think we've become so accustomed to living in a silicon driven world where our personal devices are engineered at microscopic level that we've forgotten how to do things the Apollo-era way.

For example, to the best of my knowledge, IM-2 doesn't use RADAR — they're using LIDAR and optical navigation instead. Perhaps it is to save on mass and power so that more payload reaches the surface. Perhaps optical navigation was declared to be "good enough." Perhaps it doesn't make sense from a minmaxing of capital perspective. But this philosophy may not be suited to an untamed frontier.

China adopted the Surveyor / Apollo-era philosophy. Their first successful lander, Chang'e 3, used the same hover & fall technique as Surveyor.

    > The vehicle will hover at this altitude, moving horizontally under its own guidance to avoid obstacles, and then slowly descend to 4 m above the ground, at which point its engine will shut down for a free-fall onto the lunar surface. The landing site will be at Sinus Iridum, at a latitude of 44º.

It chose the terminal landing sites with the help of LIDAR and its cameras, but it relied on RADAR and a suite of sensors to have robust navigation.

The follow up missions up-ed the ante every time, but they seem to have consistently focused on the robustness of their craft over precision, MBA-spreadsheet-oriented minmax-ing.

nexuist · a year ago

It is all downstream of the loss of the manufacturing industry in America. In the 50s you could entrust a random guy to build a liquid rocket engine in a dusty garage because he spent every day of his career building various pipes and combustion chambers. All of these guys are now dead or retired so when you try to build hardware today you get new grads who settle on LIDAR and computer vision not because it is the best choice but because it is literally all that they are familiar with; the old solutions have all ceased to exist within the minds of employees and classrooms.

nexuist commented on Show HN: GoatDB – A lightweight, offline-first, realtime NoDB for Deno and React github.com/goatplatform/g... · Posted by u/justagoat

sgarland · a year ago

> lighter than SQLite

You’re concerned that a < 1 MiB library is too heavy, so you wrote a DB in TS?

> easier to self-host

How is something that requires a JS runtime easier than a single-file compiled binary?

nexuist · a year ago

This is clearly intended for use in web applications so a JS runtime comes for free and the package is only 8.2kb

nexuist commented on Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels ytch.xyz... · Posted by u/hadisafa

nexuist · a year ago

Hey, this is great! Could you make it so clicking on the video ID in the bottom right corner opens the full video in a new tab? It would be nice to be able to like / save the whole video for later. Kinda like DVR.

nexuist commented on Basic ReAct webapp using FastHTML and LangGraph github.com/jank/curiosity... · Posted by u/jankar

nexuist · 2 years ago

At long last: A way to write web apps in Python while preserving the un-Googleable naming conventions of JavaScript frameworks

nexuist commented on Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars autoweek.com/news/a615322... · Posted by u/speckx

shortrounddev2 · 2 years ago

This uses GPS data, not optical recognition

nexuist · 2 years ago

Awesome, so in addition to confusing aircraft and sending them in the wrong directions, Putin can also stop everyone from driving in Europe whenever he feels like it.

nexuist commented on Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago news.asu.edu/20240617-sci... · Posted by u/geox

alun · 2 years ago

You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process

nexuist · 2 years ago

That essay also loosely inspired the opening scene of Lord of War, which showcases the journey of a bullet from an underground mine to an Eastern European factory all the way into the head of an African child soldier.