Kobo (ereader) + Pocket was always just an amazing and low friction combo. This blows.
This is the primary way I read longer articles on the internet. I hope something else pops up because this changes my daily routine pretty significantly.
Readit Newstacoman commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg
tacoman commented on Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? nytimes.com/2025/03/01/wo... · Posted by u/throwaway13337
Let's consider a positive-sum economy. Over time, the total amount of value in the economy grows. That additional value comes from innovation, but whose innovation?
I grew up in Australia, in the state of New South Wales. In the end-of-secondary-school exams, the most popular subject in NSW is English, because it's compulsory. The second most popular subject is Business Studies. There's an awful lot of entrepreneurial spirit there.
But the reality of the Australian economy is that its complexity is declining: the economic activity is ever more concentrated into fewer and fewer industries. Sure, there are some industries, like hospitality, where you can start your own business, but the bulk of the economy is dominated by a small number of large companies: a handful of mining companies, two supermarkets, and so on. Every now and then, there's a new government initiative, like the National Disability Insurance Scheme or the opening up of vocational training to private providers, and a few years later, there's a big scandal, because most of the companies providing these services turn out to be fraudulent. So much of Australia's economic activity is tied up in pre-existing businesses that it seems that the only way to do anything novel is to rip off the government.
There was a time when Australians started innovative businesses: Victa lawn mowers, the Hills Hoist clothes line, and so on. Ford Australia and Holden (owned by General Motors) competed to build the best cars for the Australian market. This was a time of optimism and increasing living standards, when impoverished workers were enticed to emigrate to Australia by the Great Australian Dream: a detached house and a car of your very own!
But now that airfares a cheap, talented Australians emigrate to the UK, the US, or the EU, and do their innovative work there. Thanks to tax breaks, the best possible investment you can make in Australia is to own someone else's home. The population is increasing faster than ever, but housebuilding is slowing down. The housing crisis has been building for twenty years now; anger turns to ennui. A belief that Australia has no future is slowly starting to coalesce. Australia has entered a zero sum death spiral.
The solution is to create an economy where the old bootstraps analogy actually holds: where simple, honest hard work actually improves one's lot in life. An economy where anyone can innovate, not just university graduates with millions in venture capital funding: the economy that the Baby Boomers grew up in.
If only we knew how to create those conditions without having to fight a world war first.
Almost everything you have written here can also describe Canada. There is an Australian YouTuber named Chris Kohler who does really funny little shorts describing things happening in the Aussie economy and it’s jarring how often they apply directly to Canada also.
tacoman commented on The gem Apple discontinued: the 11-inch MacBook Air (2019) morrick.me/archives/8338... · Posted by u/tosh
I'm not much of a MacOS fan, but his laptop is the best laptop I've ever owned. I got the 8GB/256GB version and it was worth the price because my kid still uses it every day. The 720p webcam is fantastic quality. The speakers are the best I've ever had in a laptop.
We just replaced the battery with a new one from iFixit and it's like a brand new machine.
The only downside i
tacoman commented on Instant macOS install on Proxmox including AMD patches github.com/luchina-gabrie... · Posted by u/goodburb
tacoman commented on Woman, 82, still rides same bike she was given at 13 telegraph.co.uk/world-new... · Posted by u/tcfhgj
It’s an interesting phenomenon how people go on through life with their belongings and not notice their age.
I have some Prana pants that I really like, but don't wear too often. Recently someone asked me where I got them and I said, "hmm maybe 5 years ago at MEC." A month later I came across a picture of me wearing those same pants on a fishing trip 16 years ago.
I miss n-gate
Some weeks would go by and I would just check n-gate to see what happened on HN.
tacoman commented on Brave Leo now uses Mixtral 8x7B as default brave.com/leo-mixtral/... · Posted by u/b_mc2
Using TheBloke nous-hermes-2-mixtral-8x7b-dpo.Q5_K_M.gguf, llam.cpp with oobabooga, on Ryzen 9 7950x and RTX 2070 super, offloading 4 layers to the GPU.
27,631MiB system memory used.
7358/8192MiB usage on the GPU.
I'm getting 6.32 tokens/second.
You: You are Hunter S. Thompson, write a 450 words essay on the LHC project. The writing must be in Thompson's style
AI: Well, buckle up, kiddos, because we're about to dive into the twisted world of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider, or as I like to call it, the Doomsday Machine. This beast of a thing is buried deep beneath the Swiss countryside, a 17-mile-long ring of death and destruction that makes the atom bomb look like a goddamn firecracker.
Now, let me tell you, when the Swiss government first proposed this monstrosity, I thought they'd gone completely batshit crazy. But then again, this is the land of Toblerone and Heidi, so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised. The LHC is essentially a giant, underground racetrack for subatomic particles, where they're accelerated to nearly the speed of light before being smashed into each other like a couple of drunken frat boys at a kegger.
The goal of this madness? To recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang, when the universe was nothing more than a seething cauldron of energy and chaos. And if that doesn't sound like a recipe for disaster, I don't know what does.
But let's not forget the real reason we're all here: the Higgs boson, or as it's more commonly known, the God Particle. This little bugger is what gives other particles their mass, and without it, we'd all be floating around like a bunch of cosmic tumbleweeds. The LHC was designed to find this elusive particle, and in 2012, they finally did it. Sort of.
You see, the Higgs boson they found was a bit of a disappointment. It was too light, too wimpy, and didn't behave quite the way they expected it to. So now, the physicists are back at the drawing board, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong. And in the meantime, the LHC continues to churn out more and more data, like some kind of unholy particle-smashing machine.
But let's not forget the dark side of the LHC. There are those who believe that this thing could very well be the end of the world as we know it. They fear that the LHC could create a black hole, or even a miniature Big Bang, right here on Earth. And while the scientists assure us that these fears are unfounded, I can't help but wonder if they're just whistling past the graveyard.
So, what have we learned from all this? Well, for one thing, we've discovered that the universe is a much stranger place than we ever imagined. We've also learned that even the most brilliant minds can be blinded by their own ambition, and that sometimes, the pursuit of knowledge can lead us down some very dark paths.
In the end, the LHC is a testament to the insatiable curiosity of the human race, and our unquenchable thirst for knowledge. It's a monument to the power of science, and the potential consequences of playing God. And as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible, we must always remember that with great power comes great responsibility. Or, as I like to say, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
I am using the exact same model. Ryzen 5600G w/32GB and an Nvidia P40 w/24GB VRAM
20/33 layers offloaded to GPU, 4K context. Uses 25GB system RAM and all 24GB VRAM. 5-7 tokens per second.
I live in Hungary and I have fiber and IPTV from Deutsche Telekom. You can choose between 2 set top boxes, an older model with Windows CE and the newer one with Android. The technician said they much more problems with Android. The system itself has more features but WinCE is just more robust. Anecdotal story I know but at least it's still in use in some areas of the world.
The Mediaroom IPTV platform which DT is probably using has millions of deployed STBs still running WinCE 5.0.
tacoman commented on Ask HN: What item/service can you buy for less than $50 that is life changing? · Posted by u/jharohit
A simple bidet like a Neo 120. It simply baffles me that North Americans haven’t caught on to how life changing this is.
(To be clear, they still work today if you can get a second hand remote / hub.)
I will use Harmony for my home setup until it no longer functions.
The horrors I have seen related to CEC and ARC are something else.