underbluewaters (u/underbluewaters)

underbluewaters commented on Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1 libroot.org/posts/going-t... · Posted by u/libroot

jjordan · 3 months ago

If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.

Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.

underbluewaters · 3 months ago

I don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.

underbluewaters commented on What the heck is going on at Apple? cnn.com/2025/12/06/tech/a... · Posted by u/methuselah_in

kace91 · 3 months ago

>as critics say Apple, once a tech leader, is behind in the next big wave: artificial intelligence.

Most critics I see deal with the fact that they’re fad chasing and delivering without their flagship polish (for both new products and updates). This narrative is likely to push apple deeper into the well if it becomes the mainstream spin.

underbluewaters · 3 months ago

As a mac user since 2006 I see the problem as twofold.

  1. Siri has always been terrible. The rise of chatbots has made that fact even more obvious. It's such low hanging fruit to integrate some sort of llm chatbot. Why didn't they do it years ago?
  2. Their advertisements all mention Apple Intelligence. Costco today was advertising "Macs with Apple Intelligence" as a headline feature. I use MacOS and iOS everyday and I'm not even sure what they are referring to. It's probably fine if their AI strategy isn't clear yet, but stop letting marketing act like they've already shipped it. That they have been promoting this non-existent feature since 2024 is embarrassing.

underbluewaters commented on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 ft.com/content/23e54a28-6... · Posted by u/akira_067

superxpro12 · 4 months ago

for the same problems with amazon, youre relying on a computer to tell you what to buy, which is very shortly going to be infested with promoted products and adverts instead of genuine advice. The AI implementers will poison the responses in the name of advertising, of this i have zero doubt in my mind.

underbluewaters · 4 months ago

10+ years ago you could in fact just pick the best-reviewed product on Amazon at a certain price point and have a great experience! God help you if you tried that today.

underbluewaters commented on Harnessing America's heat pump moment heatpumped.org/p/harnessi... · Posted by u/ssuds

andrewvc · 5 months ago

One other challenge is for existing homes a water heater may only have a gas line running to it. Want a heat pump hot water heater? Hiring the electrician alone, not to mention potentially ripping up walls will ruin any economic advantage.

underbluewaters · 5 months ago

This was a major barrier for me. I had to replace an existing natural, tanked gas water heater. Ultimately I just bought a $750 replacement because I could easily swap it out myself. Installing a heat pump would have involved an electrician to install a new circuit, and possibly other changes. While there were some 120v models available locally, they all had pretty bad reviews. So I would have paid a couple thousand dollars more. Maybe I could break even over 10 years paying less for gas but that seemed like a poor use of funds.

underbluewaters commented on New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care governor.state.nm.us/2025... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

marknutter · 6 months ago

There is something sad about not spending as much time as you possibly can with your children in their younger years, though.

underbluewaters · 6 months ago

I think it's healthy for parents to have other pursuits. Not everyone is 100% fulfilled hanging out with young children all day, and that's perfectly fine.

Even with daycare, parents are spending a substantial portion of their time with their children.

underbluewaters commented on New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care governor.state.nm.us/2025... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

Aurornis · 6 months ago

> You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it

My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.

The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.

From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.

underbluewaters · 6 months ago

This was surprising to me too. I think there was some guilt around having a child and not spending 100% of our time caring for them. The reality was that quality daycare teachers have a lot of experience and a support network that enables them to create a great environment for learning. Socializing with peers from a young age was a huge benefit. While I'm sure they'll catch up, when observing kids the same age who hadn't been to "school" yet, it was clear that these kids hadn't developed at the same rate. Even if I had all the resources in the world, I'd still send my kids to a good daycare vs trying to replicate these learning opportunities at home.

underbluewaters commented on MapLibre Tile: A next generation geospatial format optimized for rendering arxiv.org/abs/2508.10791... · Posted by u/mtremmel

underbluewaters · 7 months ago

Very interested to see what improved runtime performance looks like when this is implemented in MapLibre GL JS. I thought this effort was just focused on reducing tile size (meh). I run into runtime performance issues all the time when visualizing scientific data layers in mapbox gl js. If you build a "traditional" web map portal around MVT with lots of layers people can toggle this can become an issue. Still better than other options, but I'm excited to see what a new format with tight gpu renderer support could achieve.

underbluewaters commented on Show HN: QuickTunes: Apple Music player for Mac with iPod vibes furnacecreek.org/quicktun... · Posted by u/albertru90

dangus · 8 months ago

It’s a pet peeve of mine to continually hear about how the Apple Music app is bloated.

Apple literally reduced the bloat compared to the past. They removed podcast, TV/movie, and device management out of the app and moved them into dedicated places.

What mythical person is struggling with the performance of Apple Music on an Apple Silicon Mac? The same Macs that can handle 4K Final Cut Pro video editing with 8GB of RAM are struggling with a 20 year old music app?

I have a lot of complaints about the app but “slow” and “bloated” are not on that list. It’s just an outdated take.

underbluewaters · 8 months ago

It's not about the feature set. The Music app is the only software I use which randomly locks up my whole mac, just trying to do basic stuff like play a song or navigate albums. Doesn't seem to be related to whether I'm browsing Apple Music or my own library. This is on both my M1 MacBook Pro, and on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio in the office. It's baffling that something that worked so well in 2008 is such a dog in 2025. It's like using winamp in 1998.

underbluewaters commented on The Visual World of 'Samurai Jack' animationobsessive.substa... · Posted by u/ani_obsessive

nntwozz · 9 months ago

Glad to see Primal mentioned in the comments, still waiting for season 3!

https://www.joblo.com/genndy-tartakovsky-primal-season-3/

underbluewaters · 9 months ago

Oh my god they are continuing the story! Loved the first two seasons.

underbluewaters commented on MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 anildash.com//2025/05/20/... · Posted by u/freediver

jaredcwhite · 10 months ago

MCP is not an open standard.

People routinely mistake "protocol specification uploaded to GitHub, PRs welcome" as open standards. They are not. Calling them "open protocols" because they are open source, not open standards (no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol!) is essentially a form of openwashing.

This has been happening way too frequently lately (see also: ATProto), and it really needs to be called out.

underbluewaters · 10 months ago

Successful standards usually start out scrappy, are embraced by a community, and then are blessed by standards bodies. What comes out of working groups of standards bodies rarely gains traction. See xhtml vs "html5".