skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you scroll down to “Cinematic Experience” you’ll see a TV with two HomePod’s next to each other.

I do an identical setup with two Alexa Studio devices. The only difference being I have to use Fire TV and there’s actually a third Alexa Studio Base only device.

The setup is really good. It’s definitely not a replacement for surround sound. I argue it’s better sound than a Sound Bar though. It is even better for music.

The big thing though? As much as I love Apple stuff, everything and anything is always Alexa integrated. These synced speakers beep when my garage opens, vacuum, doors, connected to lights, my security system, fans, cameras, etc…

With Apple, your product selection is more limited or you need HomeBridge for ideal home automation. For me, I’d definitely rather have the Apple products but (hate or love it) Amazon is way more open and the only reason I settled for them.

Finally, I am not sure why and I would never personally do this setup, but if you look at the details of both Alexa Studio and HomePod “Home Theatre” setups, they both do not support connecting additionally to Echo’s or HomePod Mini’s for additional speakers. A fun option —- but equally not supported.

Bandwidth limitation of being wireless? Too few of people willing to do this?
"An intelligent assistant" is the second bullet point on the product page.

If "people commenting about how Siri sucks are missing the point" then so are Apple's copywriters.
Right idea. Possibly too soon so maybe the wrong time. But more likely just the wrong company and wrong strategy.

Gaming is not in Google's DNA and they lacked the will to make the required investments to break into the industry (this was clear when it shut down it's internal game studios)

They launched on the cusp of a new console generation with last gen tech. They made big claims about 4k/60 but in reality games performed on par with a PS4 Pro (which was about 3 years old at the time of Stadia's launch). They never updated the hardware after 9th generation consoles came out the following year.

They did not launch with a big exclusive AAA first party game. There was no killer app. No Halo, no Mario, no God Of War. They were totally reliant on third party publishers porting cross platform games over. The only people with a compelling reason to use it were those with fast internet but no console/PC because it wasn't better graphically than incumbents and had no major exclusive games.

Microsoft's GamePass in the cloud model (or something like it) is likely the one that will catch on. Netflix of gaming. Digital consumption is moving to all you can eat subscriptions. Google model was "own" games in the cloud. It's a bit like buying digital copies of movies vs Netflix/Disney+/HBO Max. The subscription model appeals to a wider market if it can be priced right.
so Japan (and South Korea?) secretly want Taiwan to go China, because that will make it easier for them to be all-in on the American security umbrella?
I have no formal math background but I did take some propositional logic classes and more than a decade later they remain by far the most useful courses I ever took. I'm really surprised that they're not standard/easily skippable in CS curricula.
You would need battery storage only if you have no grid connection.
I agree with all the cautionary advice already offered.

Here's my Yes, And...

> ...a move back and down from senior strategy and product work back to engineering IC work

The single best political advice I've ever gotten:

"Make them ask you three times."

(aka Play hard to get, Make them think it's their idea.)

Assuming you intend to stay with the same employer...

If there's an IC role that you desire, do all the things to reposition yourself for that role. So that it's obvious to everyone you're the best person.

When your Boss (or higher) says, "Hey @throw_booored, what do you think of this exciting opportunity building the next generation Acme Wonder Widget?"

"Hmmm, gee Boss, that sure does look cool. I'd love to work on that! Alas, I really love my job. I'm doing important work, with great people, having an impact. And we're so busy hitting some important deadlines. I couldn't possibly abandon them at a time like this. I'm sure you'll find someone..."

Back and forth. Never dismiss the offer. Just demure. Always sound enthusiastic about the idea, grateful for the consideration, and oh so regretful you couldn't possibly take that role at this time.

Around the third time, you say something like "Wow. You've really planted a seed. I can't stop thinking about this. I'd like to say yes. What would a transition look like? Compensation? Responsibilities?" Etc, etc.
Yup and I disagree with it. I don't blame the dude for the outcome, sometimes you do what you can and it doesn't work out. But did he do what he could?
So, what's it still bad at?
Siri claims it can't tell me the room temperature.
Sigh. Did you read the footnotes though? Because in them I explain that I haven't read Berlant's book, but I did look up--in multiple sources--a rundown of what they meant by "cruel optimism", and as I mentioned in the second footnote, I'm not quite sure Hari's own interpretation matches. They both use the same two words, but with distinct meanings, as it seems to me. And since the meaning and the book I'm discussing are Hari's, obviously his name pops up a lot more.

Did you also read my previous post (https://tegowerk.eu/posts/the-deep/), where I heap praise upon praise on Alma Katsu, a woman? What about this earlier one, where I express just how much a particular woman means to me and to my life (https://tegowerk.eu/posts/serendipity/)? Or did you just make up your mind about me based on a footnote?
Amazon set to begin new round of layoffs affecting over 18,000 people
We have an original large-size HomePod in the kitchen. Its MAIN job is music-in-the-kitchen, and it excels at that. It's secondary job is "Siri portal" for random information or timers or whatever (btw, did you know you can set multiple timers and give then names, like "set a pasta timer for 10 minutes" and then also "set a simmer timer for 30 minutes" and ask it for status on those by name?).

I have an ongoing sort-of faux-competition with my wife about how to ask Siri for things. She asks questions and gets frustrating replies, but when I ask them slightly differently I get good data.

I think my history with software make me subconsciously better able to formulate a question for Siri in a way that produces an answer other than "I found some web results...".

I SUSPECT it's mostly specificity, or asking for simple facts ("when was King Charles born?") and not derived facts ("how old is King Charles?"), but it comes up a LOT.

That same history of software means that I don't even ATTEMPT some of the stuff Siri is notionally capable of, like maintaining a shopping list. (Though I routinely use Siri on my watch or phone to add appointments or reminders.)
Yeah okay cherry-picking an example wasnt the best idea i admit. But still the disagreement we have is between a senior engineer striving for business value vs a senior engineer striving for engineering value. I have been on both sides of this to be fair.
Just as a comparision -- gasoline has a whr/kg density of 12,200. That shows the incredible efficiency of gasoline as a fuel store. This is also part of why it's unlikely we'll get electric powered aviation to replace our currently common uses. The batteries would simply weigh too much, even with incredible advances in the technology.

Liquid hydrogen is a viable alternative, though, as its density is 39,000 Wh/kg.
It goes by many names: the TrackPoint, the nub, the mouse nipple, the pointing stick, the weird red dot on your keyboard.

Has anyone ever called it "the nub"? I've only ever heard trackpoint, trackstick, or clitmouse.

Modern touchpads are miles better than they used to be, with full-fledged multitouch gestures and integrated buttons,

I really don't understand the workflow of people who genuinely prefer integrated touchpad buttons. How do you put up with not feeling exactly where right-click begins? You're not annoyed whenever your thumb happens to slide a little across the bottom and throw off your pointer aim?
r0c is a really cool project. I should dig through this codebase and see what tricks I can learn.
I'm pretty sure they weren't because of the redundant conditionals which simply defy logic. If there was only one check for every if statement, honestly I could give this a pass since it's at the very least simple, but by adding one extra redundant check for every statement you just created 9 new places where a bug could appear.

Furthermore, using Unicode characters to represent progress is the true smell here. There simply are better ways to do this.

In the grand scheme of things, does it matter? No. But this is Hacker News LOL, someone has to discuss it.
IIRC one of the oldest remaining steam engines was built for exactly that purpose. It is on display at the (poorly named IMHO) Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I say poorly named because it isn't about him, it's about the history of industrialisation.
I would go so far as to describe Siri as "aggressively useless".

I try to squelch my alarm in the morning and she replies with "sorry you'll need to continue in the app" (silencing the alarm anyways but not actually dismissing it). If I wake up before my alarm and want to stop it from sounding, I tell her to turn it off, she says she has done so (with a follow-up question confirming that I have no alarms enabled)… And then the god damn alarm goes off at the usual time anyways.

Most recently she has started replying to my requests to send text messages and start phone calls with "who is speaking?" I don't know maybe the only person who matters on this single user device? If I don't say my name to her satisfaction then the call doesn't get made. I never did any kind of voice training or enabled any kind of restriction based on voice matching so what the fuck?

The last straw which led to me unplugging my home pod was when both it and the phone started triggering at nearly the same time with the result that the speech of one started interfering with the requests to the other one.

Bonus points: the speech recognition tech is bad enough that I tend to wait for acknowledgment before speaking a command. The "Boop" that you get from Alexa and Google. Not only does Siri not have this, it triggers, waits for a moment, and then says something. One of these responses is a annoyed sounding teenager "yeah?" that has more than once had me fantasizing about the immediate defenestration of the speaker.
“The qualitative conclusions of our work remain the same”
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but Google smart speakers have had stereo pairing for a while. https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7559493?hl=en-C...
I wondered too, had a dig through the news/releases since the last post, not real update. Good to let others know of the project though, I guess
The company OpenAI used to manage workers in Kenya, Sama, has come up before

https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-...
I've also been baffled by this. Some syntax helps (".. by $band"), especially when an album and a track have the same name (which is a related issue for me).
> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something.

No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything will have less meaning.

I remember those first blogs. They indeed had a personality and a quirkiness we have since lost from the internet.
I thought that GCC being a handwritten recursive descent parser was giving it a huge disadvantage compared to other compilers when it came to introducing new standards (I remember people complaining about it a lot in the past).
A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human
Text for those who don't do the bird site:

A candle produces roughly the same amount of energy as a resting human — 80 to 100 watts, also consuming about the same amount of oxygen and producing the same amount of CO2. In an enclosed area, adding candles is about like adding people from an air quality standpoint.
MSFT manager of 25+ person team here with no actual heads up on this. The writing has been on the wall for months though from internal comms so this should come as a surprise to no one.

No one on my team has any information about this beyond the Satya email, so this is either a "no news is good news" situation (assuming you don't actually want to be laid off), or a poorly executed process. I'm hoping for the former for the sake of my team.
> When I think about this moment in time, the start of 2023, it’s showtime – for our industry and for Microsoft.

He could have left that part out.
tl;dr: maybe frame pointer omission was premature
I don't know why so many people are saying that this is bad code.

Besides the redundant checks, it's really simple, so simple that an intern, maybe even someone who doesn't code, can understand and update it.

It's performant, most compilers will cache the strings.

People trying to justify more complex one-liners with "what if you change the symbol, or just show 5 characters" etc. These scenarios wouldn't take more than 5 minutes to adapt this code, and anyone could do it.

For me, this code with a good set of tests doesn't get much better.
Everything.

Writing plain HTML used to be easy - if you could edit a text file you could slap in a few tags and be happy enough.

Having to learn CSS (there is nothing easy about grid/flex) just to get a good looking site is way more effort than most people want.

Hence the reliance on content managers/social media site that do this hard work for you, at the cost of personalization.
I helped create the report, happy to answer questions and collect feedback for future reports.

Also, don’t sleep on the accompanying podcast where RevenueCat CEO, Jacob, and I share a lot more nuance and insights that didn’t make it into the report.

https://subclub.com/episode/hows-your-app-really-doing-the-s...
Depends how often they use the site. It's been posted about many times before.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ReactOS
True at scale it makes perfect sense to do that. Its just not a very lean (2 different codebases for 2 platforms) and maintainable solution (apple and google keep changing how they do things and kick out apps that dont follow suit)
Thonny actually does this on the basic raspberry pi install. It launches into a basic mode with big tablet like buttons and then you can click "Advanced Mode" and it goes to a more normal Windows experience with drop down windows and more options. On a personal note, i've found thonny to be the easiest way to get started with raspberry pi pico development. You just plug your pico in, fire up thonny and select the Micropython interpreter and you are now live coding on a rp2040 microcontroller. It can even download the fresh U2F image to your pico. It is a very good/simple user experience.
>U.S.-benefit-eligible employees will receive a variety of benefits, including above-market severance pay, continuing healthcare coverage for six months, continued vesting of stock awards for six months, career transition services, and 60 days’ notice prior to termination, regardless of whether such notice is legally required.

Wow, that way way, better than what we get by law in my EU country when you're laid off (just unemployment benefits). Looks like big tech in the US has loads of perks.
> I don't think your average Kenyan worker is that versed in English

Kenya is a multilingual country. Swahili, a Bantu language, and English are widely spoken as lingua francas and serve as the two official languages. English was inherited from colonial rule (see British Kenya).

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Languages_of_Kenya
What fair election? Last I saw, the 2020 election was the world's biggest scam. It's quite a bias to think it wasn't.
That gets things down to 0.183s, which is certainly an improvement. But Python manages 0.033s and Guile manages 0.022s, neither of which need a precompile step. I feel like Racket needs to spend some time optimising this.

My understanding is that Racket has been doing a lot of work on overhauling its interpreter and internals recently, so I'm hopeful this will improve somehow, but it's unclear to me if they're aware of this issue or consider it a problem.
Distance from the CPU. And traditionally, RAM sits waaaaaay across the motherboard. If you put it on the CPU die, it’s much closer and much faster. Still slower than L1 and L2 cache, sure, but much faster than waiting on the fetch across the motherboard.

Look into Apple’s unified memory.
When your only shtick is debunking, everything looks like a scam. But things often work better in some places than others. There is no reason to put them up in any but the places where they do.

(That is not to suggest most Musk ventures make sense anywhere.)
Luck is the residue of design. -John Milton
I mean in the sense that no one questions the idea that it should be allowed to be an ethnic enclave.

Meanwhile here's an entire article saying Ukrainians shouldn't be allowed to have a community.
> […] has demonstrated the ability to reach speeds of 0.8 Mach (614 mph) during testing. The figure makes it quicker than a Boeing Dreamliner and twice as fast as tiltrotor designs.

The 787 Dreamliner cruises at mach 0.85 and top speed is mach 0.90. This mistake casts doubt over all other stated facts in the article.
Yes, some money is better than none. That is exactly why it is better. They are literally doing something whereas you are probably doing nothing (or much less than what they are doing).
Families will get torn apart, people with health issues will be on their own, immigrants will get booted.

C-suite will get a raise from the stock price bump.

Congrats on our system.
> to paraphrase Stroustrup: there are only two kinds of tools, the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Yeah, no, one of the interesting things is that we routinely use some tools without even really thinking about them - we don't complain about them because we never think of them at all even though we're using them, they're that unobtrusive.

In its original context Bjarne's claim is belied by the StackOverflow surveys. You can choose to imagine that "nobody uses" Rust, which famously keeps topping the charts, but not far down the list is Python.

It would be nice if our industry could manage better than .pc files but I'm an old man and when I wrote all my early code this didn't exist, your best chance was to cargo cult some auto-detection of common libraries.
The Nokia 6030 is my favorite phone ever. Practically indesctructible and with multi-day batter life, but unfortunately can no longer be used in the US due to migration off of 3g.
> Buy $299 or something that has artificial stupidity like Siri?

Well, in fairness, it’s designed first as a music device, the Siri seems like almost an afterthought. That said,

Spend $299 on a wireless speaker where the stereo pairing often fails, has random Wi-Fi connection issues (that no other Apple device has), and is otherwise hindered by issues?

Nah, fooled me on the first gen, fooled me again on the HomePod minis, think I’ll pass this time.
"Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes."

"I'm sorry, I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Please try again later."
I, for one, just thought of ReactOS again 2 days ago after a large gap. Perhaps the Zeitgeist is presently weighted toward ReactOS. Can't possibly just be my own confirmation bias, because I'm a rational thinker, you see.
To answer your question the way you meant it, no. You can use Spotify on a mac or iPhone/iPad and then set the AirPlay output device to the homepod, playing Spotify music out of them just fine. I literally do this every day.
Do they enjoy math? Are they good at persuading others to side with them in arguments? Those aren’t non-transferable skills.
How well your response embodies Step 1 & 2 :)

I listened to your narrated version, thanks for sharing your stories.

Minutiae: I noticed your anchor for Step 1 needs correcting in the table of contents.
Interesting, Washington (state) has had legal weed for nearly a decade now and does not appear to have experienced societal collapse or an incoherently high workforce. Maybe the east coast has a power THC tolerance?
I never understood this obsession with going to the gym. Like, my main problem is meeting women at all. Second main problem is impressing them enough to give me a chance to showcase my attractive qualities, which unlike my unattractive qualities, are not in plain view.

Unfortunately, living in a country where meeting any kind of people at all is extremely hard to start with, I barely get a chance to ever even flirt or ask a woman on a date.

At least your friend is getting rejections. That means he somehow managed to figure out how to routinely get in contact with women.
I feel like ReactOS should try to see if they can get with Steam / Valve to work something out where they both work on Proton together, and Valve lets them use their efforts for ReactOS, and gives them well needed funding. My understanding is they are reaching for similarish goals. One benefit of ReactOS is it tries to support Windows drivers, I'm not sure if Wine does this or not? But for something like SteamOS if it doesn't have driver support, it would make way too much sense to support it via Proton / ReactOS.
Bad marketing does not correlate closely with bad engineering.
It's easy to read, simple to maintain, and performant code. Maybe one of those newer switch expressions would make the code even clearer, but they already left the redundant lower bound checks in so I think the way this looks is quite intentional.

Much easier to read than `int count = (int)Math.Floor(percentage / 10); return new String("#", count) + new String("-", 10 - count));` in my opinion and not worth writing a custom progress component for.
Why anything else? It is a very small tool that is needed to bootstrap a build, C is the lowest common denominator.

Similarly, few things infuriate me more than the installation of some random Python package having to pull an entire Rust toolchain with it.
Postal Pre-sort routines. Many years ago, when the most reliable way to get the real walk lists was to go to the local postmasters.

There was fairly cheap commercial options even then but that shop had a bad "dont buy what you can build" attitude combined with a maddening shyness about making any other use out of the things they'd built. Having written our own presort software, we couldn't then sell it or even open source it because that would be "a burden distracting from the core mission of the business."
I just use Brave.
I really wish Apple released a soundbar + Apple TV + FaceTime camera combo product. All I want is to be able to do FaceTime calls on my TV with my parents who live halfway across the world and have the camera track me around the room (like Facebook Portal TV).
The size.

Apple discontinued the OG size HomePod a while back, and sold only the tiny baseball-sized ones. This is a re-introduction of a larger-size, better-sounding device that I assume is essentially the same form factor as the original one.
That’s some BS that we were fed about competitiveness. I used to buy that BS at some point. But these companies (and the people having them) have a choice and they do have enough money.

One of the companies I’m following now is Oxide (https://oxide.computer/careers). They pay everyone the same salary ($200k) regardless of position. It’s a bit extreme but am following them precisely for that. It’d be interesting to see how Oxide fares down the road.

It’s funny that some years ago that software developers were complaining that they were getting paid less because of politics and because people who talked controlled the businesses and the money. It’s funny because now that the table turned, most of them are doing the same thing.