Links

tldr: Backblaze cares more about dataloss edge cases than you do

An impressive recommendation from @patio11

Also does voice generation from text! And remove filler words. Some cool stuff in there.

A history of African Jazz

This is still an all-too-common occurence

On the many issues with burger, kebab, meatball and bento buttons

Crazy stuff. Also the generated faces

on overly specific expertise

Rise of holograms, deepfakes, so more ongoing fame for existing artists. Decline of labels, consolidation of the remaining power/profit in that business to fewer and fewer people.

The “official industry figures” will show that the music business is growing, but these numbers will be highly misleading. A huge portion of “music profits” will actually go to tech companies (Apple, Google, etc.), who have no interest in reinvesting this cash into the music ecosystem. For example, Spotify will take the cash flow generated by music and use it to acquire rights to podcasts, etc.—and, in general, the music culture will be starved of funds because it now must pay the bills for other businesses

Good page, some worrying all-eggs-in-one-basket figures.

have seen some worrying stats on slowdown of solar/wind rollouts, and some general issues with larger scale wind turbines.

Every major-numbered release of macOS is more annoying than the one before. Each release includes terrible new UI decisions, removes useful features you’ve come to depend on, and restricts the use of your computer as a general-purpose computer even more. It has probably been steadily down hill since OSX 10.8.

some more stuff on impact of Germany’s big shift away from nuclear

horrifying

cool idea. I’d like a fork of this with todos as well, so you can have daily dos and dont’s.

interesting discussion on experiences and stats of apps

Some interesting perspectives on who/what people are like when they stop working a while. In terms of boredom, interests, and other pursuits.

With random arrivals, pileups are terrible

If customers take on avg 10 minutes to serve and arrive randomly at a rate of 5.8 per hour, then with one bank teller working, expected wait is 5 hours. With two tellers, 3 minutes.

Interesting take on the differences in impact between large scale vs inidividual differences.

Very interesting discussion. Computers’ ability to solve tasks goes from ‘impossible’ to boring as soon as they solve it! Though I am still regularly impressed by GPS…

I’m midway in the philosophizing here, but my point so far is obvious enough: The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most. Deep Blue isn’t playing chess anymore and Watson isn’t on “Jeopardy!” because nobody cares. It doesn’t matter. We humans need to see the human doing it: Willie Mays making the catch that doesn’t look possible. When it comes to art, we need to see a woman or a man struggling with the universal mediocrity that is the natural lot of all of us and somehow out of some mélange of talent, skill, and luck doing the impossible, making something happen that is splendid and moving—or funny, or frightening, or whatever the artist set out to do.

HN thread. I still do not understand the benefit of this

brilliant writeup of excellent technique. And published on the same day he asked about it on twitter!

why am I reading about notetaking tools again

Lovely memorial about his amazing dad.