Category Archives: News

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Digg v4 and lessons not learned

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: "All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again"

Digg basically became a front page for Reddit as it circled the drain

Digg was a high flying news aggregation site from the early web 2.0 era that still exists today, but really in name only. It serves as a cautionary too for why high profile websites tend not to make major changes overnight. A major update, Digg v4, introduced August 25, 2010, caused the site to implode over the course of about 6 weeks during the late summer of 2010. Contemporary tech CEOs would do well to read up on it lest they repeat history.

Digg went from concept to being worth $200 million in about three years and was more popular than Reddit, which is now a $15 billion company. One ill fated change wiped out 90% of its value and its user base in a matter of six weeks.

If you ask someone to define Digg in six words or less, here’s what they would likely say: The thing we used before Reddit.

Today, Reddit claims to be the front page of the Internet. Arguably, during Digg’s heyday, Yahoo was still the front page of the Internet, but Digg was the heir apparent.

See more on The Silicon Underground.

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Bill Gates: The turbulent AI era is here

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The "If the AI optimists(? maximalists?) are right and it's going to do all the labor" conversation is always bizarre, because all the answers are horrific. Plus, you can never tell if the ulterior motive is just spurring more FOMO investment in AI to keep the bubble going, or any sort of actual humanist interest. The Jackpot (Gibson, 2014) model of slow civilizational collapse from bad resource stewardship while the oligarchs fight over the remnants is not a win condition. The Iron Heel (London, 1908) model of "Mass poverty except a tiny band of ascendant extractive oligarchs." followed by "We get fully automated luxury communism by eventually violently reverting centuries of extractive, wealth concentrating tendencies" is not a win condition. The Diamond Age (Stephenson, 1995) model of "The low barrier to automated coercion and violence ruins everything for everyone" is not a win condition. We can't (to mix metaphors) put the torment nexus back in the bag, but the discussions (especially inside socially acceptable parameters) are never productive.
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Adafruit USB Type C CC Resistor Fixer

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is the (second, the spectrum of wildly differently capable visually-indistinguishable cables is worst) most ridiculous thing with USB-C as implemented. *I* am a rank amateur at PCB layout and can follow the fucking directions to put appropriate CC resistors in, but tons of products just ...aren't. At least this is a clever inline fix to make broken devices less annoying.
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Laser Layers for (Almost) Isotropicly Strong Prints

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: I watched this video a couple days ago, it's a super cool idea. Very localized and controlled heating to ensure new extrusion bonds to existing material without sloshing, by strapping some diode lasers to the side of the printhead. Getting the basics working is straightforward by modern desktop manufacturing standards, though I suspect it'd be fussy to properly automate across filaments (due to differing absorption, same reason laser marking and cutting on 3d printed parts is tricky). Looks like they're experiment with using it for surface finishes too, "Adding controlled, localized energy to a print" has a lot of potential in multiple directions.

If there’s one defining factor about 3D printing you have to account for when you’re making a design, it’s probably layer adhesion. Sure, there are a lot of factors to consider, but having the z-axis of your part dramatically weaker than x- and y- is a pretty big deal in a whole lot of applications. [I Changed a thing] changed a thing to fix that — namely, he changed his 3D printer by strapping a couple of lasers to it. That’s the kind of hack we like to see!

What the lasers are doing is a very simple idea: they’re pre-melting the last-laid-down-layer just under the nozzle so that molten plastic is meeting molten plastic to create a much stronger joint than you get when you extrude onto an already-cold layer. The second layer keeps the hotspot warmer longer, which also helps the bond. The resulting parts are not purely isotropic, but he’s getting breaking strain along the z-axis of ABS that’s up to 94% of what he’s measuring in the x direction, while PLA still rates at 77.9%. That’s compared to 60% and 41%, for un-lasered samples, respectively. If you watch the video, you’ll get all the details for the printing process and can see more test data.

These lasers look like a game-changer, but their mass might slow down the fast coreXY printers that are so popular these days. If you don’t want to slow down, remember that changing your layer patterns can boost a print’s strength on its own.

Thanks to [Josh Pensel] for the tip!

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Access to telemetry data: Automotive industry criticizes intelligence reform

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...Then don't install spyware in your products and collect/retain the data in the first place?
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License Plate Reader Searches Should Require a Warrant

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yup. Either it needs to be public data so _everyone_ can get in on the stalker behavior (Subject to FOIA, so the public can map cops and politicians and whatnot), or it needs to require a warrant.
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2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm going to laugh _so hard_ if the AI companies who pre-paid for RAM production capacity end up with Billions of dollars of RAM intended for data centers they end up not building for a whole host of reasons, and glut the market trying to dump it, losing most of those Billions. Less fun if a bunch of it is a HBM variant or something else complicated to re-direct into the consumer market.
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Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yuuup. Seen this one playing out a lot. Both algorithmic "curation" that creates invisible filter bubbles and sycophantic chatbots are both resonant amplifiers for personality disorders. Even well adjusted people get real fuckin' weird when they start to believe their own bullshit due to too much affirmation.
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All of Winona Police Department’s Flock cameras cut down and stolen

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That's hilarious. Coordinated take-down of every one of those generalized surveillance devices in a geographic area.
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Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That's cool to see it being maintained. I haven't used Kermit in anger in several years, but it's one of those pieces of eternal infrastructure that you eventually need when dealing with primitive (due to small/simple, old, prototype, or just weird) computers. I share the author's feelings about good C code bases, they have a strange beauty that fancier languages never quite have.
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