Oh! Something I took a part in on HN. That's a first. Almost everything there was practical. Highly recommend checking out all of Max's work, beaming with creativity.
So its not mentioned on the post but is this your actual passport photo that was accepted and used and you have it on your physical passport right now?
It was fairly random, someone in my network had mentioned that Max was looking for people to take part in the project and I reached out. I was given a date and time slot and that was that.
Indeed, many applications I would expect to prevent sleeping (some audio playback ones, games, etc.) don't implement this. I assume it's a case of Apple's APIs changing over the years and not everyone catching up/caring. At one point I had downloaded Amphetamine[^1] but it is much nicer to just use the terminal here.
I thought the fact it is running from a Lisp script, uses Hunchentoot, and uses XSLTs for it's feed pages already puts it in some niche category of "huh, neat".
The slides from the Spark AI 2020 summit [1] helped me understand this a bit. If I get it correctly, the premise is that a specific format is used to organise information into efficient blocks where related column data "lives" closer together, enabling faster read speeds but worse write speeds.
If someone has more resources on the topic, I'd be very interested. There are many applications where sacrificing data freshness for a considerable uptick in performance is alluring.
> enabling faster read speeds but worse write speeds
Write speeds will probably decrease, because the main organization is extremely optimized.
But the goal is to speed-up queries of the type of "select sum(price) - sum(tax) from orders" at the cost of queries of the type of "select * from orders where id = 1".
I'm not sure how I feel about the content of this entire post. RSS feeds are a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful. The only way I can see to move forward is to make them as easy and painless to use as possible, the onus falls on both the creator and consumer of feeds (the websites and the clients... the user is completely out of the equation here in my opinion).
This kind of attitude reeks of the "you're using it wrong!" of the Linux world. Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack? Is your bandwidth overhead suffering that much (are you not caching?)? Make it painless and let's be thankful it isn't all web scrapers masquerading as users.
Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do that because it's already always-on by policy and therefore doesn't cost me anything extra to serve my blog from there, besides the DNS domain name.
Badly behaved RSS readers that download feeds uncached are wasting orders of magnitude more of bandwidth and CPU (gotta encrypt it for HTTPS) on my end than well-behaved clients that get served 304s. Some of them don't even set "Accept-Encoding: gzip" and download it uncompressed. That's hundreds of kilobytes per request wasted for nothing.
My blog doesn't see enough traffic to make this an issue for me, but I can see why this could be a real problem for popular blogs with loads of traffic.
It's kept up-to-date automatically. It is appropriately firewalled to only expose ports 80 and 443, the administration panel and the rest of the services hosted on it are only reachable from my LAN. It only serves static content, no scripting language is enabled.
A determined attacker might be able to get in despite all of these precautions, but it's at least administered in a somewhat responsible manner. I highly doubt most servers exposed on the internet are.
Right, and if you stuck that behind (eg) Cloudflare via cloudflared, it'd be faster for your readers, more secure for you (no direct access) and have no impact on your network or NAS's resources.
Right tools for the job. It's not a failing to use a cache.
I can't wait for the day clownfare suddenly put a price on this stuff they've been giving everyone for free.
I find it hilarious people who get 200 hits a day on their blog think they need it.
I think it's a shame that the web has become so bloated with frameworks and images and video and ads that you _can't_ easily serve a highly trafficked website from a ~20Mbps connection. It shouldn't need Clownfare etc.
> RSS feeds [would be] a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful
Pray tell, what would be the good alternative, for this «niche of people» who collect the news? We use RSS because news are collected through RSS.
And clients have to be properly, wisely configured: some publish monthly some much more than hourly; some are a feed per domain, others are thousands of feeds per domain... This constitutes a set-up problem.
RSS is the best option if you are looking to avoid walled gardens. It's a great way to find content without search ads or social media ads. RSS readers put you in control, instead of algorithmic social network feeds that manipulate you into doom scrolling. I think RSS has been growing as the social networks enshittify.
Why should "wide adoption" be relevant? We are already very well informed (much too well informed) that "people" are """odd""". What are your assumptions?
If you need to drive a screw, and few people used screwdrivers - who cares? You'd still use screwdrivers even when people tried to use cakes or monkeys or simply stopped driving screws, would you not?
You already expect "people" to use cakes or monkeys for something when they would normally be expected to drive screws - actually, you expect to be surprised with much worse ideas becoming realities. So?
Screwdrivers remain relevant, and using them properly remains equally relevant. And especially so, when you note that people are there with loose parts stuck together because the cake smudged monkey was not precise!
I see very little in the article that's actually targeted at people that hold it wrong. My interpretation is that the rant is targeted at RSS service developers who should know better, and for whom you are inventing excuses to justify laziness or incompetence.
It's a bigger issue than RSS, really. Fetching RSS is a simple GET request. It requires the most basic understanding of HTTP, and people still can't do it right: they don't know how to deal with standard headers, how to deal with standard response codes, how to send proper requests etc.
Do you think regular REST API calls to any other service are any different?
So you could be angry at web scrapers, but not at RSS readers making badly formed requests every 5 minutes?
Making it painless is letting readers use the options available, supporting the commonly used standards and maybe fixing small problems (I'd probably space trim that URL for example). It doesn't mean supporting systems that are sending poorly formed or badly controlled requests, regardless of the impact it has on your tech stack.
Conspiracy theory (that I genuinely believe): Consumers don't know what they want, and in reality they would love RSS if it was allowed to blossom. But, RSS readers make the web unmonetizable, so they've been actively destroyed from every angle, in favor of the enshittified feeds the world is now addicted to. There are so many ways to quietly bury a certain technology if the market incentives are stong enough. You can't algorithmically manipulate and addict someone who just follows accounts chronologically without ads. So silicon valley market forces tend to discourage RSS. Google killed their RSS reader once they realized browser-based feed browsing generated way more adsense profits. Other readers get VC investment and mysteriously their free version becomes unusable garbage and adoption plateaus. Not every controlling interest in a VCs portfolio is benevolent. Facebook, twitter, etc all make it against their terms of service to "scrape" your own friends privately shared posts - you can only see them via the walled garden of ads. Apples app store fees would drop if consumers understood the utopia an RSS based web has the potential of being, instead of a dozen addictive apps. But it was too free. RSS derails trillion dollar roadmaps. The incentives are clear, and silicon valley knows it.
It's like pissing in the street. No one gets hurt and the street isn't going to break, but there will be a smell and it's perceived as a rather rude behavior except in the case of animals and small children.
The downvotes remind me of a thing at a job. We had an API for programmatic access to our customer's data, and one customer had bought some expensive BI-solution that they wanted to feed with data from the system we provided. For months they came to us and complained that the API was broken and asked us to fix it.
When I looked in the logs I could see that they hit the API with a lot of requests in short succession that generated 403 responses, so we said that they need to look at how they authorise. After a while they returned and claimed our API was broken. Eventually I offered to look at their code and they were like 'yeah sure but your silly little PHP dev won't understand our perfect C# application'.
So I looked at it and it was a mess of auto-concurrent, nested, for-loops. If they had gotten any data out it would have been an explosion of tens of thousands of requests within a few seconds. They also didn't understand the Bearer-scheme and just threw the string they got from the auth-endpoint straight into the Authorization-header without any prefix. Maybe we should have answered with 400 instead of 403, but yeah, that would have been a breaking change and we didn't want or have time to do a new API version because of this.
Anyway, their tech-manager got really mad that I found the issue within an hour that they had struggled with for months, and also had mentioned that the API-adapter was designed for DoS rather than a polite API-consumer and maybe they should rewrite it to be less greedy and maybe also use ranges instead of crapping out a new request per row in in a response and stitching it together again on their end.
A few weeks later they got it running and it was brutal, but our machines could take the load so we didn't think more about it. Later I heard they got performance issues on their end and had to do as I had suggested anyway.
Be polite and pay attention to detail when you integrate with protocols and API:s. At best you'll be a nuisance if you don't, but many will just block you permanently.
> Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack?
Both RSS feed providers and reader maintainers believe that RSS isn't dead, it's just pining for the fjords.
They've got to keep their readers efficient ready for RSS to rise again - much like Christians have to resist the temptation of sin ready for the second coming of Christ.
The paper[1] seems to imply agitation is exactly what this method is promoting: "Furthermore, acoustic streaming induced greater mixing and enhanced mass transfer during brewing.". I assume the 100W of ultrasonic energy would be pretty hard to reproduce by just shaking your cold brew container though!
Very interesting, and I missed the 100W bit, thanks! Yeah that would be really hard to do by hand for 2 minutes. Maybe Guinness records needs to see who can shake their cold brew hardest/longest. So this begs further questions for me, like can I shake with 10W for 30 minutes, or 10 minutes, or…? Does the frequency matter? Can we use one of those chem lab agitator machines to cold brew?
I find it interesting that 100W for ~120 seconds is ~0.3kcal which for a 100ml cup is ~3C. They are right at the limit of power to flow rate. Much faster flow and presumably the cavitation wouldn't "brew" enough, while much slower and it would warm up the coffee noticeably. I'm doubtful the frequency matters much if the cavitation is what is causing the mixing since those are just bubbles emerging and popping, but the efficiency of coupling from ultrasonic wand to liquid could change a lot.
Since you could presumably put 2 of these in parallel and have 2x100ml cups in 2min with 200W without changing the recipe (or 1 cup in half the time), this seems pretty scalable with increased cost and area.
Unagitated cold brew is in the 10hour region, but with agitation/pump through it seems like you can do 8 cups in 20min which is almost as fast as the cavitation method. I suspect the grind size starts having really big effects here.
Yes, it's the frequency and also the amplitude that makes it faster. One could use a lab agitator but it would still be too slow. I think if you pour the water into an ultrasonic cleaner along with the coffee and filter the mix you might get the same result.
I think the size of the vibrations is important here. The paper mentions acoustic cavitation, which I believe would only really occur at small frequencies like the ones stated in the paper, not large shakes that you or I would do.
No humans walking around makes me sad :( A really cool project, albeit worrying that 50% of the real estate of Infinitown is roads only a couple of cars drive on ;) When zoomed in all the way I wish there was some LOD meshing to provide longer view distance, would make it feel much more immersive in that sense.
Features like this desperately need to be an AI-curated but human-driven operation. i.e an AI can aggregate some headlines from the latest news but a human needs to be the one that says "good to go" or "pass" on each. It's not shiny, but it would work (presumably better).
This just proves (to me) for the umpteenth time that AI can help us with our work immensely but company after company refuses to hire people who work well with it and instead focus on trying to employ it in a myriad of different unsuitable functions.
It makes no sense to summarize the news from the content of tweets that are about the news, no matter how it is done. You cannot produce a correct output from the wrong input: garbage in, garbage out.
AI summarizing the correct information could work with minimal human supervision.
Fully agree. The idea here doesn't seem to be to create quality content, but to satisfy people's itch to be informed about the world without actually paying a reputable source.
Next: Create real-time reports of sports events by just combining "hearsay" from random people on Twitter into ever-evolving "factual" news. Maybe with a user-option to select which team you're rooting for, so the hodgepodge of hearsay is automatically curated to create a favorable outcome for you personally...
News aggregators already exist. What value add from AI are you thinking of? As a user, I don't care about getting news 30 minutes faster. I also don't care if news aggregators miss out on some stories that AI would catch. I already don't use news aggregators because it's too much news.
The problem that needs to be solved is noise reduction. I want more thoughtful and original content. I want to slow down my media consumption. If someone could build a media aggregation/filtering product that serves me instead of advertisers, I'd use it, but AI wouldn't be the point of that product, just a means to an end.
Looks like it, it seems the 2% are mostly odd platform specific issues that the authors' did not deem very important (my assumption for the release happening anyway). AFAIK this[1] PR tries to fix them.
The email to the VP of Content & Community is wonderful, it covers a lot of detail and explains plainly why the idea would work. A great example for people wanting to get into freelancing, it's not for every client but once in a while you want to solve most of the problem in the first email. Why are you here? Why is this beneficial? Don't just ask "let's talk" or "maybe you have a project"... hand them the project on a silver platter and make them want to pay you. Almost worked it seems!
I respect Chris' decision to part with CSS-Tricks, it is a shame they couldn't figure out a better agreement for making sure the website continues to thrive but that is no easy feat. Onward and upward.
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