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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Ikea really managed to pull off a magnificent marketing stunt.

    They have the same furniture quality that you can get off of Amazon, Wayfair, or Walmart but you have to go get it out of their warehouse and deal with the logistics of getting it to your house. But they hand out some meatballs and give everything funky Swedish names; so people get the impression that it’s a fancy European experience.

    China is the single largest manufacturer of Ikea products. I found that when I went directly to the source, I could get the same item cheaper or a better item at the same price. That deal is likely to die with the new tariff regime but that same regime will have similar impacts on Ikea.







  • If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
    SSS - unique
    SAS - unique
    ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
    ASA - unique
    SAA - unique
    AAA - infinite solutions

    Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.







  • We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

    A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.


  • There’s a much bigger story here.
    Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

    Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

    As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.



  • I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.

    Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.

    It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

    I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

    Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.