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A high quality, low latency, battery powered bluetooth rx/tx device. The one I bought years ago is the Boltune BT-BA001. [0] It is easily my most used inexpensive piece of electronics.

Use cases:

1. Make your stereo system bluetooth, this includes a nice new pair of powered monitors, or a vintage 70's system.

2. You have an older car, want bluetooth but appreciate high quality audio.

3. You want to make your wired headphones wireless.

4. Buy 2, and make a low latency wireless audio link.

These things are super cool, and are now only $30.

[0] https://www.ebay.com/p/18030903120


I have heard that there are no zoning laws in Houston, Texas.

Are there $4 lunch bowls there?


https://cali-sandwich-pho.restaurants-world.net/menu

$7-9 for bun, and 3.25-5.50 for banh mi


There are still requirements for the types of use classifications (including things like parking minimums[0]), there are still food safety regulations, etc.

The lax zoning laws doesn't mean there are no rules, just that there are no rules preventing you from having an eatery right next to an active oil and gas well right next to a townhouse right next to a liquor store right next to a welding shop.

[0] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...


> you can try to get a good deal from allies to put it back together

There is no un-breaking this egg. Only the most deluded people in the world don't realize that there is no trust to be exchanged, for many generations at least.

The most universal bad outcome is that many people had predicted, we are now living in a new age of accelerated nuclear proliferation thanks to the loss of Pax Americana.


Can anyone articulate any rational reason for the threat of the US invading and annexing Greenland? Aside from economics, there is nothing preventing US or international mining interests from mining there today, is there? What are the other possible reasons?

I think it's about the Northern Sea Route (NSR) which is opening up cause of climate change.

A Chinese Panamax ship recently completed the NSR transit in just five days, showing that it's a viable alternative to the Suez Canal route.

The NSR is basically a conveyor belt for Russian-Chinese trade, most of it passing in or near Russian waters. However for that traffic to reach the global markets of the Atlantic, it has to pass through the GIUK Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK).

Right now Russia is so dependent on China they're transferring valuable military tech. So that just leaves Greenland if you want to isolate China (and Russia).


Why don't they use land transport? After all, China and Russia share a long land border.

They already do, a lot. The point is to reach the Atlantic (Europe).

isnt transporting stuff by boat way, waay, waaaaay cheaper than by land?

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is nowhere near Greenland. Here is a map:

https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2018/09...

Feel free to try again.


It doesn't have to be touching, it just has to be significantly closer than Maine, so it's much easier to monitor everything or set up a chokepoint if necessary.

And if I know anything about Trump, he'll start talking about Iceland next. Give him an inch he'll take a mile.


"It doesn't have to be touching"

It's on the other side of the north pole. Several thousands of kilometers away.

Edit: I see now why Europe must own and control Alaska.


> I think it's about the Northern Sea Route (NSR) which is opening up cause of climate change.

But Trump said climate change is a hoax!


There is no rational reason. The US can put as many military resources as it likes there, and the fact that they haven't probably points to it not being a great place to station a larger force because of the climate. US companies can mine there if they're able - it's not currently economic to do so due to the climate and glacier.

So I guess we have to look to irrational reasons.


>US companies can mine there if they're able

You can't just go mine there. For one no-one can own land. A permit is also not something you just get and the laws protecting the environment are much harsher than US laws.


The president is kind of impressionable and flips his position depending on who he talked to last. The Russians have an influence either directly or through others he speaks to and would love him to invade Greenland as it would break NATO and legitimise their whole strategy of being able to invade and annex their neighbours of the basis of some bs excuse. The Russians really want NATO to collapse and to take back Ukraine and the Baltics. Or at least Putin's lot do.

The whole rationale is quite Russian in style - they have to invade Ukraine because it was an existential threat - it never was - they have to denazifi it - it's run by a democratically elected jewish comedian. And similarly Trump has to take Greenland before Russia or China does - there's no way that was happening. The whole thing is rather mafia style in that the reasons are ridiculous as a way of showing power, like we need money to protect you in that case.

That said the US has been interested in acquiring Greenland for ages.


The rational reason for the threat is that it is a good distraction.

Ronald Lauder, the billionaire, has floated the idea about buying Greenland with Trump since his first time in office.

The same Ronald Lauder then started buying businesses in Greenland.

The Guardian put out a good article on it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...

As usual with Trump, it's just brazen corruption.


>The same Ronald Lauder then started buying businesses in Greenland.

Yes, and so have Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg, etc. etc.


There have been news speculation that Trump saw Greenland on a Mercator projection map, saw how big it was, and decided the US should have it. It is so stupid that it might be right.

It's to force the dissolution of NATO. There is no other reason.

Trump would be remembered forever as the 'president' that acquired Greenland for the USA. It's all ego.

Maybe the next president could be remembered as the one who gives it back!

Oh, well this is nice sounding:

> Bipartisan Legislation Prohibiting a U.S. Invasion of a NATO State Introduced

https://hoyer.house.gov/media/press-releases/bipartisan-legi...


"The No Funds for NATO Invasion Act makes clear to our allies and partners, as well as those around the world, that it is unacceptable to invade the territory of an ally of the United States".

Should actually be called the WTF Act, as in WTF should something like this even be necessary?


Germany is deploying its troops to NATO protected land, Greenland. Something relatively acceptable.

Germany has also given more than most countries to defend Ukraine.[0] No foreign country has deployed their troops to Ukraine.

I genuinely do not understand your take.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/28489/ukrainian-military-huma...


Greenland is a European colony in the new world with a mostly indigenous population. America has no interest in mainland Europe. While Ukraine isn't NATO, Ukraine is closer to Germany and Russia presents a more imminent threat to Europe.

Germany bankrolled the Russian war of aggression and still does while sending no troops to Ukraine. You can argue nuclear deterrence all you want but America is also a nuclear power, so like... Why is Germany so willing to fight for a European colony rather than its own backyard?

To be clear, I do not support American annexation of Greenland. I do support full independence for them ideally under an American protectorate. Europe has no place in the new world. Denmark's position is that they should own it just because.


> Denmark's position is that they should own it just because

No that is the American position


> I'm actually a huge fan of "unlimited slow speeds" as a falloff, instead of a cliff.

When on cellular, I like to call that "HN-only mode." It is one of the few web properties that is entirely usable at 2G speeds.


I would kill for a web renaissance to return to this format of webpages, as least as an option. Not only loading improves, but also navigation and accessibility.

Indeed. That's why, when they finally kill old.reddit, I may legitimately stop using it entirely. They've already banned most of the good apps, forcing the pretty terrible official one.

I've got a pet theory that old.reddit is actually codified in legal language somewhere as "must always exist."

Otherwise, I can't believe Reddit is actually keeping it around out of the goodness in their cold, dead corporate heart.


Let's try this one: Reddit is selling "we'll let your AI training scrape our data" and have lazily implemented it by just pointing at old.reddit.com.

Possibly, but doesn't old.reddit predate the LLM craze?

Oh I'm not saying it was created for that. I'm saying that could be why it's still alive.

New reddit is a travesty. It feels a satirical mockery of modern webdev

My favorite feature is how you click a reply notification and it takes you to a page that doesn’t show the reply half the time.

And 6 years later it's still as terrible.

RedReader is a lovely, lightweight Android app for Reddit.

Development is slow, but I've been happily using it since RiF was killed.


Recently the old reddit szopped working for me even after going to account settings and opting out of new design again (it was already marked as being opt out) across all my devices. Even after manually navigating to old.reddit.com, clicking any link would take me to new again. I had to install special extensions to reroute to old reddit everywhere.


Had that happen a few times but switching the use old reddit box off and back on fixes it.

CBC News has a lite version of their news site that they tend to promote around times of natural disaster.

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news



NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org

The dutch news (NOS) has their Teletext available via ssh on teletekst.nl.

no lite version as far as I know.


> but also navigation and accessibility

Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).

But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).


I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.

Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.

Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.

It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.


Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.

HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!


I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.

The uptoot and downtoot buttons are a liiiiitle too close to eachother tho

I find it works perfectly on Safari on iPhone.

> Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile

No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.


It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.

Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.


> How about bigger touch targets?

And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.


There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.

Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)

There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.


The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.

This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/aOvLFcM

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/7R14m4d


The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.

But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.


Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.

You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.

I'm using the "Glider" app for Android to access HN and its pretty awesome

Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!

Maybe someone can build a service that translates webpages into "reader mode" format, which you can then consume on mobile devices with low bitrates.

That's effectively what Opera Mini did. (And apparently still does, I had no idea it was still functional.)

This is a pretty promising vector for man in the middle attacks.

So is Manifest v2 ad blocking and plenty of people are screaming about killing that one.

For a proper HN technical-solutions-only response, have the rewrite functionality reside in a WASM module cached locally and run in the browser, with a transparency ledger proving everyone sees the same WASM modules. This way any MitM attempts by the service are reproducible and undeniable.


v2 is not a MitM concern (but it is a malicious code concern). Before quibbling about this consider that if v2 qualifies as a MitM concern then pretty much every other piece of software also does. That isn't in keeping with the spirit of the term.

The outrage is threefold, because there is no viable alternative, because it infantilizes users, trampling their agency, and because it clearly serves corporate interests at the expense of the user.

As to your proposed solution - the rewriting needs to happen on a separate device in order to avoid pushing extra data across the network. If you're already self hosting that service then there's no need for a transparency ledger.


It's auto updating JavaScript maintained by some unknown that can rewrite html on any page, how is that not an MitM risk?

The html itself is rarely a lot of data, most things in this space remove or resize images etc.


If only we could make that conducive to resume-driven development for web developers.

NoScript gets you part way there.

One more realistic option could be to have an "LLM browsing proxy" where you chat with an LLM via text, and it does the browsing and parsing and extracting, with links etc.

lol. It’s called Gemini.

2G speeds are awful, and cell companies clearly want it that way since 3G plans throttled to "2G speeds" and 5G plans still usually throttle to "2G speeds".

Starlink is offering 1Mbps here, which is enough for a normal internet experience. It's enough to stream video at 480p or 720p depending on the exact content and encoding settings.


I've been listening to 32kbit radio streams while on a 64k falloff. It used to be an important feature for me, the 64k up and down. Sounds like nothing, but is usable.

Telegram Messenger works fine at 2G (bar photos/videos, obviously). I was surprised by it. This is an upside of "building your own crypto" or the MTProto protocol, in their case.

Yeah but it's all links to the other places.

TBH I read comments first and in 9/10 can

Except the comments, but who even bothers with those?

Yeah I know. I think it's becoming somewhat of a problem though, people commenting without reading, or only skimming.

My thinking is that we're getting tons of bad articles now that it's so easy to make a bad article that, when skimmed, looks good, and is a good jumping off point for comments.

I think in the past it was somewhat high effort to make such an article, so most articles that look good when skimmed actually WERE pretty good. But now it's trivially easy to make an article that looks good when skimmed, and so we're getting a lot of articles whose only value is a jumping off point for comments.


Is that not what this is? This is out of my wheelhouse, so genuine question.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...


I have a few computers. Win, MacOS, Fedora, and iOS for mobile.

Out of all the things, the UX I cannot forgive is:

1. Hold Siri button

2. say "Create appointment at 3PM tomorrow."

The result is that no alert/notification/warning of this appointment occurs, unless I open the appointment and create the alert manually, at least at time of event. I cannot imagine any use case where one would create an appointment that required no reminder.

If I had created this appointment via Gmail or even Outlook, and synced... then there are notifications.

My point here is that the UX rot at Apple is not new. I am curious as to how this rot begins at BigOrg, and how it can be cured, if it can be addressed. I have never worked at BigOrg, so I really don't get it. Is there some missing UX role in the c-suite? How does my gripe, or Tahoe... ever happen? I understand how it happens at MSFT, but is this just what happens at all BigOrgs, eventually?


Whether appointments have an alert by default or not is a setting in the Calendar app.

Oh wow. Confirmed!

However, can you please explain to me the use case of "Siri, create an appointment at 3PM tomorrow" - where I would want no alert, at time of event, at the very least? I am pretty good at imagining edge cases, and I cannot imagine even one.

I have never been more upset at a default setting. I want to name and shame, and worse. Who made this call, a hippo? Think of the lost productivity at scale. "It just works UX" was supposed to be the entire point of Apple.


I would imagine a majority of office workers create appointments with no alerts. They're looking at their calendar all day.

That's only speculation, but that's why it's a setting. You can have it either way.


I would entertain this explanation, if actual office productivity calendars like Gmail and Outlook did not only have at time of event alert defaults, but also 10 mins prior by default. You know, like something actually useful.

Sorry, I have been spinning out on this for a while. I might be ridiculously upset about this. But, remember what Jobs said about boot times at scale?[0] Well...

[0] https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html


Well, you see... he is part of the "un-elected deep state."

Clearly, that is a problem that needs to be solved.


I know you’re being sarcastic, but Trump was the person who nominated Jerome Powell as chair.

This move is public punishment for not falling in line.


Thank you for pointing this out. It is really interesting, the difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47.

I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:

> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]

- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance

If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to operate in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trum...


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