I can think of two instances from the past year or two where this happened: "printer cable" (USB-A to USB-B?), and USB-A extension cable (both at separate times). I think I spent ~$10 for each of these, so my total bill was $20.
So $20 fee to pay for getting rid of a bunch of other cables I didn't need years ago and saving ~500 cubic cm of space.
And I gave the printer cable away to a friend when I was done with it, happy to repurchase it in a few years in the increasingly unlikely scenario that I need it again.
I’m looking for a recommendation to get beyond TinkerCAD (for 3d printing). I learned it in 2019 and came back in 2025 when I got my own printer. It is comfortable and fine for my purposes but lacks basic things like chamfer and fillets.
Anytime I try to jump into Fusion or FreeCAD I immediately hit a wall (like trying pirated Maya when I was a kid).
Try FreeCAD one more time, if you haven't tried 1.0+, and it might stick. I've finally, in the past 6 months moved all my work to FreeCAD and KiCad after trying both many times over the past decades.
I highly recommend watching one of MangoJelly's beginner videos for FreeCAD, even if you have CAD experience. It made it very clear how to adapt my Fusion360 skills.
OnShape is pretty approachable, and has lots of good tutorial videos. They offer free accounts for non-commercial use with the caveat that all of your documents must be public.
If you haven't tried FreeCAD recently, it's gotten a lot better in the past couple of years. It seems to have hit escape velocity, so to speak, and is improving rapidly in a way it hadn't for a long time.
> They offer free accounts for non-commercial use with the caveat that all of your documents must be public.
Major caveat! Also online access required.
And if you decide to upgrade, the next tier is 1,410€ per year.
For that amount of cash, FreeCAD can abuse and torture me quite a bit. Lol.
Also at the rate FreeCAD is developing and improving now, if more people would drop just 1k€/ donations into FreeCAD/OCCT, chances are your pains will ease rather sooner than later.
I'm not spending weeks to learn a proprietary, online-only software that will lock me out as soon as they need more money. Been burnt before on those kind of stuff
I would recommend pirating SOLIDWORKS and learning with that. It has the easiest UX of the parametric CAD modellers, and once you know the general sketch-extrude methodology you will find the others a lot easier.
Actually I think they have a hobbyist subscription which isn't totally extortionate now if you want to stay legal. Maybe get it for a year.
You may try onshape that is supposed to have a better accessibility than fusion 360, but unfortunately it doesn't seem that a CAD software with a complexity intermediate between tinkerCAD and FreeCAD an dthe pro CAD software exists
I wonder about this every time I see a smart TV-related thread on HN. I recently purchased an LG OLED (C5 48") because my old TV died so I'll finally comment. As others have said, just don't connect it to the internet. But you knew this already, so I'll provide my anecdote on the experience of this since I wondered the same thing for years before getting this TV.
When the TV is never connected to internet, and you use a single HDMI source like me, the TV acts completely like a dumb TV. It gets turned on via my AppleTV remote and displays the picture 1-2 seconds later. No LG logo (I disabled this), and no smart interface shown whatsoever.
If you want to change settings, you can display the settings interface via LG remote control and it generally acts like a dumb TV (not blocking the entire screen, so you can adjust picture quality and see the result as expected).
I've had the TV for about two months and never been asked to update it or shown any ad. The only time I've ever seen the smart fullscreen interface is when you unplug a live HDMI source and the TV detects that nothing is there. (If you turn the source off, it tells the TV to turn itself off as well.)
Hope this helps since it's a lot easier to buy a nice smart TV and do it this way than find a truly dumb commercial panel.
They could also make agreements with ISP's where their TV's can be whitelisted for access to a public or potentially unlisted WiFi, enabling them to connect that way, without the vast majority of customers ever being aware.
Similarly, these TV's could connect to any open wifi hotspot it can find and phone home/download updates that way. Cox for example proudly boasts how more than 4M of it's residential customers modem+router+ap's can be used for "WiFi Hotspots" by anyone - not just the customer/resident - if they have a cox account. I don't see why Samsung or any other manufacturer may approach said ISP's to use this network to update devices under some guise of "convenience" or "seamless updates" ostensibly for their less tech savvy users.
I don't know if these business deals exists, but "smart devices" will often try to phone home/update anyway they can, even if you don't manually configure it on a private network.
Mine is a Vizio from Target that's never been online. I've gotten close to cutting its wifi antenna circuit to prevent this but I think I got it before they started programming anything like this in and I should be safe if it stays offline.
But then I still think about cutting it in case I ever have anyone over that would be stupid enough to sign in to the wifi on it. Better for it to have never happened.
Totally correct and a good call out. I did check this as best as I could for this particular model of TV. But I'd have to do the same in a few years if it was ever to be replaced. I suspect I'll have to desolder the cellular module of my next TV circa 2036...
Now that you mention it, DJI action cameras required the same thing (installing an app to activate the camera). I bought one, discovered this during setup, and promptly returned it and got a GoPro instead.
I do something similar with voip.ms (hosted Asterisk).
The intercom calls my voip number, which can be set two ways: 1) play DTMF tone 9 to let the person in, then hang up (which is a security risk if random folks at the intercom buzzed me up trying to get in.
Or 2) plays audio "enter passcode", then:
- if the visitor enters the code that I told them, it plays DTMF 9 to let them in
- if the code is incorrect, plays "incorrect passcode" and hangs up
It also sends an email and SMS whenever someone triggers the intercom so I know about it. With passcodes, I can even set up multiple passcodes to give out to various people (like Amazon, friends) and my notification will display which code was used.
I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.
Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.
And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.
I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
Your description of the test and your replies to questions indicate you've come up with a pretty great assessment for the role(s) you hire for. Especially where you mentioned:
> The test was a few of those questions and a few which were easier to cheat, and almost nobody had good scores on just the cheatable section
I also like how you allow/encourage self-assessment, where if a candidate can't do the test in ~20 minutes under zero pressure, they probably won't be a good fit in the role itself.
This is very useful context. Especially around Contact Scopes etc. It's never made sense to me that iOS shares if the user is choosing to not share their contacts.
Apple seems to basically do privacy-related things to an 80% level but not bothering with getting it totally correct. This makes business sense because the extra 20% is way more difficult, but it's great to see GrapheneOS going all the way.
100% agreed. I'm a Program Manager and have been writing tooling for my own internal workflows for years (like Monte Carlo-based forecasting tools), or program-adjacent low-stakes stuff (like an API to generate a WSJF score based on a fields inputted into Asana, since it couldn't do that itself).
But I'm not about to send a PR for fixing production bugs even if I have decent high level context. Nobody has better context than the devs working on it every day.
I too would love to try this for simple prompts but won’t be updating past Sequoia for the foreseeable future.
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