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> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives

With a mass market electric sharpener and a reasonable knife I spend maybe 15 minutes/yr on sharpening and the knife + sharpener costs less than half this product

The marketing video seems to try to head people like me off, but it also seems to wildly overstate the level of commitment required to have sharp knives

(I do think the tech is cool tho. I just wouldn’t pay $400 for an 8 inch chef’s knife no matter how good it is)


To embrace a stereotype, there are two types of people in the kitchen: Tool enthusiasts and food enthusiasts.

The tool enthusiast has beautiful Japanese steel knives treated as family heirlooms; the knives are sent out for professional sharpening once or twice a year.

The food enthusiast has a pile of fibrox knives and a chef's choice electric sharpener. The knives go through the sharpener once a month and the dishwasher daily; the knives get replaced every decade or two.

The tool enthusiast's knives are pretty, but the food enthusiast's knives always pass the paper test.

Nobody has ever complemented me "wow, this meal was prepared with such pretty knives!"


Most people I know never sharpen their knives. My grandmothers (both of whom cooked for all branches of the family every day when I was a kid) never did. I think if a knife got too dull they simply chucked it out and got a new one. And probably cut themselves a few times until it got dulled enough.

Anyway that's three kinds of people: two kinds of foodies, and everyone else.


How can you know your grandmothers never sharpened it? In my experience grandmothers tend to have a steel lying in a drawer and use it at least before cutting through expensive meat. And they use professional sharpening services once in a year. You wouldn’t actually notice as a child.

Yeah, sorry my comment was a bit misleading. I spent a lot of time around my grans when I was a kid, and later as a young adult and a ... less young adult? We lived in the same houses (two, because my parents were divorced). They didn't sharpen knives. They both took great pride in their cooking, but they would just stare at you if you asked them about things like knife skills or mise en place. They were Greek housewives not French chefs.

I'm pretty sure we didn't have "professional sharpening services" either, when I was growing up in Greece. I think I've seen men with whetstones on their backs in old movies, or paintings, but I've never seen anyone like that live. Nor do I remember any shop that did that sort of work.

Why is it so hard to believe that housewives rarely sharpen knives? It even rhymes.


Maybe they understood you better if you didn't insist on speaking french? Arranging your ingredients when mixing them comes pretty naturally to most people even if they don't know a fancy phrase for it.

Thanks for elaborating. I am sure the food was great. Since the proposition rhymes, it must be true :)

Your kitchen example also functions as allegory for software development

I generally agree you should buy fast machines, but the difference between my 5950x (bought in mid 2021. I checked) and the latest 9950x is not particularly large on synthetic benchmarks, and the real world difference for a software developer who is often IO bound in their workflow is going to be negligible

If you have a bad machine get a good machine, but you’re not going to get a significant uplift going from a good machine that’s a few years old to the latest shiny


Yup. Occasionally I wonder whether it's time to upgrade (5800X3D / 3090), do a back of envelope calc on cost vs incremental gains and very quickly decide I'm good for now


5950x is such a great platform. I can’t see replacing mine for several years at least.


The combination of the twin Matisse I/O dies (one on the CPU package, one serving as the X570 chipset), Zen 3 chiplets, and overall maturity of the AM4 platform is still unmatched. I'm waiting for AM5 to "get good" before upgrading my 5950X (even though Zen 4 and Zen 5 chiplets are already quite good). I hope the next gen brings a core count bump, better DDR5 stability at higher speeds in 2DPC configurations, and USB4V2.


Certainly agree on the chipset front - I went from an X570 to B650 which was absolutely a downgrade, the most painful being the loss of ACS on the chipset PCIe lanes.


Terrible for VFIO!


ETA: Oh, and PCIe Gen5 between the CPU and south bridge(s).


I enjoy building PCs so I've tried to justify upgrading my 5800x to a 9950x3d. But I really absolutely cannot justify it right now. I can play doom dark ages at 90fps 4k. I don't need it!


FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. And much faster compile times, and code execution if using thread pools. But, I think it was a 3 series Radeon, not 5. Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs


My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky

It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app

Using them side by side made it really obvious tho


(That said, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the iPhone 15 Pro I’m typing this on)


FWIW, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the Pixel 9 I'm typing this on


Pixel 10 is heavier than the pixel 9 allegedly.


I saw that it grew by few millimetres as well… sigh.


BlackSky seems to be run by a competent dev with a high enough profile that I see his posts regularly without following him directly

Based on his progress posts it seems that ATproto is intentionally moving in the right direction and BlackSky has progressed to the point he’s asking for volunteers to move off Bluesky and try out his implementations


What is this BlackSky you're talking about?


https://www.blackskyweb.xyz - it's the black people community on Bluesky, they started first with some custom feeds and blocklists/labeller, now they have a PDS and relay, and they're planning to launch a forked version of the app and eventually have a full independent infra basically. With some extra features like option to make "internal" posts that aren't shared with the wider Bluesky but only with people on the PDS.


> It will undoubtedly lead to great advances

"Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us


Angela Collier has a hilarious video on tech bros thinking they can be physicists.


Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA

and, germane to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY vibe physics


Yes both of those :)


Wade Boggs is one of my favorite players, but better than Mike Trout?!


Better is not what's being measured. The measure is contributions to wins. Boggs, being a good/great player contributed more by virtue of having played well for more games.

Think of it in terms of HN:

Let's say you and I both make the same number of comments and submissions per year. For 7 years each of your comments and submissions gets 100 karma. For 20 years each of mine gets 75 karma. On a per-comment/submission basis you contributed more, but I contributed more in my HN career.


I agree with your first paragraph, but there are lots of basically-broke people who live on boats

Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself

Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque

(There are, of course, significant downsides)


It would be sick if they could leverage this increased efficiency to reduce how frequently they bother already paying customers with annoying upsells


I think their former head of growth (Elena Verna), stated on LinkedIn that everybody in the company hates those black patterns too, yet every single experiment in removing them and providing alternatives resulted in unacceptable revenue losses.


Yeah that’s generally how it works, you throw away ethics to make more money.


I hope this analysis does not factor in the brand damage, lower user satisfaction and the risk of losing customers to an emerging competitor without these dark patterns.


honestly it might very well be optimal (if you optimize for money).

optimal does not have to be pleasant.


Well honestly it's hard to sell a feature as a product.


In case you are wondering this was a Steve jobs quote


Yesterday they sent me an email inviting me to use "Dropbox Passwords".

A service that they decided to abandon: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-passwords-disconti...


These kinds of upsell decisions aren't coming from the same people who work on technical topics.


This is what I hoped for but based on the Ultra implementation in the Astons is not at all what we’re getting

It seems to require pretty deep integration with the automaker (Aston provides a lot of custom visuals), and based on the available third party reviews it doesn’t work as well as you’d suspect for a flagship integration


Typed languages are also better suited to IDE assistance and static analysis

I'm a relatively old school lisp fan, but it's hard to do this job for a long time without eventually realizing helping your tools is more valuable than helping yourself


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