The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.
I've setup a test website for my father's business. We own the domain which was bought separately and we just point it to the servers for our WordPress plan (I didn't want to be bothered with self-hosting). The main reason to go with WordPress was setting up WooCommerce to start selling some stuff online to augment the main business. I can't say I enjoy the experience of getting the look and feel right, and it hasn't really changed in twenty years. It's as enjoyable as formatting a Word document.
I did the same with an Atari 400 that had a cassette tape. I remember it would take 30 minutes or so to load/save games I copied from magazines. The keyboard was torture. I then moved on to very rudimentary text adventures of my own once I felt a bit comfortable with BASIC. I'm very glad my father bought that for me...he was a painter and we didn't have a lot of money then. It was extremely formative.
Cool project. I would think the killer use case for this is when you don't have internet access and you are forced to deal with something like an openssl man page when having to do something non-standard. With internet access I enjoy getting commands from ChatGPT directly and reading any ancillary information like explanations and alternatives (EDIT: I notice you support that to some extent). Have you tested this with local llms? I imagine it would be challenging to get something reliable from them beyond the most basic commands. For my part, I would never have the AI run a command for me and would be wary of that functionality even existing.
Hey, thanks for your feedback. That is great input, because I just realized that users might prefer to have a command printed out (inserted into clipboard) for them, instead of it being executed immediately. LocalLLMs are on my todo list! Also, what I want to work on next, is to make it possible to pipe errors / logs into the application, so it could help you troubleshoot and debug faster
Years ago after getting one I was messing around in settings on Amazon's Alexa website and noticed a log of commands/messages sent to Alexa. I reviewed them and was horrified to see "why does daddy always beat me". Best to let your daughter win at Uno in this age of always-on connectivity. Or just unplug it, which is what I did.
There's some important nuance here: All commands (after trigger/wake word) were sent to the cloud in the past anyway.
The option to do some on-device processing came on later devices and, as I understand it, wasn't even enabled by default. Furthermore, on-device processing would still send the parsed commands to the cloud.
The headline is vague, but it's misleading a lot of people into thinking that only now Amazon will start sending commands to the cloud. It's actually always been that way. I suspect the number of people who enabled on-device processing was very, very small.
I'm shocked that not one single article I've found mentioned this incredibly obvious fact. This has ALWAYS been the case and only a few select models ever offered the option to turn it off. This change puts all devices on equal footing and behavior with the launch device.
I don't love Amazon, but I love ginned up outrage over tech the author never bothered to understand even less.
"I don't love Amazon, but I love ginned up outrage over tech the author never bothered to understand even less."
And 99% of Echo owners disagree with this. No one cares if a reporter mixed up "amazon is starting to spy on you tomorrow" vs "amazon has been spying on you since the first echo was launched". Only amazon would make an argument like "yeah but we've been doing this for years now and no one made a big deal about it..."
Right. But you have to admit this sounds a bit like labelling Cereal "arsenic free". Really helpful to know but the sudden announcement hides that it's always been that way and implies others aren't. In truth this is probably how they all work and always have, but such a headline wouldn't ding Amazon sales.
I genuinely can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or whether you're saying that you appreciated the link to the XKCD. If the former, then I apologise.
The Sauron's Eye of public sentiment can only pay attention to one thing at a time. If you justify today on the basis that it wasn't paying attention yesterday, you can rationalize anything.
> I'm shocked that not one single article I've found mentioned this incredibly obvious fact.
The search engines are crap. There was a story some years ago where Amazon employees from an Eastern European country were actually listening to your Alexa and sent the relevant commands back to the device.
I'm not disappointed that this "non-event" is drawing attention to this comparison. Even if it's farfetched to dream that bringing privacy more to the forefront of the news zeitgeist will result in a shift of the status quo for our industry - heaven knows that if privacy stories don't get mindshare, the status quo could get far worse.
I knew someone that used to work on the Alexa team on the language side of things. She had an emotionally terrible few weeks at one stage, because she and her team had to brainstorm (working in conjunction with experts) on just about every possible way users might ask questions that indicate they're being abused, so that they could provide suitable responses. Glad to have worked on it, but it was heart wrenching in many regards.
The spike in one-hit-wonders during the 90s wasn't surprising to me. I had the unenviable position of working as a line cook and construction worker during the 90s and listened to the radio 6+ hours a day. It's actually fun to listen to those hits these days. There are so many songs that I've forgotten about that I would listen to over and over again before they were overtaken by a new hit. Superman, burning beds, seether (whatever that was), bands named after boxes and chairs, ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open...listening to them now brings back a lot of memories so it's hard to hate them today as much as I did then. I remember exactly where I was (sitting in the parking lot of a Shoney's in Charlottesville, VA) when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. Typical FM radio before that was hair metal and classic rock.
My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.
Primus, faith no more, Dee lite all in heavy rotation on mtv.
Umass spring concerts included phish, beastie boys, bostones one year, Dylan and the Wailers (without Bob Marley) the previous.
I worked security for Perl Jam playing the student union ballroom.
Lots of that music holds up really well. Eve6 if my underrated band of choice.
Phish had some fun weekend camp out with fish concerts/fests in Maine and Upstate NY.
It ended kind of badly with riots at the Woodstock 99 concert.
In a similar vein: I had a new coworker named "Jason" join a team once, and for the life of me I couldn't help but type "JSON" first when writing emails/messages with his name. It took weeks before I could reliably get it right first try. Some habits (muscle memory? sub-vocalizations?) die hard.
Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
Compared to say the 70s, the 90s was pretty bleak. A bit of good grunge, a bit of good hiphop, and then it all sort of fizzled out. At least in europe/uk you had the explosion of electronic music and mdma and everyone having an amazing time. American kids growing up in the late 90s were robbed.
As an American, that was a lot more going on that you didn't really hear about, but I also agree with you about electronic music. I randomly grabbed a Future Sound of London CD in the mid to late 90s, and couldn't believe what I had been missing. I have been exposed to bands like Kraftwerk, but nothing like what was going on in the UK and Europe. From there I discovered Trance music, then progressive House, and started to experiment with sequencing software like FruityLoops (now FL Studio) in the later 90s. Trip-hop then started to become popular, and it became easier to get my friends into electronic, who prior only were into 90s hip-hop (arguably some of the best ever produced).
As a 90s American teen this is completely absurd. It is literally the peak of the music industry as a whole.
The American 90s rave scene was also absolutely amazing. Big enough to have parties every Friday and Saturday but not too big to attract much undesirable people and law enforcement.
Trance originated in the 90s though it only matured after. But it was a great time for me. I'm in Europe, yes, but I heard about trance events in the US too
It's crazy, I heard Mmm Bop the other day and didn't even hate it a little bit. It was probably the most annoying song of the 90s and yet the nostalgia kept me du bopping right along.
I think about highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore. I'd include David Bowie, Neil Young, Billy Joel, Duran Duran, Yes, KRS-ONE, just for a few. Sometimes I listen to a late discography and enjoy it consistently, such as Neil Young [1], other times it seems like an artist really loses their way, like Frank Zappa did once he got his Synclavier. Other artists wander in the dark for years and come out with something better than they ever did [2] Despite all this, some artists put on an amazing live act despite no new hits, such as Public Enemy and the 38 Special/Foghat show my son won tickets to last year. [3]
I used to have reductivist explanations such as "struggles with music technology" or "too old to rock and roll" but after hearing a lot of late music that I like, despite being unpopular, I think every artist follows a different trajectory.
[3] Answering problems in so many ways: members who passed away were replaced with other illustrious rock and rollers -- I wasn't expecting to hear "Play that funky music white boy" or an instrumental from the Heavy Metal soundtrack but these were great, Foghat even paid a songwriter to make a new song that fit in perfectly with their set.
> highly productive artists who, at some point, keep making records but can't make hit records anymore
Then there is Cher, who has had 52 charting singles (Billboard Hot 100) so far, from 1965 to 2023.
The Rolling Stones have charted singles from 1963 (UK) to 2023, so their hits also span 7 decades.
On the songwriting and production side, there is Max Martin, who has written or co-written 27 #1 hits (Billboard Hot 100) so far. The first one was for Britney Spears in 1998, and the most recent two (!) were for Ariana Grande in 2024.
Ah yeah but that's always the case. Was mostly just surprised my response to 27 number ones was "really, only 27?!"
Looks like the hot 100 is more confusing than I thought; I see I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys only peaked at 6 because it somehow only came out after its peak in popularity, whatever that means (maybe it was only a music video for a few weeks or something or not physically available or something?)
US #1 or not, the song is an enduring classic. It has remained in the top 200 on at least one Spotify chart since 2015, and probably as long as Spotify has existed.
Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame) was pushing 80 when I saw him perform a few years ago (he’s 81 now) and his show was absolutely incredible. He played one new song which I’ve totally forgotten, and of course all of the old songs, but wow that show is refined to a perfected science. Pigs literally flying, a literal wall coming up, laser lights, projectors, fake machine guns. Comfortably Numb was a standout, but he’s been doing this songs for over 40 years now to arenas. It’s astonishing. So many moving parts (literally and figuratively) and I’ll fondly remember it for the rest of my life.
Right, there was a time that many older rockers seemed "too old to rock and roll" but as you say, they have learned from all their successes and mistakes so they have it down to a science. My wife had an amazing time at a Bruce Springsteen concert similarly.
From vague memory, I'm not sure Frank Zappa lost his way, but actually found what he'd been looking for the whole time. Prior to the Synclavier he was forced to use humans to bring his compositions to life, and therefore his compositions were written with this in mind; a forced compromise of sorts.
Can't be too upset though given his prolific album releases prior to his Synclavier moment.
You're right, he was such a misanthrope that he didn't enjoy working with musicians, yet, he worked with so many brilliant musicians that made his work great.
I think of his albums where he heavily overdubbed concert footage, probably peaking in The Man From Utopia which just sounds like the greatest concert you never went to.
Also worth remembering that his most synclavier-heavy work came as he was dying of cancer. And also that the "synclavier phase" is like 4-5 albums out of over 60.
Back in high school, my buddies and I snuck in to a few Saron Gas (their pre-Seether name) shows at Roxy's in Johannesburg. We were under age, and couldn't afford the R20 cover. They were really talented, and put on a great show (one of the top club shows I can remember).
> The band originally performed under the name Saron Gas until 2002, when they moved to the United States and changed it to Seether to avoid confusion with the deadly chemical known as sarin gas.
One of their guitarists came out of my local scene. I shared a stage with the guy a number of times. After a few years and albums, he left the band and became a teacher. It was one of the events that started taking the air out of the rockstar dream.
Thank you for reminding be of the band's name. Hearing that one four times a day was painful. It's stuck in my head now again and I haven't listened to it in twenty years.
I've never heard that one. Thanks for pointing it out. They remind me a little of The Connells...check out Scotty's Lament and Stone Cold Yesterday with my favorite being Fun & Games[1]. I think they were five years too early...I was obsessed with them in high school.
Another early one-hit-wonder is from Deee-Lite, "Groove is in the Heart" (1990). I still watch the video from time to time...the woman can dance like no other.
An interesting thought to think about is how sense of Smell is related to memory (from an evolutionary perspective the sense of smell-mem link was to ensure we Humans knew when something was not OK to ingest)
But in modern times, now you can have smells link or lock memories in...
So for you as a line cook - you have a bunch of experiences with these songs linked to whatever you were smelling at the time which then locked the 'nostalgia' into memory - so now in the Reverse RAG situation, you hear a song and your memories of those times are really strong.
And to quote the magnanimous Steven Wright:
"Memories... they're really the only thing you have to think back on"
I have a weird second-hand memory by this. Back in the 90s, when I was still in school, we were having a bit of a relaxed period. My teacher had the radio on and was marking some stuff, while we kids were doing whatever.
At one point, while I was talking to him, Stairway to Heaven started playing, and he told me that every time he hears that song he remembers the taste and smell of a cheeseburger he had when he visited the US years before.
Now, every time I hear that song, I think of cheeseburgers.
I wish everyone who read the above comment would report back to confirm or deny that they also think of cheeseburgers now when Stairway to Heaven comes on.
My brother has an exceptional sense of smell... and he had a wonderful memory.
I personally, have a compltely retarded_sense of smell, and a poor mem.
I was extremely involved in martial arts (pre-olympic, blah blah) and got hit in the nose a lot)
--
I had a photographic mem until I was about ~14 which I originally thought of as the first time I smoked pot -- but really it was when I started Martial arts...
((I used to take tests in Biology whereby rather than doing the test, I would re-draw the entirety of the chalkboard of the class for that test - and not answer a thing)
(I have memories from 6 months old... where a girl named Wednesday attempted to smother me in my crib with a pillow) ((hippy commune, 1970s, Sanf Francisco -- yes my mom was friends with Jim Jones -- I have incredible memories))
but I relegated my mem loss to various things -- but I have a REALLY poor sense of smell currently. and a poor mem as such.
(However, I can tell you every single passwd Ive ever typed into a machine. The first ISP passwd I was given in the early 90s by netcom auto gen was "FblQ00Ho" in ~96-ish... ((part of my frustration in IT when someone says they cant recall they passwd))
We should have a device that provides a scent when someone selects a secret - and then have them select the passwd induced by the scent.
(I dont give a heck about how nuts the above sounds... its real. thats why its called NOSE-To-LOGIA nostalgia. (I love dissecting etymology)
--
I wrote the following joke eons ago about photographic mems as such:
"I have a photogenic memory... Whenever I think back on myself - I look fantastic"
I have memories of being in my crib, and have confirmed that they are real with my parents. I was into psychedelics at the same time I got into martial arts. I still remember my phone number from living at home as a kid. I can't prove it, but I have a theory that the type of mind that fully enjoys martial arts (assuming you are in this category), is able to "let things go" more easily than other people. I still have some olfactory "memories" that are more current, but I feel like the type of mind that would be into pot or other hallucinogens as well as martial arts, probably has changed their brain to create memories in a different way. I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I find this type of thinking tends to focus on more integration of multiple things going on all at once, rather than a specific event tied to a specific smell, for example.
While I may be completely full of myself, I enjoyed reading your comment, and it struck me how people with totally different experiences in life may have more of a human connection than you'd think once you start looking at finer details. I appreciate it!
Too early maybe.
Your comment is profound, and loved and received.
You must watch the Telepathy series on JRE and such,
Your wording is well sorted. We are finding ourselves - ive been open on HN with resistance,
But the entiretity of tech build in Silicon Valley has been built on som dark shit.. (but its all around mind manip and Sex Magikx if you want to discuss that) ( Morehouse university and such)
regardless I appreciate you
(Ill freely give you all my creds if need... I know a lot)
They are trying to be sarcastic, and focus on HN and the way people generally use the site. That's how I understood it, anyways. You didn't say anything wrong.
Music is the only way I can remember any points in my life at all. Where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what I was feeling, etc. Otherwise completely impossible. I can remember the exact moment I heard every song I heard (that I liked).
A famous linkage of smell/taste with memory is near the beginning of Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" (Remebrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time). Involuntary memory is a theme in it.
At thirty I quite my job as an industrial painter and sandblaster and started as a temp data entry clerk at a local government for $8/hour. Worked hard at what I did, made connections, and moved into field-work, then GIS. From there I moved to the private sector in Civil Engineering, still doing GIS. I then made a tangential career change into geospatial software development after moving to DC, as I spent a lot of time learning programming on the job as a GIS Analyst. Now I do DevOps. I think the key for me was to put myself into an environment where I could get the opportunities that I wanted, and working hard towards those goals.
This is great. It's interesting how two very remote dwarf planets with widely different orbits are so close to each other right now (90377 Sedna and 2012 VP133).
EDIT: On further thought, I noticed another kind sorta nearby. I wonder if this is just a matter of looking for them in that area and that there could be a lot more that are undiscovered?
Your edit is spot on — there's a lot out there in the Kuiper Belt / Oort Cloud that we don't know about. It's hypothesized that there are many objects out there, with more mass than in the Asteroid Belt. It's no coincidence that the ones we know are all near their perihelion currently.
