"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural."
Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too?
I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural!
I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.
I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense. But it's like talking about what is really green vs what is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on the definitions of the terms.
It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic?
My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken processing it?
I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd definitions and interpretations of commonly used language with the expectation that everyone who interacts with their group understand their dialects. It's not really jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the language, just used to mean something different than the general population would understand. Similarly, artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good, when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.
You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation.
But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.
Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.
To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists?
To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.
Apple still sells the iPhone SE 3. Rumor has it that the next iPhone SE will lose the home screen button but retain the same size. The camera isn't as powerful as the iPhone 13/14/15 lines but I find that it does fine in low light and takes the same exceptionally beautiful photos in good lighting. It has portrait mode as well.
It's not that much of a trade-off in terms of features or capability and it has the small size you'd expect.
How did you get it to work? I'm trying to do something very basic, wait for a text message to appear and make a POST request to an endpoint with the contents. I can create the Shortcut itself, but I cannot make the Automation run without showing a notification and then requiring me to tap on the notification to run the Automation.
(Translating UI strings from German.) When I have the automation open, the first two settings are "Automation" (set to "Execute immediately") and "Notify on execution" (set to off). That seems to work. But not sure if it's more restrictive for certain types of actions, like network requests. I'm only using it for fairly basic stuff like "if Youtube or Nebula is opened, turn screen rotation lock off".
I'm specifically looking for a small/normal-sized smartphone that doesn't run iOS, as I need features from my phone not available on iOS (specifically, running automations automatically)
We’re in SF. Those are real testimonials. And while those are renderings the actual devices look identical. Lots of photos on X showing they look like you’d expect. As much as a photo on Apple’s website looks like the real thing.
Sorry for the late reply. I'm a big fan of both reading and eInk so I think I'm in your target customer group, and I appreciate the response.
I would recommend you be a bit more up front about who you are on your website, and also that you try to get more in-depth statements from you early adopters. It seems like you have a good story and people who really love your product, but your website doesn't say that to me.
You can see around the lenses and have decent awareness of what’s going on. I can see my partner and interact with her on the edges. I can also drink tea and see where everything is. It’s nowhere near complete isolation.
Hey HN, I helped build the Sol Reader glasses and would love to answer any questions. It helps that I've spent months using the glasses and can attest to the increased amount of reading these glasses have unlocked. I have a 2 year old and making time for reading books is hard, but now I've found chunks of phone time being replaced with Sol time, esp. in the middle of the night when I don't want to have a light on that wakes my partner.
One note on the screen resolution, the screenshot linked on this thread is from our SDL2 simulator. The actual page feels more like paper, with warm eink artifacts and slight character bleed. No one who puts these glasses on talks about the resolution, instead they all have this huge smile on their face.
> Is the system able to adjust to the strength of your eyesight?
There is a per-eye diopter adjustment, ranging from 0 to -5.75, so you have quite a bit of focal adjustment.
> What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers?
Not having to hold a book is huge, IMO. I didn't realize it until I started wearing my Sol Reader regularly, but it's basically as much work as watching TV while capturing the words of a book.
Also, the lack of light output means I can read in the middle of the night. There's dark mode and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.
So far the boot loader is unlocked and you can flash on top of it, although I don’t know why you’d want to since you’d have to rebuild an entire OS but it would be possible. Our waveforms were easy to get right so it’s not as simple as driving the eink displays with OSS drivers.
To add a book you can use a mobile app or text directly since we’re manually buying the books for now. Once we have a book marketplace it’ll be self serve on the mobile apps. We are planning side loading capabilities so you can use the mass storage device, but there’s a bit of preprocessing we’re doing to the epubs that we’ll have to replicate for self serve epubs. To get around that you can email an epub to add@solreader.com and we deliver it directly to your device. Handy!
The lenses that ship with these limited editions will be dust and moisture resistant. But if they drop in a tub all bets are off. That may change one day.
You can use hackersmacker.org, a browser extension I built, to highlight HN authors while reading on the web. And if the people you follow also use it, you’ll see friend-of-friends and foe-of-a-friends.
Hacker Smacker (https://hackersmacker.org) is a browser extension I built to help with exactly this problem. It shows a colored or next every commenters name, signifying whether you friended them or foe’d them. And so it lets you read Hacker News natively and allows you to quickly scroll through comments, highlighting, commenters who you like, and filtering commenters who you previously have marked that you don’t like.
Makes quick work of comment threads. And if the people you’re following, also use hackers smacker, then their friends and foes will also be shown as side-by-side orbs.
