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> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription


That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.

I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.

Reminds me of vid.me, who picked up on the intense hatred towards youtube and launched a competing video host that actually got some serious traction. No ads, no subscriptions, just pure good content.

They went bankrupt in a year. Turns out internet consumers are just painfully entitled.


The integration of ads is a problem but content creators and marketers have had an adversarial relationship with SEO with Google for a long time, the old algorithm probably would not work as well as what they are providing.

https://www.clicks.tech/pages/about-clicks ?

(not affiliated but feels a bit rough as a critique for a companty that has shipped keyboards for a while)


The physical address is just a coworking space according to streetview. It's the same address as fxtec: https://www.fxtec.com/


where do you see it is a coworking space? looks to me like a normal office building

either way it is a physical address, I was just responding to the invalid claim above


It was meant as an addendum. I might have confused it with the chancery house on the other side of the road, streetview footage shows construction signs for a coworking space so I assumed it would be that. The actual address seems to be from a law firm, not sure how good of a sign that is. It's not unusual for UK companies to use their solicitor's address


where do you see that link here: https://www.clicksphone.com


"visit our main site" -> about in the footer


Tangential but did not see it mentioned: Calibri must have been the Microsoft Word default at some point, at least in some parts of the world, because seeing it makes me think this is a Word document by a person that did not change the default font.


It absolutely was, from Office 2007 up to Office 365 where they switched to Aptos (2023-ish?)



Related ongoing thread:

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image generation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875 - Nov 2025 (214 comments)


neat trick indeed. would be cool to do the math and get an analytical formula of mean queue time given cache refresh for a given k, under some mild assumptions.


That may have been done in the underlying paper by Mitzenmacher et al., but I haven't checked.

I'm more confident that that paper established that firing n requests at n servers will result in a max server load proportional to log(log(n)) with high probability, vs. proportional to log(n) for random -- IOW an exponential improvement in max server load over random.


> Some said it was a sign of a continued rise of Reagan and Thatcher style individualism. Cultural critic Allan Bloom deemed the Walkman "a nonstop... masturbational fantasy” in his 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Neo-Luddite John Zerzan saw the Walkman as part of a modern trend that encouraged a "protective sort of withdrawal from social connections" and Thomas Lipscomb, chief of the Center for the Digital Future, equated it with the euphoric drug "soma," from Huxley's Brave New World, creating, as he put it, "an airtight bubble of sound" that was nothing but a "sensory depressant." In other words it all felt ‘a bit blackmirror’ as one might say today. (A collection of quotes collected in this 1999 Reason Magazine article)

not sure about the masturbational fantasy but the rest seems fairly spot on as a critique?


I want to live in a violin


what does pike look like

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/tut/introduction/first_glan...

(saving you some clicks...)


From what I remember of working with Pike, the best part was probably the included image module. Maybe I will install Pike again just to see if I still like it.

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/docs/man/chapter_13.html


Turns out there is no Pike package for FreeBSD, no port, and the Pike git repository has a FreeBSD subdirectory last updated 22 years ago.

But ./configure && gmake && gmake install seemed to work, or at least it runs and nothing weird has happened so far.


pike used to be in bsd ports. probably the maintainer stopped working on that. it is still being tested. it builds but currently the testsuite fails:

http://pike.lysator.liu.se/development/pikefarm/8.0.xml

http://pike.lysator.liu.se/development/pikefarm/9.0.xml

if you dig through you'll find 3 or 4 failed tests out of thousands.


Thanks. It took me 5 clicks before finding any code (this page).


I feel like my iPhone does it. But not sure. Sound definitely changes when you zoom while recording


They do. They rarely mention it but they do:

https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2019/249a0jw9...


The only content regarding audio I saw here are slides 124-140, which cover beam-forming but I didn't see anything about a default beam-forming profile tied to virtual zoom.


On current iPhone Pro (16) you can even select the audio mix you want for recorded video after recording.


Unfortunately in practice I've found it sounds not great.


Depends. In my practice (selfie camera videos) I found it to be unbelievably good.


This is a feature of iPhone, yes. Believe it came around the 11 (?) but it can really help when recording concerts if you're into that sort of thing.


Funny, that’s exactly when I hate it the most! If you zoom mid clip the sound very audibly changes which is not desirable.


Samsung phones have this as well, can be enabled or disabled in the camera settings.


Mine is too old to test the claim, but knowing that it has at least three microphones on board, It'd be absurd if Apple didn't implement it.


It's pretty computationally cheap, too, as long as you've got the math right and an easy way to choose where to aim the beam


Reading obj c brought back some good memories of when I coded iPhone apps around 2009. Great language

On topic: parsing others file formats has to be one of the most fun and most terrible things. The bliss when it ends up working is great


I have unintentionally spent a lot of time parsing things in my work and side projects.

When you have a spec, parsing things, even if it's a bit terse (or awful), is not a problem. You look to the code you have to handle that terse bits with pity, but if it works, it works.

On the other hand, when you need to parse something undocumented, and it's bad (PSD, Office formats, bytestream from a dodgy IR multitouch pointer for a smartboard), you suffer to a level where every emo teen yearns and anybody who goes through real pain either feels better for themselves or hug you in empathy.

It's that bad.


I second this, it's a great fun exercise parsing various binary file formats. At various times through my career I started with simple stuff like BMP and worked up to packetized media streams.

On the way learned a lot about bit manipulation and reading ISO type specifications.


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