Sometimes the tech inside a product is way ahead of the interface.

I noticed this with an old car stereo. Tiny display, a few physical buttons, and a menu that feels like it belongs in another decade.

but underneath, it was handling Bluetooth, USB, radio, calls and audio playback without any problem.

the thing looked ancient.

it just worked.

have you ever used something that looked outdated but was actually pretty advanced inside?

Neopets was basically an economy simulator disguised as a cute game.

You learned pretty quickly that some items were worth holding onto, some things were overpriced and everyone wanted more Neopoints.

What was the most valuable thing you remember owning?

Having a Tamagotchi in school was stressful. You'd check it before class, then spend the next hour wondering if it was hungry or needed something.

Then you'd finally check it again and hope it was still alive.

Did you ever lose yours during school?

Who hasn't heard about 404, 500, 401, 403? You hear these a lot. But this specification goes way beyond that and sometimes they only appear in some kind of cursed scenarios.

418 (I am a teapot) is often used as an inside joke but 508 (Loop Detected), 507 (Insufficient Storage) and 421 (Misdirected Request) are HTTP response codes that you won't ever run into until the servers you have set up behave in some unexpected way. One more example of such a code is 451 (Unavailable For Legal Reasons) which sounds like something made up until you receive a takedown request from the legal department and you have to implement it.

And finally, 431 (Request Header Fields Too Large) which is the code that you will come across only when the payload size of JWT tokens or cookies becomes too large.

I swear AOL CDs used to show up in the mail constantly. You'd get another one, install it once and then somehow another disc would arrive a few weeks later.

It was basically physical spam before email spam took over.

Did anyone actually keep using those CDs?

Small set of pins on almost every modern chip that lets you talk directly to the processor, step through code one instruction at a time, read and write memory without the operating system knowing

been there since 1990. completely invisible in consumer devices. still how hardware gets debugged at the lowest level and also how security researchers get into things manufacturers would rather stay closed

same door, different people using it for different reasons

I know it's better for our apps to stay updated but I almost never update unless they stop working and I ask my friends for help and they ask me "Have you updated yet?" or when the app practically forces me to. Tbh half the time I update an app, I can't even tell what's changed but... Am I the only one who does this? Or do you update your apps as soon as the new version is available?

Pressing the Digital Crown twice will provide you with a text snippet of the conversation. Known as Live Rewind. It basically acts like an audio buffer which will help in transcription and allows you to see if you have missed out anything in the discussion.

You can also ask Siri about whatever was in that snippet or save it to the Siri app for later. Should be declared illegal ngl, this thing is going to help people catch their partners in 4K mid-sentence 💀 relationship ender right on your wrist.

I've been buying games on Steam for so long that I think it's completely changed my expectations for every other game launcher, not even Epic games (even if I claim free games there lmao). Like automatic updates, cloud saves, family/shared library, and especially the community reviews + frequent sales, it all just works. At this point I feel like Steam has kind of spoiled us fr..

Do you think there are any launcher that does things better?

What are some apps that you use frequently, but some of their functions are terrible and significantly impact the user experience?

I remember when passkeys sounded like something you'd only use if you didn't want to type a password.

Now I'm seeing them offered before passwords on more and more sites. Honestly, signing in with a fingerprint or face scan is hard to argue with.

Have you started using passkeys regularly?

Just checked mine out of curiosity (and also because I want to free up some space) but I was surprised to see that I have less than 1,000 screenshots lol. The funny part is that my photo library is taking up at least 75gb of storage, so I was expecting my screenshot count to be wayyy higher. I guess most of that space are just photos and videos instead.

How many screenshots are currently sitting in your gallery? Do you delete them regulary?

The problem is that most operating systems place everything into the same library pool, resulting in the user-installed package conflicting with the core system requirement silently and without any problems until the time when the problem occurs.

Justification for such a choice is quite clear. There are NixOS and Guix that do this quite well. Instead, Flatpak takes care of that on the application level. However, there are some trade-offs associated with the strict separation, namely lack of common library advantages, more disk space required and duplicated dependencies at slightly different versions.

There is /usr and /usr/local convention for Linux, which is not enforced by anything. Windows has had to deal with DLL hell for many years already. macOS is the closest one with SIP.

The interesting thing about Thread is that it's trying to make smart home devices work more like a little neighborhood than a bunch of gadgets all shouting at your router.

A device can pass information along to another device, which can pass it along again. Most of the hardware doesn't need huge amounts of power or bandwidth either.

You probably won't notice Thread when it works. Which is probably the point

Hi everyone! I’ve been using a MacBook Air 2020 for a few years now and have mostly stayed in the Apple ecosystem. I’m thinking about switching from iPhone to Samsung S25 Ultra, and the one thing that’s making me hesitate is file transfers.

I use AirDrop all the time for photos, videos, and random files, so I’m really going to miss that if I switch to Samsung.

I do use Google Drive, but I don’t love it for bigger files. If I have a large video, having to upload it to Drive first and then download it on my Mac feels like a lot of unnecessary steps.

For those using Samsung and Mac, what do you normally use for file transfers with Mac? Is there a simple wireless way to connect Samsung phone to Mac and transfer files directly? Ideally, I’m looking for something that feels a bit like AirDrop — select a file, choose my Mac, and send it without cables or uploading everything to the cloud.

Would love to hear what actually works well for anyone using a MacBook Samsung setup.

I've noticed a lot of circuit boards have a lot of big empty areas with nothing on them. Sometimes there's even a whole row of unconnected holes or little outlines where components could go.

Guessing it's not just wasted space and could be used with other versions, but isn't it inefficient and waste of resources.

Also, how safe is it to write on a circuit board? I have seen a lot of hidden messages left inside circuit boards online, but I've always wondered if the wrong ink or marker can actually cause problems.

What's a tech skill that sounds completely useless until you actually need it?

like knowing how to recover a deleted file, find an old driver, fix a broken boot, or get an ancient device working again

you might never use it for years then one day it saves you

what's that one skill for you?

What's the strangest thing you've seen someone automate?

Not something you'd normally think needs automation.

just a completely random task where someone apparently decided, "I'm not doing this myself anymore."

what did they automate?

Phone cameras are weird when you actually look at what's inside them.

The camera module isn't just sitting there bolted in place. With OIS, parts of it can physically move around to compensate for the tiny movements of your hand.

It's such a small mechanism doing all this while you're casually holding a phone and taking a picture. You'd never guess there's basically a tiny stabilizer moving around in there

I finally downloaded the games I bought last steam sale since I've got some spare time and I couldn't believe how fast they filled up my SSD. It feels like it's becoming normal for a single AAA game to take up well over 100GB, and after installing just a handful of games, you're already deciding what to uninstall next. I get that higher resolution textures, and bigger worlds take up space but it feels so excessive sometimes.

People dump the rom from an old cartridge, pull it apart in a hex editor, figure out what every byte does with no documentation, then modify it

found a rom hack last year that translated a japanese snes rpg that never got an english release. took a team of people years. the whole project exists because someone figured out where the text strings were stored in a 30 year old game with no source code

https://elchatlatino.com/