1. Ultrasonic Chef’s Knife
Total comment counts : 31
Summary
Seattle Ultrasonics is promoting a Batch 1 pre-order with estimated shipping by January 2026. The page shows an empty cart with login prompts and notes that customers can cancel anytime before shipment, plus a brief explanation of what a pre-order is.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author critiques a QVC product named after a US tech city, written by someone living near QVC’s home in a non-tech area of the US. They warn against buying “future e-waste” kitchenware unless there are accessibility needs. As alternatives, they recommend a decent victoronix 8" chef knife for about $65 (they paid $36 long ago) and a world-class chef knife for under $250.
Top 2 Comment Summary
Commenting on a thread, the author notes the video shows minimal prep, contrasting simple slicing with real dicing. They cite Seattle Ultrasonics’ knife database as a reference and observe that Japanese knives (and MAC) score well on BESS and CATRA, but poorly on the “Food Cutting Rank”—a roughly ad hoc measure based on robot tests of tasks like bread and cheese. The ranking seems odd since it highlights knives that perform well on non-typical tasks rather than everyday chef duties.
2. Designing NotebookLM
Total comment counts : 12
Summary
Jason Spielman led NotebookLM design, guiding its user experience, brand identity, and visual system from concept to launch. The project unified reading, writing, and creation in one space, solving “tab overwhelm” with a linear Inputs → Chat → Outputs flow and a responsive, scalable 3-panel UI (Source, Chat, Notes) that keeps sources and citations accessible. Early prototypes evolved from a notes-driven UI to an integrated chat overlay; panels adapt to space while remaining extensible. NotebookLM is expanding with flashcards, quizzes, and professional reports and earned TIME’s Best Inventions 2024, in close collaboration with Google Labs and brand teams.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author criticizes NotebookLM and a related post for overdesign and overengineering a simple, valuable UX. They want a straightforward way to select files and chat or summarize them, but NotebookLM suffers from low information density and an abundance of cards, buttons, sections, and icons that hinder navigation. The other post also disappoints, featuring scrolljacking, image carousels, and excessive visual hierarchy rather than substance. While acknowledging slickness, the design often interferes with rather than facilitates the user experience.
Top 2 Comment Summary
NotebookLM’s simple design struggles to scale with new features. Recent updates (Flashcards, Quiz) expanded the Artifacts Button Container to six large buttons, making it 328px tall and confusing for users on small screens in India who can’t see notes. The author used Tampermonkey scripts to collapse the panel and fullscreen long notes, noting similar fixes by others. Other issues include a chat input where follow-up questions are unstable after selection. The author urges more testing and fixes, citing two related gist links.
3. Philips announces digital pathology scanner with native DICOM JPEG XL output
Total comment counts : 5
Summary
Philips expanded its SG300/SG60 pathology scanners with the Pathology Scanner SGi, introducing configurable DICOM JPEG and DICOM JPEG XL outputs—the first native JPEG XL in pathology. JPEG XL files can be up to 50% smaller without quality loss, aiding scalable storage and cloud/on-prem workflows. DICOM adoption enables interoperable, centralized archiving, cross-modality diagnostics and remote collaboration. Philips also offers AI tools and AWS cloud archival to address data growth and pathologist shortages. The SGi is under development and not CE marked.
Top 1 Comment Summary
Author finds pathology image processing annoying and hopes Philips sticks to open DICOM and a consistent internal format. OpenSlide can read many slide formats but does not support Philips’ iSyntax (non-TIFF); TIFF is an export workaround. If Philips uses iSyntax, non-Philips software is limited and lab techs must export to TIFF, costing time. Ideally microscopes would store images in an open format with metadata usable by workflow software to verify scans are complete; the author hopes this will happen.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article is a Mozilla Connect ideas page urging readers to vote for a feature that would add native JPEG XL support in web browsers. It promotes JPEG XL as a possible standard image format and invites community backing to have browsers implement it without plugins.
4. After Babel Fish: The promise of cheap translations at the speed of the Web
Total comment counts : 1
Summary
Translation is a creative negotiation rather than mere word replacement. The piece traces machine translation from AltaVista’s 1997 Babel Fish, which offered instant but flawed Web translations and claimed to “break the Internet language barrier.” It highlights early limits—limited language pairs, misrendered names, terms, idioms, and grammar, even prompting “round-tripping” tests. Umberto Eco argued that translation requires deciphering sense from context and maintaining grammar, citing examples like Shakespeare being rendered as “Shakespeare’s Plants” and “spirit of God” as “el alcohol de dios.” The article concludes MT cannot replace skilled translators; it’s a tool with constraints.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The excerpt argues that Google Translate launched in 2006, but claims it was already available in 2004. The author accuses Google of Orwellian retroactive dating, citing personal memory and the Internet Archive, and recalls using Translate in December 2004 to translate winhistory.de.
5. Knitted Anatomy
Total comment counts : 0
Summary
The text describes a Cloudflare security-block page, noting that the user was blocked after triggering protection rules—likely due to certain words, a SQL command, or malformed data. To resolve, the user should email the site owner with details of what they were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID (e.g., 982432d0e84a8b9e) and their IP. Cloudflare provides performance and security protections.
6. Solving a wooden puzzle using Haskell
Total comment counts : 4
Summary
April 28, 2025 post, the first of a two‑part series about solving a wooden puzzle with a computer. The author outlines the problem and a Haskell-based model: 25 identical pieces, each a 4×1×1 trunk with a notch, must fill a 5×5×5 cube with no holes. Space is treated as a 3D voxel grid; a single generic piece is rotated and translated to generate all dispositions. The Disposition type encodes any placement, and the challenge is enumerating all dispositions. There are finitely many, enabling a computer-assisted search once a suitable decomposition is chosen.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author notes replicating a C++ solution to a puzzle from a decade ago and revisits the original source. They found it—written in French and not elegant but functional—described as brute-force backtracking. They aim to improve it to enumerate all possible solutions, not just the first, and share a link to the polycube.cpp file.
Top 2 Comment Summary
Solving these puzzles is equivalent to solving an exact cover problem, which is NP-complete.
7. A revolution in English bell ringing
Total comment counts : 2
Summary
The article notes a recent website update to streamline sign-in and improve security. It mentions a writer and bell ringer who lives in England. It also includes a New York Times quote praising the magazine as unexpectedly excellent and standing out in a homogenized media landscape.
Top 1 Comment Summary
I don’t see the article text. Please paste the content you want summarized (up to 100 words). If it isn’t available yet, you can provide it when ready and I’ll summarize it.
8. Scream cipher
Total comment counts : 29
Summary
This playful post riffs on cryptography, introducing a “scream cipher” after noting there are more Unicode ‘A’ characters than letters in the English alphabet. It ends with a humorous shout-out that you’ve reached the end and invites engagement: share thoughts on Mastodon, email, or Bluesky; follow the blog via RSS or the email newsletter; browse the 137-entry archive; check a list of cool internet finds; and, cheekily, go outside—the best option.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article describes an encoding called zalgo256 that uses a set of Unicode combining marks (about 256) with 2-byte UTF-8 encoding. By stacking arbitrarily tall sequences of these marks on a base character, a single grapheme cluster can carry unlimited data, leaving only about 2x byte overhead for systems counting by grapheme clusters. The author notes that Hacker News blocks some codepoints, preventing demonstration. Using “A” as the base yields a zalgo-like aesthetic, somewhat akin to the SCREAM cipher.
Top 2 Comment Summary
An author shifts from ROT13 to SCREAM as a post-quantum cryptographic replacement, notes the claim that qubits cannot represent or detect diacritical marks above Latin letters, and closes by thanking the contributor for cryptography.
9. Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf]
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
error
Top 1 Comment Summary
The text promotes minimalism for clarity, urging writers to remove any punctuation, word, sentence, paragraph, or section if it doesn’t alter the message. It credits Strunk & White for this practical guidance and calls it the most actionable tip for better writing, technical or otherwise. As an aside, the author views McCarthy’s residency at SFI as an ideal job.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The piece argues that many early-career scientists fear writing plainly, worrying that clarity would make their work seem simplistic or trivial. Because their self-identity centers on being perceived as “the smart one,” they lack the confidence to present ideas in an accessible and easy-to-understand way.
10. I’m Not a Robot
Total comment counts : 45
Summary
error
Top 1 Comment Summary
The narrator reached Where’s Waldo, grew bored, but praised the hack as awesome and funny.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The speaker hoped to prove themselves but was hindered by their lack of Minecraft knowledge.