My cynical ass is having trouble finding a the dark side of this.

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Can’t bring myself to read this whole thing, but it seems clear to me that he can’t see the forest through the trees. By and large, the hate has nothing to do woth biases on what McCartney is “supposed” to be, or intellectual musings on synths.

It’s just fucking annoying.

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The warm blood going into the feet transfers its heat to the cold blood going back. That means less heat going into the feet where it would otherwise be lost to the environment.

Humans minimize heat loss by simply restricting blood flow to the extremities. It’s uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable (or dangerous) as a cold core.

The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I’m curious what’s changed.

Spotify has a lossless quality option in their apps.

The link says “The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s”, so I guess that’s what Spotify uses for the “high” desktop/mobile setting described at https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/

If Civilization II taught me one thing, it’s that ongoing payments are an absolute scam… Unless you’re planning to declare war anyway.

I think when people talk about fiction being too “political” nowadays, they usually mean one of three things:

1. “I hate minorities.”
2. “I am only now savvy enough to notice the political undertones that have been a defining characteristic of the genre for a century or more.”
3. “The writing sucks.”

Personally, I can get behind #3 because boy howdy there’s some bad writing out there.

And I’ll admit I occasionally fall prey to #2. Some things I watch today feel too “on the nose” in regard to current events, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s truly worse writing than my old favorites or if I was just too ignorant, naïve, or credulous to pick up on it when I was younger. It’s also sometimes hard to tell when re-watching old stuff because I don’t feel the zeitgeist of 30 years ago in my bones the same way I do today’s (naturally).

For example, I can watch an episode of Futurama that’s literally about the world being nearly destroyed by a giant ball of 20th-century garbage, and somehow it doesn’t feel overtly topical, while the new episodes about bitcoin and AI feel more like a sermon than a sitcom. Maybe the writing is worse, or maybe I’m just old now. Who’s to say?

And that is exactly why it was so effective.

Like the old saying goes, “show, don’t tell”. TOS didn’t need to shake us by the shoulders and say “look! There’s a black woman in a respected professional position! Isn’t that amazing‽” They just showed us Uhura doing her job, being treated the same as anyone else because it’s the future and why would it be any other way?

I don’t want AI in my browser even if I can turn it off for the same reason I don’t want my refrigerator door booby-trapped with an explosive even if I can turn it off.

Bugs happen. Configuration changes happen. User error happens. Software is complex, and I shouldn’t need an intimate knowledge of every goddamn app I run to be sure it’s not siphoning all my data off to god-knows-where. I use hundreds of programs on a daily basis. It is completely untenable to carefully configure every single one, stay abreast of constant updates and changes, and spend 76 full working days reading every TOS I am subject to. And of course, all their policies and defaults are subject to change without notice, so nothing I learn today will necessarily apply tomorrow anyway.

I want to be confident that my web browser is not — either by design, due to a misconfiguration, or due to a bug — sending my data to OpenAI. I do not want a booby-trapped browser, even if I can turn off the booby-traps. I do not want my fridge to explode, so I don’t buy fridges with built-in explosives. Seems pretty simple to me.

I also want to be confident in the same for others. If I deploy a browser to 100 employees’ machines, or even just my mom’s, a little opt-out checkbox under Settings will not give me any peace of mind.

Giraffes have the same thing.

My cable management is not a mess, it’s just natural evolution!

Microsoft CEO Can’t Understand Why No Fish Wants a Tongue-eating Parasitic Louse in its Mouth

Share pictures of yourself, or your children, only with actual friends and not for the whole world to find

Good advice but let’s be real: in practice, this means having no social media profile, and even that is a half-measure.

Even if I carefully curate my friends list (most people don’t), and share my photos with only my inner circle (most people won’t), I have no control over what my friends do. If my cousin posts a photo he took at Thanksgiving, it’s probably going to be visible to all his friends, and even friends-of-friends. That’s thousands of people I’ve never met and there’s not much I can do about it.

There are pictures of me on Facebook, and I do not use Facebook. The social cost of getting on everyone’s ass about taking/posting pictures with me is too high even for a grumpy old fart like me. At least I’m not tagged (since I don’t have a profile), so it’s not neatly pre-sorted for potential attackers. But that’s at best security through obscurity, and it isn’t even very obscure. Anyone targeting me specifically would have no trouble finding pictures of me, and none of that is realistically within my control.

It’s more like “beater bike security”. Any bike lock can be thwarted by a dedicated thief, so the best strategy is simply to be a less attractive target than the other bikes around.

This is a systemic problem. It goes beyond individual choices and even beyond social media policies.

In all seriousness, this is very interesting, if only because the methods are easy to control and reproduce.

That said, I’d really like to see comparisons against a more typical warmup routine. I’m not sure the tendon vibration is doing anything more than simulating a warmup. Even that on its own is interesting, just because it opens the door for more targeted experimentation.

Yeah, I meant for AI stuff specifically. Their main products are…well I wouldn’t say “good” but they successfully choked out all competition in the 90s so…

Microsoft has nothing worth using. Microsoft hasn’t made anything that’s even worth talking about. Anyone with an OpenAI key and an afternoon to kill could make something every bit as good as what Microsoft has done. They put the absolute bare minimum of effort into everything they’ve done with AI.

The only advantage they have is customer lock-in. Historically, that’s usually enough for them. I hope it’s not this time.

Eventually Microsoft will probably buy a company with people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I think that’s their only way forward because it looks like the brain drain has finally caught up with them.

Binary Eye

It’s a QR/barcode/etc. reader. Very simple, and after trying like a dozen different QR readers I’ve found it to be the most reliable.

I know that a lot of brands’ built-in camera apps can read QR codes nowadays, but I find a dedicated app faster than the all-purpose camera apps I’ve used, and if you use open-source camera apps like AOSP’s or OpenCamera, then you won’t have that feature built in anyway.

The problem is that they are naively inverting the colors, which doesn’t work for photos. Lazy, yeah.

In principle I think it makes sense (as much sense as the feature in general, anyway). Personally I do not understand the push in iOS and Android to make all icons look the same, but if that’s what you want, then excluding shortcuts would be an eyesore, right?

UN-confirmed

In case anyone misread that, they mean the United Nations (UN) confirmed it.

Yes, it’s a genocide. Genocide is bad. It’s not that fucking complicated.