Bloodborne is his favorite game, plus he’s a “producer” not director or something where a bunch of the creative responsibility would be on him. IMO his name being attached to the project does give me a bit of reassurance that it will be respectful of the source and not just be a Sony cash-grab.

While I agree with you, I’m not sure Chromebooks should count as “using tech” for the sake of learning. If you really want to give a younger generation experience with technology there are far better systems for them to learn on.

Just a minor bit of pedantry, but Social Security Numbers are generally abbreviated as SSN, SSID usually refers to a “Service Set Identifier” aka WiFi network name.

Haven’t had a chance to really look into it, but there’s also spacebar chat which is an open source selfhosted reimplementation of the discord backend that can be used with existing discord clients and bots and stuff. Which depending on how solid the rest of if is, could really help existing discord people move with less effort.

One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.

It’s a bit niche, and I’m probably one of the few people who daily drove them when they were a thing, but bring back Firefox OS phones - they were a bit ahead of their time, but now that every app is a browser window anyway it’d probably be fine, and people are craving a mobile OS alternative to Android and iOS.

Sure, I’d personally prefer something a bit more powerful, so maybe a joint project between Mozilla, and a linux phone distro like PostmarketOS would be cool. Or (since I’m already in fantasy land) depending on hardware, considering Valve’s work on ARM for the Steam Frame, maybe a partnership with them.

Granted, it’s been close to a decade since I daily drove FirefoxOS, there’s always a chance I’m remembering things as better than they were. I should dig my old FirefoxOS Phones out and do a bit of a retrospective look at them.

“Low-energy beverages” sounds like a dumb Trump insult for caffeine-free diet soda.

Even in China it’s boomers using AI to make boomer memes.

I know not everyone is in a position where they can just ignore management, and maybe I’ve just been in more blue collar jobs where ignoring management is normalized. But unless they’re literally looking over your shoulder, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. It’s not like AI is more efficient once you count the extra debug time.

That’s honestly more of a problem than a feature at this point. The GPL at least protects open source projects as a “public good” and forces corporate users to contribute their changes back to the public (in some manner). All permissive licenses do is let corporations leech off the community without a requirement to give back.

Marry a database. These losers falling in love with AI don’t know how to be a real technophile.

Honestly, while Pepsi isn’t a great company either, if they made an ad pointing out how much “their competitor” spent in water, electricity, etc. on making an ad using AI, and then included that “since AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted, we stole it and paid an intern 1 million dollars to replace the logo with our own” and then just play the ad with the trucks drawn over like in a school notebook to be blue pepsi trucks with the pepsi logo.

I think if a big company went all in on being a world-class AI hater, they’d do really well. It’s kinda a huge untapped market as consumer sentiment against AI grows because it’s being pushed so hard.

They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.

So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.

It can’t do anything to help anyone, but it’s essentially a mobile Flock camera with license plate tracking and facial recognition. It’s a privacy nightmare, and a massive legal liability for the city (Benn Jordan has an excellent video on his YouTube about Flock cameras and how bad they are). Best case scenario is it drives through a deep puddle during the next hurricane and shorts itself out.

I have a bunch of different zigbee models, but my overall favorites are the Sengled Zigbee plugs. They have power monitoring, which can be really useful for automations.

For example, my computer monitor makes an annoying high-pitched squeal when in standby mode, so I have it and my PC on separate Sengled smart plugs and if the PC plug is drawing low enough wattage for 10 seconds that I can be sure it’s off or asleep, my automation turns off the monitor smart plug, and when the PC plug wattage jumps back above the threshold, the monitor plug gives power to my monitor again.

Obviously that specific use is a bit niche, but the ability to know when not-smart devices are using more or less power and run automations accordingly can be really useful.

There are other brands besides Sengled that have power monitoring, but I’ve found theirs to be pretty reliable, just make sure you get the zigbee plugs, because they also make wifi plugs that look basically identical to the zigbee model.

That’s just the Emacs logo in the top-left. At least I assume Emacs has a terminal since there’s that old “Vim proverb” about Emacs being a “great OS, it just lacks a good editor.”

I’ve heard they are generally accurate but that there are better sources, unfortunately I haven’t heard specifically what those better sources are.

With as much as I’m ready for the AI bubble to burst, Sabine Hossenfelder isn’t a very reliable source on much of anything - especially her newer videos from within the past year after she got called out for some unscientific takes on transgender care. Since then, she has kinda doubled down on her anti-science-establishment takes acting like she knows more than actual experts.

I’m not really criticizing any of her takes in this particular video (I’ll be honest I’m at work and haven’t had a chance to watch it yet), but just want to caution anyone who may watch this and start getting her videos recommended a bunch by their YouTube algorithm that she’s not considered a reliable science communicator by anyone who is.