greybeard

I don’t know if any TVs are actually using it, but Amazon Sidewalk is a form of LoRa, low power, low bandwidth, long distance communication. It’s designed to let non-internet connected devices phone back home. I hear it is very popular with shipping trackers because you can put a small device in a pallet and have it send it’s GPS back for free. I’m not sure it would support the GBs of data TVs are phoning home with each month, but it could certainly send some data home.

Yes, that’s why I expanded on what you said and spelled out hero protagonist.

Nope, the narrator, which I don’t remember well, might have been the inner monologue of the hero protagonist.

On the sidewalk.

Snow Crash is a Sci-Fi book from the early 90s. It coined the term metaverse. It takes place in a post American collapse setting, where corporations have taken over. There’s a lot of interesting points in the book, probably as interesting today as the day it was wrote.

But what stuck with me, and helped form my understanding of society and helped me build my career in tech was his observations on franchises. He posits that franchise are basically a living organism, who’s DNA is written in binders. These binders cover every eventuality. They explain process, procedure, and expected results so that the humans in each franchise can keep the organism alive.

It was kinda a throw away set dressing just setting up the world at the beginning of the book, but it is the part that had real meaning to me.

Youtube has been feeding me Omarchy video lately, it seems like every single one I tried to watch brought up using Grok. I don’t know anything about Omarchy, but it was enough to give me the feeling something wasn’t right.

They are threat to the democratic party? The party that lost to a reality show clown without the DSA? The democratic party that’s sat idly by as that clown turns the US into a circus? That’s the party you are so worried about?

Other way around. PrusaSlicer came first. It was originally a fork of Slic3r, then Bambu and OrcaSlicer forked it. Prusa certainly has back ported some features from OrcaSlicer, which is the way open source should work. Everybody wins.

I pay a premium for Prusa because I like their philospohy of making as much of it as possible in house, and their general openness, not just in code, but in how their business functions.

My first 3D printer was a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. I’m very willing to spend if I think it will benefit the entire ecosystem I’m interested in.

Also, with Prusa, I get to feel like I’m DIYing it, but with great and detailed instructions, and an all-in-one parts sourcing. They are also great at supporting their devices after the fact, which is sometimes necessary, because they often come out a little too hot.

I disagree, it will be worse in almost every way for war than quad copter with a gun mounted on it. Once the brains catch up, maybe, but for now it’s going to trip at the first slightly uneven flooring or raised threshold, and completely destroy itself on a power cable laying on the ground.

You are trusting them either way. If it is your router to their modem, or your modem to their local relays, either way they can view all the traffic you put across the line.

AT&T doesn’t really leave me a choice, I have to use their stupid router/modem, but of course that’s treated as a dumb gateway for my own router. I’ve turned off their wifi radios and enabled their equivalent to gateway mode. It’s pretty much the best you can do beside put it in a faraday cage.

The notable step ups you can do is DNS over HTTPS, or full VPN tunneling, although I always assume most the VPN providers are doing the same spying, not to mention the performance hit.

It’s a dumb promotional thing, they aren’t "Premiere"ing the game, they are are showing gameplay footage. It’s an Ad that Netflix users are paying for the privilege to be advertised to.

It’s pretty clear that robotics hardware has advanced way beyond the software. Do a backflip? No problem, that’s a predefined routine with good secondary control mechanisms to handle the variation between requested movement and actual movement.

Pick up a dish? Well, that’s going to take vision, control, understanding of how the grabber and various materials interact, and then fuse all that data into an expected result and a plan of action, then control of unexpected things like the plate slipping or the floor being slightly wet.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how much it has highlighted how far we have to go.

Obviously I don’t know your setup, but Linux is far easier for printing in most cases. The drivers are built in, and just work. No third party driver packages full of spyware and ink ads necessary.

Hardware support, in general, has always been a struggle for Linux, but in the last few years, two things have happened to tip the scale:

1. Technology kinda stopped advancing. Products are, more often then not, a rehash of last years model with no major changes. This means if Linux gets support for last year’s device, it’ll probably work with this years with minor to no changes.
2. Growing Linux popularity has increased the profile enough that companies are at least trying a little to support Linux, even if it is mostly just making sure Linux developers have documentation on the device.
3. And secret number 3, the tools and systems for reverse engineering USB devices have gotten better and more understood.

AI is finding bugs, which are getting fixed. That’s great, it means a more secure and stable system. As these vulnerabilities are patched out, they are gone forever(regressions not withstanding).

Theoretically, Linux could become perfectly secure. It’s not going to stop people from doing insecure things, but it could mean there are no unintended security weaknesses. We could hit a point were an “LTS” copy of Linux never receives a single security patch, because as long as the code isn’t changing, there’s nothing to fix.

Of course, this is all theoretical, and assumes that new classes of attacks or bigger chains for attacks are never found, but vulnerabilities should be a finite resource in a static codebase, and once that resource is fully exhausted, the code is now fully safe.

Ideally, open weights or open source models catch up, and this can all be done without paying a ransom to OpenAI or Anthropic, and is available through the whole stack, not just kernel level.

The first time I saw one of his comics I really thought it was AI as well. The yellow tint was part of it, but I think another part is the background and foreground not matching. Another thing that stood out was just the amount of detail, felt way more effort than most web comics.

It really is too bad for the artists, he clearly puts a ton of work into these, and it no doubt hurts to have others undercut that.

There are definitely still ads, I’m not talking about the creator inserted ones, but there is a banner that loves popping up that says “view products”, directing users away from the video to a list of products where Google gets a cut of the sales. And lately, I’ve been getting ads for Paramount Plus videos in the middle of my feed. Oh, and then there is putting “Member Only” videos in my feed attempting to upsell me on memberships to creators.

Those are all 100% controlled by Google.

They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I’ve had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn’t a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.

My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?

Probably true. It is the global trend. Although they may follow the same curve as the US, despite booming renewables, coal is being replaced with Natural Gas more than solar and wind. That’s more for political reasons though. Solar and wind continue to get cheaper, and grid storage is finally starting to pan out.

As others have pointed out, it’s not that coal use is decreasing, in fact, it is increasing. It’s that other sources are growing much faster. They don’t have to “juke” the numbers, just lie with statistics.