It’s just crazy how many Bluetooth devices have broken (or completely absent) authentication and pairing security.

It’s very difficult to tell when they’re encrypted, too. Your Bluetooth keyboard and mouse could be broadcasting everything keystroke and click unencrypted to anyone within 100m or so.

And that’s just the accessories. There have been tons of exploits of phone and computer firmware over the years as well. Security is an afterthought at best with Bluetooth.

You mean Emacs?

320kbps mp3 is actually very good.

Most steaming services will use much worse than 320kbps mp3. Some of the premium plans have options to do lossless but even then, it won’t be much better unless they’re encoding it from a higher-quality master.

Also, most phones have okay-at-best DACs. Devices designed specifically for music (like mp3 players), even very old ones, could realistically have better DACs.

I don’t see anyone entering your home in this scenario.

If you broadcast your IP address in a torrent swarm, that’s now public information. Your ISP can match that IP and timestamp to a customer. None of this information resides in your home and there’s no wiretapping or anything like that.

The specific examples seem reasonable, but do not support the overall thesis.

The problem with that philosophy is that all the fundamental problems reinforce themselves, generation after generation after generation. Assuming familiarity with Windows as your baseline guarantees that you will be stuck in a rut of horrible UI design “because that’s the way it’s always been”. The lowest-friction choice will always be to carry forward all the bullshit.

I don’t think you can truly call someone “computer literate” if they can’t tolerate moderate friction and learn new things quickly.

This is also why apple’s UI sucks so bad now. They used to have fantastic UI design because they made software with the fewest possible assumptions about the user. Now they design software assuming you are ass-deep in their previous software. It is the design equivalent of inbreeding.

If you ever conflate a people with a country, you’ve made a big, dangerous logical fallacy.

I live here because I was born here. That says nothing about my moral character.

I’ve done what I can as a citizen. It has not been enough. I’m not going to stop.

Then revise it until you can read it without hating it.

And, uh, don’t get too caught up on that part.

Lots of artists never stop hating their own work. Art and neurosis — name a more iconic duo. At some point you just need to move on and let it be what it is. Perfectionism is a powerful thing, but it must be tamed.

This is especially true when you’re starting out, before you’ve developed an intuition for which paths are worth following. It’s easy to get stuck in a loop trying to “fix” something that’s never going to be what you want it to be. “Quality over quantity” is the more common refrain, but for a beginner it should be the opposite, because what you need more than anything at that point is just practice. Related: https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/

I don’t think they’re owned by Amazon, but the shipping email gave me an “Amazon Logistics US tracking number”. I guess that means Amazon handles warehousing and shipping? I don’t know what the practical difference is between buying on their own site (which used Shop.com for payment processing, fwiw) vs buying on Amazon.

There are classes of products that are basically impossible to find locally now. Or if you can find the products, they’re outrageously expensive. One example is computer cables. 20 years ago I could walk into any dollar store and get all kinds of cables and adapters for $1-5. Now the only things I see locally are, like, $30 HDMI cables. I’m not paying $30 for a cable, especially not when that money would be going to another huge corp like Best Buy or Target. I’m willing to pay a bit more to shop local but there are limits, and there are so few truly local places left.

If that fails I do a web search and buy from another platform

This is something where I think we could benefit from the wisdom of a community.

Naively searching the web will generally yield >90% results centered around Amazon. Even if you exclude all Amazon domains, you need to sift through all the listicles and “review” sites that are really just Amazon ads with Amazon affiliate links inside.

Same deal if you want to use deal aggregators like slickdeals. The overwhelming majority of posts there are from Amazon, or subsidiaries like Woot.

Heck, recently I bought something direct from a brand’s own web site, only learning that they shipped through Amazon when I got the Amazon tracking number. I’m honestly not sure if I could have known that before completing my order.

It is getting ever harder to avoid giving Jeff Bezos more money.

Yeah. The newer versions of Dall-E, GPT-Image, and similar cloud apps seem to have subnetworks specifically for text. They’re worlds better than they were just a year or two ago. Like, you can twist them into generating semi-coherent-looking text logos, or make a cartoon character wearing a T-shirt with some text on it.

I’ve seen some complex pipelines with open models, where people train loras specifically to fix the things the base models suck at, like hands, text, etc.

But it’s still a really dumb idea to generate a whole presentation slide or infographic that way, for a wide variety of reasons. If you ever get decent results, just consider yourself lucky. I mean, even the people with the skills to do this well (who are few and far between) would find it way more trouble than just, you know, making slides the normal way.

The incompetence we keep seeing from Microsoft is staggering. I can only assume this is malicious compliance. I imagine some exec said “everyone needs to use AI for everything” and everyone below them said “okay you dumb fuck, here you go”.

Oh it’s definitely extra stupid. Looks like the slide was made whole-cloth by an image generator, not like the text was generated by an LLM and pasted in.

Image generators make typos all the time (if you can call them that).

See also: continvoucly morged

Not sure about the licensing, but Adobe’s AI is called Firefly and it’s a few years old now.

Use Bazzite or one of its sister distros.

This is the only reason I use a "gaming* distro. They took the single biggest pain in the ass, and made sure it works out of the box. Yes, there are other challenges (immutable distros have a learning curve) but overall I’m very happy with Bazzite.

Nope. Setting up an ad-blocking DNS server, or installing a web browser with an ad blocker, is as easy (and free) on iOS as it is on Android.

Look up instructions for Mullvad DNS or NextDNS.

And logical punctuation.

Wait. Is that Edge’s real tag line? “From browsing to solved”? Who writes this shit? (Rhetorical question; obviously it was written by committee.)

There are two types of users: those who run untrusted software, and those who are way too trusting.

One of the things I love about all the old Jackie Chan movies is that they always include stunt outtakes in the credits. You can see how some things go wrong. Bloody nose here, broken foot there. Even the best of the best get hurt. I don’t think you’ll find a professional stuntperson who’s never broken a bone.

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