I have an analog Casio G-Shock that's the perfect beater watch - radio controlled, solar charging, I can discern the hands in the dark without glasses, and almost indestructible. It wasn't terribly expensive either.
I think Casio is threading the needle quite well with new technology. I'm sure they're exploring pure smart watches, but the core ideal is "no maintenance" - you don't have to change the battery or set the time[1]. This naturally leads to tough, energy-concious engineering, and as they make millions of watches, they have economies of scale.
The newer models have BT low energy so you can use the admittedly fiddly controls with an app. But you don't need to. It's just a complement.
[1] obviously this only applies to the more expensive models, and if your local time source supports DST
I skimmed it. It's terrible. It's a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who's convinced he's actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.
Contains such Austean gems as this
If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington -- measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation -- it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .
Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn't cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can't help himself.
[1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!
It's been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they're just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.
Thoughts / notes on Nostr? A local on a tech site is pushing it semi-hard, and I just remember it being mentioned in the same breath as Bluesky back in the day. It ticks a lot of techfash boxes - decentralized, "uncensorable", has Bitcoin's stupid Lightning protocol built in.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
Nuclear wonk Chery Rofer talks a bit about the plutonium fire sale to Saltman in this piece, after some faff about Putin trolling Trump into resuming nuclear testing:
Bungie made Marathon before Halo and it's basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many "integrated" species. It's a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.
OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pfor's leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and there's an eldrich horror living in a star too.
I used to work in a call-center adjacent industry and the amount of crap some employers used to make sure their workers sounded as much as robots as possible was astounding.
Guys, it's a problem that GenPop thinks "AI" is useless, because that means they will deny the inevitable coming existence of the Evil Robot God and make it harder to stop it
The whole thing has to be read to be believed. But there are some fun nuggets:
saying that an evil robot god is coming is Rational. Doubting that is a conspiracy theory
slagging flat-earthers on LW is truly the pot calling the kettle black
"I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or detect cancer. In that case, I think it's a lot harder to deny its achievements. But in our world, a lot of AI's greatest achievements take context to understand, like protein folding or playing board games." - yeah sure buddy all the pro board game players are quaking in their boots
drivers have mixed some trucker speed into their cokes