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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • This is very important if you’re a dad. You can’t just start reading the book straightaway. You gotta read it upside down in a nasal nonsense voice until your kid yells for you to stop. Then act confused. Then when they turn it around for you, open it from the last page and say “the end,” then close it again. Then, depending on the vibe, you might say, “oh, I get it now” and start reading upside down again. On a good day you can keep it going for a few minutes before you actually start reading the book.

    It’s peak comedy. No one has ever been as funny as a dad pretending they don’t know how to read a book





  • I think we all know where this is going.

    1. The Brainchip is trendy in Silicon Valley but doesn’t do much yet. The company says cyber-superintelligence will be available in a year, tops. Investors are pouring billions into it. Everyone says you need to hop on the trend now or you’ll be obsolete in six months.
    2. It’s been two years. The Brainchip still struggles to control a mouse or search Google. Everyone’s lost interest in building apps for it. Many users are reporting severe migraines, but the company says there’s nothing to worry about.
    3. The Brainchip pipes three unskippable ads directly to your optic nerve every time you go to the bathroom. Notifications ping your brain all day long. You can get it removed if you’ve got $80k to burn, but there’s a high risk of postoperative stroke.

    Yeah, no, I’m not putting anything in my brain that isn’t open-source from end to end. And even then probably nah.


  • isaacd@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #3090: Sail Physics
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    2 months ago

    Yes, it’s possible (and common) for a boat to sail against the wind by the power of its sail alone. Sailors have known this for hundreds of years but if it sounds impossible, no worries, I thought so too at first.

    Here’s how it works, simplified so I can get in trouble with pedants:

    The boat, first of all, has a keel (the blade-like bottom of the hull) which “locks” it into movement along a single axis: forward and backward. The wind is not going to blow the boat sideways, at least not very effectively.

    Second, sails are curved, not flat, and can rotate (when seen from above). The force created when the wind deflects off the sail matches the curve of the sail, more or less.

    So if the wind is blowing directly south ⬇️ and you want to travel north ⬆️ you angle the boat northeast ↗️ so it can only move northeast or southwest. Then you point the sail east ➡️ so the wind gets deflected west ↩️. Newton’s third law does the rest. When the wind hits, the boat will move northeast ↗️ because the keel prevents it from going straight east.

    Then after a while you turn the boat (“tack”) northwest ↖️, point the sail west ⬅️, and continue.











  • There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forfoss.org/

    tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

    Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

    I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.


  • isaacd@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Generative AI Con.
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    5 months ago

    “If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

    Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.




  • Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

    I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

    Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?