This never gets old:

https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired

Why would I want my life managed by a computer? Also, org-mode. ;)

There might be other buses ahead of the one you are on, en route to that stop. You really want the phone GPS to figure out what bus you’re on, maybe showing a selection of possible bus numbers or route numbers. It would be great if you then see a route map showing your location as you move.

Postal chess, killed by computers. Regular over-the-board chess at high levels has turned into a police state with metal detectors and stuff, but at least it’s still doable. Online chess, lol.

It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.

Just leaving this here…

https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-bros-are-putting-swords-on-robots-and-democratizing-mma-2000823619

Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the movement of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.

What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else “my friend is on BART and just passed station X. When will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.

I didn’t implement this because it stopped being needed, but a text to print converter for my hearing impaired and non-techie elderly mom. Basically an email gateway running on VPS so if she got an email or text from a family member, a raspberry pi in her bedroom would immediately print out the message on a receipt printer where she would see it. I was going to use a cheap thermal printer but another family member objected (I guess reasonably) to the toxic crap in thermal paper, so I found someone selling a still affordable impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.

This thing went on for pages without getting to the point, but as others have said, it’s earbuds with a USB-C plug.

There are a bunch. I tried Jerboa and then Voyager on android. Jerboa is the official one, I found Voyager to be a bit nicer, but in the end I find it better to use a browser including on my phone. I sometimes think of writing my own client to reorganize the UI to be more like a usenet client, or maybe even just write a Lemmy to NNTP gateway. I don’t understand why it wasn’t done that way in the first place.

Chomsky was big on the idea that we innately have a certain bunch of ideas wired into our minds at birth, and then we learn words that are connected with some of those ideas, and other words are related to the initial words. One of his examples iirc was the word “climb” being connected to an innate concept. We can imagine all kinds of species possessing this concept even without having language. Humans later evolved a language faculty that allowed associating words with the concept and the sensations of climbing. IDK how current that idea is among linguists nowadays.

I would say LLM’s trained on internet text manage to communicate verbally to some extent, despite not having such biological priors. Their style ranges from annoying to sometimes hilariously wrong, but plenty of humans are the same way.

Without inspiration you can still write in your usual style, just with less depth. As for the hoops, make the accuser put up a big chunk of cash in advance. More serious drawback: the person is incentivised to write like an AI.

Lock him in a room for a few hours with a pen and paper and no internet and ask him to write a few pages under video surveillance on a given topic that he isn’t told in advance. Then see what the AI detector says.

I’m confused, is this about cloud storage, or the Google gallery app, or the camera app? I’m using fossify gallery and local-only storage, but haven’t yet switched camera apps. I guess I should.

It says that after he (August Hanning) left his post, he became a consultant, and paid his successor (“Manfred D”) for copies of classified documents. It suggests that he was reselling the documents but I don’t think it established that as a fact. So it’s unclear who the beneficiary of the spying was supposed to be. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. In the past in the US, it’s been customary for ex-presidents and maybe military generals to keep their security clearances after leaving office, and it seems like a good bet that they traded on the information in whatever ways.

You can do it with a toothbrush. Just brush your teeth twice a day and you’ll look older sooner than you expect. It’s actually pretty annoying. You get all kinds of infirmities to help you act the part. Enjoy your youthful good looks while they last.

Web search “casio ae1200 instructions” found a lot of user manual pdf’s. I didn’t look at them. But this approach works pretty well a lot of the time.

Not much happened. Everything is worse now, pretty much. There’s another documentary “Terminal F” about Snowden being trapped in the Moscow airport for a month. It looks like it was re-released in the US under the title “Chasing Edward Snowden” and IDK if they cut it or otherwise messed it up, but the original version was good.

https://archive.org/details/EdwardSnowdenTerminalF2015

“You cannot kill time without injuring eternity”.