Rebelgecko

Town by me had a huge outcry about a proposed data center and how it would ruin the area. Funnily enough there's already data centers on the same street!

Is there a non-annoying way to get Libby books onto it? It's a step or two with a Kindle, but it would be cool to have them on a more portable device

In a manner of speaking. They have a monopoly on selling official jerseys for some big North American sports leagues (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB)

Interesting. In a city by me, they found that businesses along new bike lanes actually grew by 17%, while the citywide business receipts were static (grew by exactly 0% in inflation adjusted dollars). They were looking at a similar time period (2019-2022). Maybe COVID just hit different cities differently.

Sauce: Culver City Move Pilot Report, page 59 https://www.culvercity.gov/files/content/public/v/8/services...

Fwiw when I was in school kids would definitely check their phones from time to time or send an occasional surreptitious text. But it wasn't as pervasive as it is today- I was pretty shocked to see even at the elementary school level how much class time kids spend on their personal devices

Parents are responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of the notifications kids get at school

Sports jerseys are funny- they've gotten to the point where the dupes are cheaper AND higher quality (eg embroidered instead of cheap iron-on patches)

I thought this article was really interesting but it's odd how it doesn't mention where the funds came from. I can't imagine the salary of a school teacher in her 20s can cover lawyers, a dev team, buying IP, etc

(crying emoji) is a masterclass in modern vocabulary... seemed a bit suspect to me. Maybe people are just sadder

I was initially put off by the lack of recharging too, but I've changed my mind a bit.

I think the amount of ewaste is pretty small. My uneducated guess is that it's probably about the same as a musical birthday card. And unlike a singing card that probably gets used a dozen times and thrown away, the Index can be used >10,000 times before it's time to recycle it (assuming it lives up to the specs)

For comparison, check out the rechargable Stream ring. It's bulkier, costs >2x as much (before including subscription... The sub alone costs more than buying an index every 2 years), and needs to be recharged every night. It's sort of in line with Pebbles advantage over other smart watches- doesn't need to sleep on a charger every night

Apparently the US Navy does these semi-regularly to test the durability of warships

A lot of the time, the head unit only accepts signed updates

Apparently they just stick a brush on the caboose to clean them

Are the cells themselves tougher, or do they just depend on the frame to keep them safe? Just navel gazing, but I wouldn't be surprised if these had better ROI- for conventional solar installations, the mounting hardware can be significantly more expensive than the panels themselves. And you have to worry a lot more about things like wind. Off ground would have better performance in winter, but shorter days in winter are going to be lower outut regardless

You used to be able to get knickknacks on AliExpress (incl shipping) for less than the cost of a US domestic postage stamp. Nowadays it seems like free shipping has a higher minimum, and most of my items use unreliable gig economy services like uniuni for the last mile delivery

For whatever reason, the lies about specs are particularly egregious for lights. Slopmarts like Amazon and AliExpress happily advertise 50,000 lumen flashlights (which would probably melt after a few seconds if they actually operated at that level)

Is it? I can imagine scenarios where they're better off accepting a duopoly if it allows the profit margin to be 3x higher

They also recently doubled the price of the standby plan

That's lame of them, I'm on a residential plan. Maybe because I host my personal website from home?

Cloudflare often just straight up blocks me or makes me do a captcha. IMO those are both much worse than Anubis

Using the steam deck flavor of Linux, literally just buy the game, download it, and hit play. Runs pretty well

Same with websites like Airbnb. Last I checked, their search results only showed the 'real' prices (eg including fees) for certain states and countries. In some states you have to click into the listing before learning that there's an extra $500 cleaning fee on top of the nightly rate :)

Usually by the time people are seated and you read the fine print on the back of the menu, inertia has taken over.

If you're in the Home Assistant ecosystem, I'm intrigued by their voice hw

What does that have to do with people being arrested?

Many RFID cards are literally just an ID number, and will happily allow you to copy that number to your own RFID card (look up "blue cloner guns", although they have their own downsides). Basically just security through obscurity. Cards that do fancy crypto stuff exist, but odds are your workplace badge, apartment fob, or hotel room key is the simple kind (because those are cheaper)

It's hidden for users who opt in (not all spambots do, believe it or not) but there are some 3rd party databases that index comments- no idea how complete they are

It's harder now that post history is hidden but I did something similar in the past.

Start with a single comment you think is a shill. Maybe 80% of their post history is vague inane generalities (like "aww so cute" in r/cats, or a reply to a top rated post that only paraphrases the existing context without adding anything new). You can use an LLM to identify every comment or post from that account that mentions a product or service. Take note of everyone who replies to that comment as well as the parent comment. Then use an LLM to identify every post from that original account asking for recommendations (hey r/bidet, what's your favorite bidet), and look at who responds. If you build this graph, draw directional edges based on who replied to who. The accounts with edges both ways across different posts are bots. Rinse and repeat by examing the post history of THOSE accounts. You will end up with a graph with a few loosely connected nodes (maybe false positives) but a tight web of spam accounts that frequently engage with each other.

That's your bot farm. This would be relatively trivial for reddit to implement, if they cared about reducing spam. I got a POC working in a few hours, back before they limited API access

They just did a month ago, so it'll probably be a few months before they do it again

Partial refresh on these can often be surprisingly fast, even when full refresh takes seconds