chokma

Automation is also for reducing drudgery - the work that prevents us from meaningful struggle by taking up resources that can be better applied elsewhere. Not all struggle (or pain) is created equal.

Maybe the sycophantic behavior of AI models comes from rich people having them build to behave the same as their personal yes-men. A person accustomed to never hearing "no" won't like a machine that tells them off.

Another example: there are fallen countries that try to penalize abortion even in extreme cases (rape, incest) Having the data in your ad-exchange’s online profile that you bought a pregnancy test and a bus ticket to another state that allows abortion may be enough to get you jailed.

Note that there is a difference between Panoramafreiheit (freedom to record a public building / space with people walking around) versus recording the street before your house with an always-on security camera (almost always forbidden).

Even having a fake camera pointing at a public space can be forbidden as it creates surveilance pressure on people using the space.

This reminds me of https://perldoc.perl.org/Locale::Maketext::TPJ13

Seems like to get it right for every use case / language, you would need functions to translate phrases - so switch statements may be a valid solution. The number of text elements needed for pagination, CRUD operations and similiar UI elements should be finite :)

Eventual source code access is an interesting idea. What language is Uruky implemented in?

It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.

For more calculations about the use of (computational) brute force: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_...

"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

To my knowledge, the state of the art in tooth removal still is basically pliers and a lot of force

One time, my dentist told me "I can't get it out, I am going to fetch my dad to do it" when she had trouble removing a tooth. What followed was a not so fun experience in professionally applied dental violence. (Her father was also a dentist)

We had to configure a daily reboot for a raspberry PI that just displayed a web page with the current status of emergency calls for local first responders on a mounted TV screen.

Purpose: if you come into the building to fetch the car with the medical equipment, you could see at a glance how many people acknowledged the alert and would arrive shortly etc. Sadly, the system tended to loose its WIFI connection and then the reloaded web page would display a network error. And since the web page was a 3rd party product, we could not hack the Javascript.

Why does patreon need its own app?

Wondering about that, too - I always use the website on my ipad since a browser allows me to enlarge the font size when reading novels on Patreon (a feature that the app does not offer).

Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they’d already discussed – a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.

I know a developer who wrote the software for an SMS call center about 2 decades ago - it would keep a log of all texts sent, so any agent could pretend to be any of the completely fake profiles of women looking for a relationship.

At 1-2€ per SMS, this was a quite profitable business for the call center, the dev and the telcos, who took about 50% and had no interest in shutting this down.

Looks like the screenshot and the text are different.

"Any business model that does not acknowledge this and does not seek proper compensation for artists is not of interest to us." -> screenshot of their reply is missing the first two "not"s.

But, I’ve never met anybody who’s paid for it.

I bought the server boost once, hoping it would improve the audio quality of my little channel. There was no discernable difference, and as I do not need more dancing blinking emojis, I canceled the subscription again.

Swiss pensions for foreigners are also only paid if the recipient proves they are alive once a year. My father had to sent proof of being alive for decades.

To be fair, it is much harder to verify this automatically if the recipient lives in another country.

DownloadNet reminds me of how I got really started with Perl programming over 20 years ago. Since I was using my parent's land line with a dial-up modem (which cost cents/minute), I wanted to speed up the process of looking for a job via the government's official job search site.

Turns out, on my slow computer it was faster to clean up a megabyte of HTML with regular expressions before giving it to Firefox than just rendering it as-is - by about 30 seconds per search result page.

Perhaps it's possible to sanitize often visited websites with DownloadNet? (currently getting aggravated by reddit hiding images via JS code to prevent download / viewing in another tab...)

Same with a friend‘s re-implementation of Battle Isle 2 (https://www.kitana.org/arena/bi2/bi2.html)

You would need the original or the GOG version.

Yeah, searing meat in the pan will raise the PM2.5 levels in my flat by a factor of 30+.

Last weekend I used ChatGPT as an NPC generator, which works surprisingly well. I told it to generate a list of NPCs which guard a high security prisoner transport in a Shadowrun-like szenario in my homebrew 3d6 system, using a table formatted as asciidoc, with columns (name, job, level, skills, equipment) and it wrote a properly formatted list of NPCs. This was useful, as I do not like to come up with custom NPCs on the fly, and this way I had a name and occupation / level at hand whenever I needed one.

It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle.

Had this problem with an A-K200 about 13 years ago - when driving long distances, after a couple of hours the nav system would randomly stop working. Sometimes stopping at a gas station would allow the system to reset by itself, sometimes not.

Firefox reader mode helps - just a pleasant white background. White on black causes after-images for me...

A legacy system had an error message like „hahaha operation failed!“ with no explanation, which was most infuriating.

They also had the ActOfGodException for things that should not happen…

Royalroad.com also directs a large amount of readers to authors publishing advanced chapters of their webnovels on patreon.

That sounds like an interesting idea - now I want to print ebooks in my favorite font size... but that feature is locked behind DRM. Still, for webnovels it may be viable.

Auspacken, Einschalten, Garantiefall

I have a mid-price gadget for measuring inside air quality - it detects VOC and formaldehyde, along with PM2.5 / PM 10.

It also detects alcohol from drinking a couple of beers as a dangerous increase in formaldehyde...

My provider has increased the price by ~27%, to 39¢ / kWh.

Best offer from electricity price comparison sites is 44¢/kWh, so I guess I will stay with them.

People using electricity startups / discount providers (both gas / electricity) have seen them go into insolvency. They are automatically supplied by the base providers who run the networks in their region.

New prices are up to 1€/kWh on the high end. This is less a problem due to shutting down nuclear plants or the CO2 tax, but rather due to the energy market being de-regulated to casino style capitalism (meaning many more investors / companies being allowed to make a quick buck on the end user's expense).

edit: another reason for high energy prices: the former government has decided that wind energy farms require 1km distance from the nearest settlement (compared to less than half that for a coal-driven power plant...). Also NIMBYism prevents the building of desperately needed north->south electricity lines which could transport energy from wind farms to where its needed.

Indeed, it is near impossible to escape the rule of the nation state. It would require you to bootstrap from zero in a place where no one else rules. Those places are no longer found on earth. And once the Musk colonizes Mars, space won't be the place for freedom either - look at the Expanse series for an example on how "free" the people are who try to setup their space homestead. Perhaps a Star Trek society can offer this "freedom" again. But then, to paraphrase Life of Brian: what has ultimate freedom from society ever done for us?

It looks like sovereign citizens want to have their cake and eat it too: not to pay taxes, but travel the roads build with the same taxes. Not to pay for medical insurance, but being able to get the best treatment from the cursed oppressive state.

The "feeling of wrongness of the world" can also be rooted in other problems to which they find a reality denying escape mechanism. In Germany, many sovereign citizens (Reichsbürger) have legal or financial problems (taxes and debt), so deciding to be the king or president of your house and garden empire seems like a valid opportunity to deny all those pesky demands.

The best quote for this is from Bruce Schneier:

"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412