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Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.
You actually can define custom functions as named templates, but they're definitely not pretty, and would almost certainly push you towards the "just allow us to write code using a normal programming language" side of the argument.
My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.
lemmings.exe also had an immediate quit without warning on the esc key, iirc.
One of my favorite UX stories is about my first Mac, a 12" g4 mbp. One of the best things about it was that I could open the lid and it would immediately be awake and ready to use. I would use it, do what I needed to do, then close it and put it away. It was great because it consumed so little of my time.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
I was recently raving about how NYC's metro payment system OMNI doesn't require an app, so you can use whatever contactless payment device you already have to get around NYC. That characteristic makes it so easy to just slide into the metro without having to deal with unfamiliar apps and all the mental overhead that comes with them on top of all the mental stress and sensory overload that comes with traveling.
Oh dang, you're right. Mac OS X was my first Mac OS, but it looks like the Drop Box concept existed long before OS X. Here's a reference from 1991 titled "AppleShare Drop Box: Access for System 6 and 7 Clients" https://www.savagetaylor.com/TIL/TIL09033.pdf
I thought it was a reference to the Mac OS X `~/Public/Drop Box` directory, which was a write-only place for people to send files to your user, which has been around since the first OS X beta came out in 2000.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that the pay-to-play even applies to multiplayer within your own LAN. I just verified that nothing had changed since I last played: you are unable to join LAN games unless you buy a monthly xbox pass. Complete BS.
Yeah, "think of the children" is a rhetorical technique but also a logical fallacy.
Another thing that is crazy to me (and maybe this is a premonition) is that if you play MS games online on Xbox, you have to have a subscription, but if you play on other platforms you can play for free. They are literally punishing their own users with additional fees. I thought this was just Minecraft, which is why my kids and I always play Minecraft on our iPads instead of on the Xbox, but when I recently bought Forza Horizon 6 I was amazed to see that I could play online with other players for free, whereas on Xbox I had to pay to play online in Forza Horizon 4 and 5. So they are basically saying "you gave us a bunch of money for hardware? Cool, now give us more money every month to use it online!" It's absurd, and it's one of the things that drove me away from Xbox. I also have friends who have been lifelong Xbox fans who have had enough and are leaving for Steam.
Chaining a switch off the gateway is the best way to do it anyway. If you do that, then when you reboot your gateway, your lan devices do not lose their physical link and can continue talking to each other.
It sounds interesting, and surely there would be some awesome things that would come from it, but on the other hand, MS could use this to take control of linux APIs through their "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, so it would not be without risk.
Just look at what happened last week with linux distros needing to update their secure boot keys with a new MS signed certificate. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/expiration-secure-boot-signin...
And look at what MS did with their old version of Office for Mac, where they decided not to simply renew a certificate that would keep the software functioning. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-office/yo...
We already have companies like Nvidia and Broadcom shipping binary blobs to support common hardware. Do we really want a corporation like MS getting in on that kind of thing? If MS wrote some really great desktop linux software, it would be hard for the broader linux community to resist being lured into using MS controlled APIs, and handing over part of their control to Linux's most notable rival.
Adobe did this with their perpetually licensed software. If you install Lightroom 6 today, the face detection and maps features do not work because they didn't pay for perpetual licenses for the libraries they used.
Before electronic POS systems accounted for this, we'd just split the bill evenly. I didn't like that solution either though because it rewarded people who ordered expensive food or lots of food, and that was never me. I even quit going to lunch with big groups of coworkers because of that.
If you forget to pay when you get back to your car, are you charged the max? That's how it works with other systems like this that I've used.
There is a part of Ghost in The Wires that is pretty close to that:
Ring me up, Mate.
Neill.
That made me smile. But what the hell? I figured: he already knew he had been hustled, so I had nothing to lose.
I called.
“Hey, Neill, what’s up?”
“Hey, mate.” No anger, no threats, no hostility. We were like two old friends.
We spent hours talking, and I shared all the intricate details of how I’d hacked him over the years. I decided I might as well tell him, since it wasn’t likely to work on him again.
We became telephone buddies, sometimes spending hours on the phone together over several days.
Oh god, I just disabled dark mode and yeah, it looks awful. Looks great in dark mode though.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit.
Does anybody actually believe that?
The 2020 and 2021 versions of The Frame had direct API access for updating artwork. Newer versions apparently have access through cloud services, but I haven't tried it yet.
- https://github.com/ow/samsung-frame-art (older models)
- https://github.com/TheFab21/ha-samsungtv-smart (newer models)
That looks like The Frame from Samsung. Does it have a matte surface? What version of Tizen is it running? Does it have API access?
I've been using ZFS on linux for like... 14 years now? I've migrated through centos, ubuntu, and debian during that time and the zpools never had any issues that weren't hardware related.
ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.
I even use it on single spinning rust USB drives. Zero problems.
Maybe the difference is that in iOS 26 you can turn off Apple Intelligence without turning off Siri. That's how I've been running my devices. It'll be unfortunate if I can't continue doing so.
AI ive, the thinnest neural network ever.
I experienced the same situation a month or two ago. One of my friends sent me this article that was illuminating. https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
This reminds me of that scene from The Covenant:
You're here to translate.
Actually, I'm here to interpret.
That is not a "userspace package manager" though. That still requires root.
Allow list is the best approach. Soon TVs will randomize their MAC just like our phones do.
Have you tried syncthing? A few years ago I replaced Dropbox with that on all my computers and it's been great. It works a lot like old school Dropbox, except without the cloud-hosted storage parts. It does p2p sync of directories between computers.
I'm sure lots of cyclists have anecdata about that hatred. My personal favorite was somebody in a Santa Clara neighborhood a block from the DMV shouting at me to "get off the f***ing road!" Clearly they didn't read the part of the DMV manual that mentions that bicycles must "not ride on the sidewalk"[1], and missed that cyclists are allowed full use of the lane.
I now live in rural suburban Michigan, and even on these rural backroads I have jerks in trucks yelling at me on my e-bike going 20+ mph to "get out of the f***ing way".
Maybe those people do not represent the majority, but it feels like they do, and those actions feel threatening when coming from a multi-ton vehicle directed at a 75 pound vehicle. (Fat-bike ebikes are heavy.) It's also odd to experience this on a rural road on a lake shoreline because isn't the countryside supposed to be slow paced?
1. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...