legrande

Is it just applying past experiences to a new situation, or can you learn to look for solutions?

You can achieve anything you put your mind to. It took me a while to realize this. Turns out the brain is a marvelous machine and once it has a goal (solve such and such a problem) it will try everything in its power to solve it, since it's a goal-oriented machine. People doubt their own capabilities, and don't believe in themselves, which is their own downfall.

Is this AI?

AI for me is just a small assistant role I hire when creating projects. It's not the whole product/service with all its moving parts which require a human-in-the-loop. It's not going to spit out a fully fledged SaaS enterprise for you or run a business for you.

You can get Windows 10/11 serials on eBay rather cheaply. How they source them is beyond me. Maybe they buy them in bulk at a discount and then resell them. So far I've had no problems with Microsoft detecting and then revoking my licenses.

How Machiavellian

Also needed: ai.txt declaring which AI bots are allowed or disallowed to scrape content

Are there any smartphone models that receive as much love, and last as long?

Most smartphones have planned obsolescence[0] built in, so they force you to upgrade. A truly long-time phone would be one of those 'dumb' or 'feature phone' phones by Nokia. Some even ship with 4G compat and have apps like WhatsApp built in, and nothing else. There is a myth I want to dispel that these are 'senior phones'. They have real value for all generations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table?

Sometimes I just want to do a project for fun and plop it on Github and see people's reaction. Not everything has to be monetized, and that can sometimes become an ulterior motive: 'If I keep releasing stuff with monetization I will profit' mentality creeps in.

Ironically my blog is written with the help of an LLM, so AI scraper bots are trained on their own output.

But if you are concerned there's a good resource here for blocking them: https://darkvisitors.com/

https://webflow.com/

Bumble

Also these:

https://swisscows.com/en

https://search.disconnect.me/

https://www.ecosia.org/

https://metager.org/

https://searx.space/

Who in their right mind would try to fill their inbox with email?

MailBait users find many uses for inbound email in bulk. These can including testing your email server and mitigation processes, verifying and training your mail filters and rules, learning what other techniques and technologies other bulk mailers are using, seeding Machine Learning, and finding something new to read. Because of the large volume of potential email, MailBait does not condone using other people's email address with this service. Please treat email addresses that you don't directly control with respect and don't sign them up for spam regardless of how much you think it would be funny. Agree to, and abide by the terms of service.

Good way to nuke someone's account, but it smells of scriptkiddy shenanigans and something recommended from 4chan crowd. But good luck spamming my temporary addy.io disposable.

I always click the unsubscribe button at the footer of e-mails if I don't want to be micro-harassed daily in my Inbox. I never want to read newsletters, and there's no anomalous exception to that.

We are all living on borrowed time here on earth and I don't want to spend significant portions of it reading newsletters and promotional material. It's just a gimmicky growth hack your service/product uses to gain leads.

And most of the e-mail I receive is bacn[0] instead of spam.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21830739

Caffeine by itself gives me jitters. I like to combine it with theanine to cancel out the jitters and get me in a flow-ey state. Also Lions's Mane mushroom supplements work wonders and apparently causes neurogenesis which is what you want in any creative field or any field that requires you to solve puzzles for a living, or just doing it just for fun.

I want to see the world's first fully-AI driven feature film. This is in the pipes. Just wait.

So, the youth protested. Much like it does today, but it seemed more hopeful about the future.

Protests happen more and more online now. Angry about something? Make a humorous meme about it and watch the whole world laugh at it, dissolving & disarming the power of the thing you're angry about has.

Isn't LinkedIN known for this? I un-subscribed from all their e-mails but still they get through, and I have to login and disable those too. It's a cat-and-mouse game I like to play.

My blog's images are not massive in file size, by design. I host them on a sub-domain to help segment the traffic. It's by no means CDN-tier but my traffic is light enough that I don't worry about it.

People will continue developing closed-source AI because AI is expensive to train. Someone's gotta foot the bill

But if it's local, we don't need to rely on the compute of third parties, we use our own compute. On-device AI will replace all these companies doing stuff in a remote black box we have no insight into.

Honestly it's a mess. I still do unwieldy naming schemes like:

    PROOJECT1-FINAL-WORKING-COPY-A
    PROJECT2-NEW-FINAL-V1
    PROJECT2-NEW-FINAL-V2

I use it purely for the syntactic sugar. It's less characters to type than vanilla JS[0]. I've toyed with Cash[1] too which I use for small projects that don't need the entire jQuery lib.

[0] https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

[1] https://kenwheeler.github.io/cash/

As a rule of thumb, I never register a ccTLD. You don't know the Geo-politics and baggage that TLD is under. Some countries are incredibly unstable, and that could be reflected in the ccTLD. The only exception is if you are a resident of that country and have a valid passport to reflect you live in that country, and that the domain can be claimed & validated because you live there.

Sometimes ccTLDs bind you to a country you don't live in, and it also signals that you may like/honor that country's practices and history (which you probably don't).

What I do is, choose generic TLDs like .blog and .dev. In the past .tk was considered low-rep because it was free, and it raised red flags, so at least pay for a domain. They're the same price as a T-Shirt!

Buy a bunch of veg, chop it all up, stick it in air-sealed tupperware and store in the fridge. When you feel hungry, throw bits of it into a bowl and make a salad. Add generous amount of ranch dressing for taste (if you dislike veg). Maybe throw in some walnuts, sesame seeds, and bacon if you want.

a.co → Amazon

someone in the computing world

Notable / Prominent people. Many hackers die every day, but some are so privacy/security conscious that nobody notices.

I done sentiment analysis of tweets. It literally was as simple as looking for positive words like 'good', 'amazing', 'awesome', 'brilliant', etc and maybe looking for a smiley-face emoji alongside the tweet, and I found positive sentiment for brands and interacted with the tweets. I was working for a social media company at the time that done brand engagement. Now Twitter is dead we're looking at Bluesky, Nostr, Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc and do our analysis there. It's very astro-turfey, but it works.

Fraud is always going to be a thing with payments. I'm not sure what you're asking? But if I had to choose between old-style banking institutions and Bitcoin/Monero/Ethereum I would choose old style banks, since they do things like rate limiting on how much you can withdraw/send, thereby greatly hampering fraud.

I have Lubuntu on a few old Dell Optiplexes and it runs swimmingly.

I think it's nice to have diversity on how to authenticate. Passkeys are useful in a certain context, but I imagine the technology won't exactly 'kill the password' anytime soon. I think the 'password killer' idea is framing it wrong.

It's a timeless piece. It doesn't need the 2004 context. It's all relevant today.