nyx_

Yeah, absolutely. I've become so accustomed to the instant gratification loop of "how do I do this -> internet for 2 minutes -> okay got it" that having to actually read papers or docs on something to build an understanding is a real slog for me lately. I think neural plasticity goes both ways and it's a skill that can be built up again, but getting yourself weaned off of immediate answers is pretty tough.

I fed it a Mailinator address and it was happy to let me keep reading.

This seems like a phenomenon beneath the same umbrella as the NEETs and incels of the western world. A difference, though, is that in all the presentations of hikikomori I've seen, they lack the same toxicity and anger at the outside world, even though their situation is a similar manifestation of broken confidence, extreme social anxiety, so on.

I wonder if this is true, or if there's a darker side to the hikikomori that we just don't see as much of.

Eco-friendly stuff aside, this post makes me feel kind of nauseous. Things like indoor AR directions or having the weather integrated into a maps app are obvious applications of existing technology, but hardly anyone but Google has the resources to make these things happen at scale with nice UX.

So I see features like this and I feel bad that it's Google doing it: the ultimate goal of the technology is not to make the world any better, but to get more eyeballs and exfiltrate more personal data so their advertising monopoly can continue to snowball.

I'm inclined to think that someone who needs hours of time just to write an email in which they don't sound like a big jerk is likely to be a fountain of workplace interpersonal problems. If spending a few seconds to be a little more tactful is difficult for someone, the problem is with them, not the "millennials" that need to be "coddled".

Don't even get me started. :( It gives me pangs of cognitive dissonance every time I use my Android phone to type up a rant about how creepy Google is. I'd love to walk the talk, but my impression is that FOSS Linux phones aren't really viable yet if you're interested in things like, you know, functional power management or a Bluetooth stack that actually works.

I use a couple of Aqara sensors to report temperature back to my Home Assistant instance via a HUSBZB-1 USB Zigbee dongle[0]. They work pretty well, although they report data pretty infrequently absent any large temperature swings, so not great for data-viz purposes.

I'm not at all surprised the hub thing constantly chats with its family back in China, but a properly security-paranoid home automation aficionado wouldn't be caught dead giving some proprietary black box power and network inside their own home.

[0] https://shop.homeseer.com/products/nortek-usb-zigbee-zwave-i...

I've had ISP DNS servers that redirect NXDOMAIN responses to spammy "search" pages full of sponsored crap and banner ads.

There's always OpenNIC, DNS.watch, or Quad9 if you're after something that isn't operated by a creepy megacorp.

Next earnings call: "Alright guys, I know it doesn't look good, what with our process technology still stuck in 2015, but picture this: TSMC's fab gets annihilated by a giant meteor."

Like the original post says, they are in fact a useful tool to promote wakefulness, and if you have a problem with wakefulness or attentiveness, you can go to a doctor, get diagnosed, and be prescribed with amphetamines perfectly legally if you so wish.

Supported ESXi-Arm Hardware:

* Far Edge: Raspberry Pi 4b - 4GB or 8GB Model (8GB is HIGHLY recommended...

Yeah, no shit.

You can read the post at https://github.com/samyk/slipstream

You know the toys you're shopping for are the coolest when the webpage says their sale is restricted to US citizens and residents only. Is that an ITAR thing?

"The software doesn't perform well with your use case, huh? Have you tried getting a different use case?" :)

I looked at the cited paper[0], and I'm not sure the article author has correctly summarized its findings. As I understand it, the paper says "cyclical climate change probably caused this pattern of extinction->re-evolution (van der Hammen cycles)" and it points to overlapping changes in the geologic record (including canids and their teeth) as evidence of that claim.

I can't see anywhere where the article says "changes in canine dental morphology caused the cat gap."

Edited to say: oh derp, I only looked at the first line of the article - there's a discussion of that connection further down in the article, although it says in the summary that the connection is disputed.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-002-0392-1

"Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away", it's some of the most egregious poverty porn out there. These High Court bailiffs (who are employees of a private company, because of course) show up at people's doorsteps; if it's because of a debt, they demand payment or start taking inventory of items to seize.

So my only knowledge of this part of UK law comes from watching this garbage TV, but what amazes me is how much freedom the officers seem to have with respect to how strict their enforcement actions are. In some cases they only ask for a small amount of the debt and a payment plan to make up the rest, but if the debtor's uncooperative or a bit of a dick, the officers are going to start towing cars and carrying out TVs.

Could you source or back up your claim that there are generational differences at work here? I don't really follow.

Somewhere between 5 minutes and a month.

Agree. Getting good at vim isn't something I do for my boss or my company, it's something I do for me.

Using something like "ci(" to blank the parentheses under my cursor and immediately start typing a replacement saves me, like... a couple of seconds. But it gives me a little dopamine hit that I think helps with job satisfaction.

You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone.

Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics.

The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.

These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie.

One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.

I like to run fail2ban in conjunction with a non-standard SSH port on which only public key auth is available.

This way, most of the junkware that does rude things to port 22 is banging on a closed door; the slightly more effective junkware that actually finds the SSH port gets banned immediately, because I know anyone trying to log in with a password is full of it.

Interesting... maybe I haven't taken enough Ubers to notice, but I generally can't tell the difference between a 4.9 driver and a 4.7 driver.

Would you pay more to guarantee getting the highest rated driver near you?

A little over a decade ago now, back when the Sony PSP was current, there was a neat little homebrew IM client called AFKIM. It used bitlbee to connect to various IM services (AIM, GTalk, MSN, etc.) and worked pretty well for something running on a PSP.

The keyboard, though, was great:

http://localhost.geek.nz/afkim/docs/usingafkim.html

It's a 3x3 matrix. You use the analog stick to pick a square, then hit one of the face buttons to enter a character. Left and right shoulder buttons shifted the keyboard to uppercase, numbers, specials, etc.

IIRC it was a Lua module that any PSP homebrewer could drop into their application for a pretty decent OSK.

550km, actually, or 340 miles. Still a couple orders of magnitude closer to Earth than satellites in GSO.

Of course not. If you don't like paying the monopoly prices, you can just, uh... you can just start your own backyard wireless telecommunications service provider.

Also has DJ Qualls as Rat, one of the dumbest computer hacker stereotypes to ever be committed to film. After the FBI knocks to raid his apartment, he rushes into his computer room and starts microwaving CDs and shoving floppies down the garbage disposal... then once they have him, they tell him they need him to control the information on the entire Internet. He says yes, but only on the condition that he's given "an unlimited supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets." Quality stuff.

On today's edition of "Things You Shouldn't Be Able To Do From a Browser"...

Seriously though, sending PJL commands directly to printers on port 9100 is such a neat hack. Back when I was working help desk in college, much fun was had the day I discovered you could change the "READY" string on HP printer displays to anything you wanted. "INSERT COIN", "CHECK ENGINE", etc.

As far as dockless last-mile transport goes, I'm actually a big fan of those electric kick scooters... but I acknowledge I'm an imbecile and they're really dangerous.

One issue I have with that model in general is that for many of the distances I'd like to use a share bike or scooter, it would take longer and cost money to walk to the vehicle and unlock it. It's frequently faster and free just to walk to my final destination.

You can get surprisingly good results with throwaway hardware. A few years ago I did an all-night time lapse of a night-blooming cereus opening up its once-yearly flower. $10 throwaway 480p webcam on a cheap tripod, old laptop running a script to capture every few minutes, old incandescent lamp to keep the thing lit through the night. Fed all the images into ffmpeg (with some noise reduction, I think?) and found the output looked almost professional, apart from the low resolution.