robsh

They hate us cuz they ain’t us.

https://imgflip.com/gif/g13fl

Surface Book 2. It’s kind of a bad tablet and also a bad laptop. Both batteries completely dead and not repairable. E-waste.

Copenhagen Wheel. Still working but no longer supported. Approaching 5000 miles. Some day they might brick my bicycle, which is kind of crazy.

If employers pay for commute time they can also use home location as a hiring criterion.

All we need is native Excel support, and HTML5 web support. In web browsers it should be the default copy formatting, and if you’re writing an HTML document these characters should be an alternative to using TD and TR tags.

Millionaire class? The article describes a small business owner who wants to retire. Meanwhile, the private equity firms are going to monopolize the market and raise prices. Sadly, none of the 20 or 30 year olds who are actually doing the work will be able to buy out their owners business.

Any young tradespeople: form a coop and buy your bosses business. Better to be a 10% owner than 0%.

Vertical integration is not monopolistic. A dairy farm can make great ice cream, like McConnell’s or Strauss. Apple’s acquisition of Beats is maybe the one that shouldn’t have been allowed since they were in competition for headphones. Most of their other acquisitions are pretty small companies with specific integrations into Apple products or services.

DDG/Bing had only one Ai image for my search of baby peafowl. Unfortunately the one AI image was from stock.adobe.com

Not even close. LLMs can spew word salad. Images can be classified or dreamt. Physical movements can be iterated and refined. Speech can be processed as text. These are components of intelligence but these are all things that most animals can do, apart from the language.

Intelligence generally requires something more. Intelligence needs to be factual, curious, and self-improving. If you told me ChatGPT rewrote itself, or suggested new hardware to improve efficiency, that’s intelligence. You’ll know we have AGI when the algorithm is the one asking the questions about physics, mathematics, finding knowledge gaps, and developing original hypothesis and experiments. Not even close.

The following formula will return the closest moon phase emoji in Excel:

=LET(phase,MOD(ROUND(MOD(NOW(),29.5275)/3.691,0)-2,8)+1,UNICHAR(127760+phase)))

Chanterelles are not a great example as their look-alikes are easily distinguishable. Furthermore, they exist in symbiosis/parasitism with particular tree roots as a host. When you return to the same spot you’re harvesting new fruiting bodies of the same organism that you visited last time.

Some people can’t deal with collaborative decisions, if the group is wrong. He started xAi because OpenAI didn’t care that GPT had no logic or factual accuracy. I don’t like Musk but I actually agree with him on this one. In that sense, I think Wolfram Alpha is a better “AI” assistant than anything else that’s come along so far.

When plugged in to a computer, it would be cool if it reverts to being a smart display with touch screen. It could still charge and transfer files too maybe? I don’t know enough about USB-C, but I really wish devices could do dual function like this.

If we spam critical EM frequencies drones may fall out of the sky. For example a laser pointer may overwhelm optical sensors, while ultrasonic distance sensors are often used to determine height and proximity to obstacles. Some pilot software may fail gracefully, by safely flying blind and landing gently - but I’m guessing most will fail spectacularly.

I have the faintest of hope that WWDC will reveal a new hybrid Mac/iPad OS. If it ever happens I won’t hesitate to buy an iPad Pro.

Legacy keyboard shortcuts are still supported in Excel for menus long gone. For example Alt EAF is clear all formatting, and Alt EAA is clear all (values and formats).

I’d really like to see something like this optimized for regular subtitles usefulness, rather than for attention grabbing. Two subtle changes from regular subtitles to make it more fluid. First the words appear as they are spoken and from near the mouth (if on screen). From that point they fly down to form the phrase or sentence at the bottom of the screen. It would help avoid comedic spoilers when the punchline is out before it’s spoken. Ideally the AI processing could just happen real-time during playback, by looking at the existing subtitles and then refining the timing of each word using the audio and video.

https://webamp.org

HCCB is like a color QR

Agreed. When I type a good word that isn’t accepted, I usually just stop playing that days puzzle. My guess is that Sam is not very scientifically literate. Simple weather words like cyclonic or adiabatic, advection, no dice. And then you get some pretty obscure literary words.

Makes me want to make a free clone that includes science words, and isn’t afraid of the letter S.

I have eaten nuts for days and I can tell you it will get old quickly. It’s no coincidence that sugar leads to over-eating. The body sends a very strong signal to eat when the sugar is digested. The same signal does not happen when nuts are digested.

He’s referring to subsidence. The buoyant weight of soil is less than the dry weight, so it does compact when the groundwater is drawn down lower than ever before (as it has been for decades, getting lower and lower). It’s an irreversible process.

The California Aqueduct is currently dealing with problems relating to subsidence - what used to be a smooth downhill grade is now slumping in the middle. The capacity of the canal is reduced and without intervention it would eventually be unable to flow uphill.

There’s enormous variation in the rate at which children learn language and speak, particularly in the age range being studied. It’s not a race. Nobody is robbing kids of spoken words, as if they are entitled to them. Some people maybe don’t talk very much. Some parents are always traveling for work. Some kids grow up running around barefoot in a village. No big deal.

It should be $1 for limited-term access to the whole site, not one article.

Not just journalism but all subscription media should have non-subscription options. All the streaming video or music services should allow 1 day access for $1 or 1 week for $5. It costs them nothing to do so and I don’t think it will erode their monthly subscribers since it’s going to be cheaper for a month.

Would have been way cooler if was a real mouse. I figured they put a neuralink in the mouse too and the human learned to control its little mouse brain. Moving a mouse cursor, that’s pretty boring. It would be interesting if the user doesn’t need a cursor at all to fully use a computer.

It would be amazing if it could be deployed with pyodide/wasm as an alternative to a Python web server. Truly a standalone interactive notebook, hosted with plain html.

Price right now is $65/MWh. There’s an app called ISO Today https://apps.apple.com/us/app/iso-today/id596881268

Price in the middle of a sunny or windy day can be way less.

Time zones were invented for time agreement across longitudes. We could easily do away with them if we included longitude, and everybody used a true solar noon clock. It could be automatic for GPS-enabled devices to maintain accurate solar noon time. Actually GPS satellites send a very accurate time on the signal, so you wouldn’t necessarily need a time server, except to know which epoch you’re on.

Decimal time doesn’t seem as useful to me as localized time. With GPS coordinates, we don’t need a timezone system, everybody could have noon at solar noon. When setting up meetings, one only needs to include the longitude and everybody could easily join at the correct time. It would be cool if airplane rides showed a real local time while in flight. Might be a cool app.

While we’re at it, the Gregorian calendar could be made celestial as well. Date could be based on the solstice/equinox and moon. Apparently this is called a lunisolar calendar and repeats on the Metonic cycle every 19 years. Though it’s off by a couple hours. That means if I recorded a message with lunisolar date and local time, a historian could probably infer the exact year it was recorded.

Hm

Good start! There aren’t too many nice battery powered screens.

It would be nice if the U in USB-C really meant universal. If I plug in an iPad to a computer over USC-C it should advertise itself as a storage device, a battery (bi-directional charge), a monitor, a touch input device, and two webcams. The computer should also advertise to the iPad what it has. Then both devices would need OS level software to control which features they want to use. Mirror iPad screen to computer screen? Sure. Use iPad as extra monitor? Sure. Use iPad as drawing tablet for computer, yes please.