wastholm

As a tiny and very informal experiment in metacognition, I once told ChatGPT something along the lines of "I will now ask you a question. If you are not sure you know the correct answer, you will respond with only '418 I'm a teapot', nothing else." I then asked it for the correct identity of Jack the Ripper (the first thing I could think of that famously has a lot of theories but no agreed-upon "correct" answer).

The first time, as expected, it ignored my instructions and started hallucinating. But when I did the same thing again some months later, I was surprised when it actually answered only "418 I'm a teapot", indicating that it knew it didn't know the answer.

Just an anecdote. I'm sure there are people doing actual research in this area.

Not OP, but I found a series, not a movie, titled _One Cent Thief_ that fits the description. Sounds interesting.

https://archive.org/details/OneCentThiefSeries

The best frying pan I've ever owned is the cheapest-possible cast iron one I got when I moved out of my parents' house 30 years ago or so. Very rarely does anything stick and when it does I fill the pan half way with water, put it back on the stove, let it boil for a couple of minutes while I do something else and then wipe it clean.

I have parrots so I theoretically have a strict "no Teflon in my house" rule but with a Japanese wife I've had to grudgingly tolerate a Teflon-coated rice cooker.

I still use (KDE Plasma's) wobbly windows, but set very low. In general in GUIs I prefer a very quick animation to an instant change, perhaps because it helps make things seem more fluid and dynamic and because it guides my eyes to where a change is happening in case I'm not already looking straight at it.

Something like this?

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/

No affiliation, just a (mostly) happy owner of a Gemini. They don't seem to sell those anymore and I can't vouch for the other models but they look nice too, I guess.

If not pure coding projects, at least for things like markdown, having a preview could help.

Everybody's needs are different, of course, but I personally find that Vimwiki [1] gives me all the preview I need, right in the editor, when editing Markdown.

[1] https://vimwiki.github.io/

To each their own indeed. For me, as someone who uses KDE/Plasma by choice and Windows because sometimes I have to, it has been a source of humor for years and years how an environment literally called Windows can have such hilariously bad window management. No point to focus, no configurable window shortcuts, no send to front/back, no minimizing a window when its application is "busy", bad and inconsistent visual indication of which window has focus...

A nitpick perhaps, but I was surprised to see `cite` used to enclose the author's name in your `blockquote` example. I was under the impression that `cite` is meant to be used to mark up titles of books and similar, not author names, and MDN[1] seems to agree with me here.

That aside, nice work! This could surely be useful as a default stylesheet for Markdown documents and the like.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...

A very significant part of the pool of interesting projects in "my" market is only available under framework agreements for which solo consultants will not be considered (but Kvadrat will). If I were completely solo, I would have to bid for such projects through brokers who would happily charge me between 5% and 20% without really giving me anything back besides acting as gatekeepers.

Instead, all my cold calling, contract negotiations, billing and accounts receivable — things I'm not good at and don't enjoy doing — get taken care of. I'm happy to pay for that. The "luxury" of "business friends" is included.

I work at a place where about 500 independent consultants/contractors have outsourced branding, training (to a degree), office admin, and, above all, sales to a shared organization.[1] Those who want can become "partners" by buying shares (I have). Importantly, this setup also provides a community because solo consulting can otherwise get lonely at times. But essentially we're all still entirely "our own" and free to choose how much we want to work, whether we want to pursue side projects, etc.

We pay 17%. So not quite the 15% you mentioned, but also far from the 30% others talked about.

We're only in Sweden for now, so maybe this isn't immediately accessible to you. But it shows that it can be done.

[1] https://www.kvadrat.se/

Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. (I have given some Calf plugins some light usage in Qtractor without noticing any obvious problems.)

Stay away from CALF even though they look pretty.

Why, what's wrong with them?

Thanks for a very informative comment!

mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?

I've been using KOrganizer[1] for longer than I can remember. For better and/or worse, it's pretty tightly integrated with the Plasma desktop. For now at least, I use it with Google Calendar as its backend. Every once in a long while, it gives me some scary-sounding error message about failing to sync — but so far as I can tell the sync works just fine, albeit sometimes with a bit of lag.

I recently also started using it with my work-mandated Office 365 calendar. According to some docs somewhere that I can't find right now, there were quite a few hoops to jump through to make that read/write so I settled for read-only.

[1] https://apps.kde.org/korganizer/

I don't know if it qualifies as a "mathematical coincidence" or not, but I find it amusing to demonstrate to kids that you can multiply 142,857 by 1, 2, 3, etc., and the result is always a number with the same digits but in a different order:

2 × 142,857 = 285,714

3 × 142,587 = 428,571

4 × 142,587 = 571,428

Etc. But then, suddenly:

7 × 142,857 = 999,999

I got a 404 at that address but this seems to be the same article (I had to override a TLS certificate warning to get it):

https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...

I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!

Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)

Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.

I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.

The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).

KDE -- I guess they want us to call it Plasma nowadays -- still has this feature (it's off by default, but you can enable it in Desktop Effects). It's pretty clunky to use, though: you have to hold down both Shift and Meta while drawing with the mouse. And I don't think you can draw with fire.

Never noticed someone trying to send a email to any addresses I haven't previously used.

At least a few years ago, I noticed a lot of spam to <random first name>@<my domain> -- i.e., completely made-up addresses that I had never used. Since messages sent to those addresses were guaranteed to be spam, I started treating them as free training data for the spam filter.

I don't know if this still happens, though, because I haven't looked.

You don’t have to be a nationalist far-right in order to have an objective look at the situation in EU

Sure, but I didn't say that. I said those are the only ones I hear making unsubstantiated alarmist claims about Europe, and/or their respective home countries, "declining and sinking". I have no problem with people pointing out specific problems, like you did with wages and tech innovations. This opens up for constructive debate. Screaming that we're doomed does not.

COVID showed Europeans how dependent they are from China industry and US tech.

I absolutely agree with you here.

Most Europeans know that Europe is declining and sinking slowly.

Sorry, you lost me here. Outside of the nationalist far right, I never hear people saying anything of the sort. How are we "declining and sinking"?

Same end result though. If I randomly get medical advice by people at my local bus stop and I therefore [mostly] stop trying to get it from other sources, the randos at the bus stop will have become my [main] source of medical advice.

I have never understood why people insist on getting news from Facebook. To me that seems a bit like heading to the nearest bus stop in search of medical advice.

While I don't have a Facebook account myself, I do recognize that apparently their service has some value to a lot of people. But using it for news -- in the traditional sense, i.e., reports on large-scale developments in the real world -- has to me always seemed ill-advised.

As someone with a daily email "newsletter" of my own [1], I am aware of (many of) the vagaries of spam filters. I use plain text only, though, so I couldn't use tracking pixels even if I wanted to. I do unsubscribe users if messages start bouncing but I have no way of knowing if they get silently dropped or spamfoldered.

As someone who subscribes to lots of newsletters, the "interact or we will auto-unsubscribe you" thing still annoys me.

[1] https://www.aphorismsgalore.com/daily

What irks me is when email newsletters that I'm willfully subscribed to (the Economist comes to mind) inform me that "since I haven't been interacting" my subscription will be terminated. I have too been "interacting" (or as I call it, "reading") but my email client, very sensibly, doesn't load external resources, like pictures, willy nilly.

In case I'm not the only one who had no idea: MBSR = Mindfulness-based stress reduction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduc...

The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated.

That varies a lot by jurisdiction. I'm 50 and I haven't written a single check in my entire life. (Sweden.)