Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.

It’s because in the US pixel phones are one of the only ways to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Or, in other words, to actually own a phone.

For me the best tech purchases aren’t really the ones that bring me joy. They’re the ones that become invisible because they take away points of friction.

So I would say my Brother printer is one. It’s been incredibly reliable for more than a decade now.

Switching over to Ubiquiti Unifi access points for wifi has been worth it too. It’s a pain to run wires for them, but having a solid signal everywhere in the house in all kinds of weather is just amazing. They’ve been running for a decade too, though I did just replace one so I can have a 6GHz connection in one room. Not really sure that particular upgrade was actually worth it, but the system as a whole has been so nice. There’s just never anything to fix about the wifi anymore. (Well, okay, occasionally there’s something to fix with the Internet, but it’s usually just “Comcast is down,” and we have to wait until they fix it, and sometimes also reboot the modem. The wifi itself is pretty bulletproof.)

So yeah. Tech that works reliably and invisibly for years on end is what I find really valuable. Gadgets can certainly be fun, but great tech is just there in the background making things easier.

Don’t forget Mr. Card Game!

(it’s actually pretty okay to forget Mr. Card Game, it’s not great)

Thanks for the reminder! I had switched to Lawnchair, but I just realized I had forgotten to uninstall Nova. Fixed!

If the song you listened to was “Why Does the Sun Shine,” you should know they didn’t actually write that one (it’s from a 50’s educational record they liked as kids) and it’s not very representative of their ouvre. They’ve even released a follow-up track (“Why does the sun really shine?”) which corrects a lot of that one. It starts with the line “The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, the sun’s not simply made out of gas, no no!”

I mean, this was my first question as well. If you say “I don’t trust that guy with my kids,” then you also should not be leaving that person alone with your kids. If you do leave him alone with your kids, people aren’t wrong to say that you very much are trusting him with them.

So I think it’s legitimate to ask whether they mean they “don’t trust Chinese and US firms with their data” in the sense that they do not provide their data to them, or just in the sense that they do give them a bunch of data, and then feel misgivings about it.

Which, y’know, it’s something you have a limited degree of control over, certainly, and we don’t want to fall too much into blaming the victims. But as someone who didn’t manage to actually get off Facebook until last year, I definitely felt for a long while before that like I was complicit in my own exploitation, and contributing to a societal problem. I think even the people still there know that cancelling it is the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing the amount of data in the hands of dubious firms.

That would be the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.

Yeah, this is what I was going to call out. Calling it “100% solvable by humans” and saying “if human scores were included, they would be at 100%” when 20-60% of humans solved each task seems kinda misleading. The AI scores are so low that I don’t think this kind of hyperbole is necessary; I assume there are some humans that scored 100%, but I would find it a lot more useful if they said something like “the worst-performing human in our sample was able to solve 45% of the tasks” or whatever. Given that the AIs are still scoring below 1%, that’s still pretty dark.

Yep. I’ve only got three APs, and one is by the modem and router, so it’s really just two long wires, and one of those is to my office, which is also where my main desktop PC is, so I needed that wire anyway. The other one was annoying, and I had to drill a couple holes for it as well as exploit a laundry chute, but all that was ten years ago, and having pretty complete wifi coverage since then has been worth it.

The one weak spot is the kitchen, where there’s coverage, but it tends to be a bit slow. I just decided to upgrade my bedroom AP to Wifi 6 (from AC), though, and I might try switching the old unit over to mesh mode and mounting it to cover the kitchen. Mesh involves two wifi links so it’s a bit slower, but the connection strength will probably make up for that. It’s worth the experiment, at least.

I turned off wifi on my router and instead use multiple wifi access points connected to the router by ethernet. It’s way easier to get good coverage and speeds that way.

But then you’ve got a space that’s 5’ 7 3/8" and you need a clearance of 7/32" on each end, so your piece should be…uh… 5’ 6 15/16" long. So much easier than metric, right?

In metric it would be 1711mm (or 1.711m) and you’d need to take 5.5mm off each end, so it’s 1700mm. (For the record, I picked random numbers in imperial and only did the metric conversion afterwards, I just lucked into the nice round number here.)

I dunno. You need how many sig figs you need in whichever system, but switching between a factor of 12 for the feet, base 10 for the inches, and the equivalent of binary decimals for the partial inches sure does take getting used to. I’ve finally gotten used to it enough that I can do it in my head, but I prefer to work on metric for most things.

I acknowledge that machinists just use thousandths of an inch, which does greatly improve working with that system, but it also introduces a third kind of measurement that can’t easily be interconverted with the other two. I dunno. It just feels like we’re doing way too much work propping up this archaic system when literally everyone else in the world is using something simpler and we could just be on the same system.

Yeah. I think none of us really understands how valuable all our data really is.

Most of the “commercial” TVs, the ones intended for businesses, don’t have this. They also don’t have streaming services and whatnot not built in. They’re just a display with a few inputs, and maybe a tuner.

Many years ago when t-mobile first debuted their “visual voicemail” that did automated transcription, my dad brought me his phone and wanted to know what the hell has happened with one of his messages. It said something like “Parrot vegan spaniel primo wavy.” I showed him that he could still press a button to listen to the actual message, and it was from Walgreens; the computer had been trying to transcribe the Spanish voice saying “para diga en Espanol, oprima nueve.”

Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I’ll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years…

GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they’re mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that’s not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.

I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.

Note that it’s not an RPG, though.

I’m reminded of the whole “I have been a good Bing” exchange. (apologies for the link to twitter, it’s the only place I know of that has the full exchange: https://x.com/MovingToTheSun/status/1625156575202537474 )