Dave.

It’s BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.

Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the “magic packet” of wake on Ethernet.

Super convenient for “find my device” applications, also nice to be able to connect and activate the device without having to press a power button like a peasant.

It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for “convenience”. With BLE on it would be flat in about 6 weeks regardless of whether I’d used it or not , which really ruined ad-hoc usage for me.

The Apples and Googles and Microsofts of the world are all about offering cloud services to hold your precious data, for what is essentially “free” to the end user. Push you into their services with dark patterns, make it a pain in the ass to do without them, join the cloud, it’s awesome.

Unfortunately all that comes with a catch - when automated services fail, and self-service solutions fail to resolve it, you have zero chance or ability to contact a real live human who can apply reason and judgement to sort out the issue. You and all your data are basically fucked at that point.

We’ve all been there, back in the day haha

But they had “kernel tweaks for buttery smooth performance!!! ^*”

* oh yeah bluetooth, wifi, fingerprint sensor doesn’t work, camera takes green tint pictures, phone app crashes, and I’ve had some hard lockups, but it’s been my daily driver for two hours now and it’s awesome!!1!

Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.

Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.

Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we’d be set for a century or two.

showed the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’” had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.

This is ENTIRELY because of Meta’s content algorithms that buried the content from everyone’s friends under a torrent of shit. It’s pretty disingenuous for the company that controls that algorithm to present this as some inevitable fait accompli, something out of their hands, oh well.

But of course Meta was terrified of people just viewing all their friend’s posts and then logging off for the day because, as everyone knows, line must always go up.

Australian here.

Step 1: design your damn toilets so they do not clog.

Step 2: there is no step 2.

Seriously, half a century of toilet use here in Aus and I’ve never caused - or discovered even - a blocked toilet at home.

Clearly the fact that I can buy a toilet plunger from the local hardware store indicates that this can happen here. But it seems that every American household has a toilet plunger and poop knife on standby and many articles are devoted to what clogs, and how to unclog, American toilets.

There are better designs for both toilets and plumbing out there guys, maybe you should look into using them.

Everything is fine in the Apple ecosystem as long as you want to do something The Apple Way™.

As soon as you want to do something differently to how Apple decrees it should be done, then you’re screwed.

This kind of reliability is huge for prosthetic limbs, fitness trackers, and robotic arms, where precision and durability are non-negotiable.

Thanks, AI slop! Sensors that have been durability tested for a few hundred cycles will be perfect for prosthetic devices that can do that in half a day of office work, or fitness trackers that can do that in five minutes, or in robotic arms that can perform that kind of movement in 60 seconds! I’m going to use them in my next safety critical robotics project for sure!

"automated decision systems "

“IF X THEN Y” satisfies this description.

Soooo basically just take the handbrake off practically every chunk of software ever written then?

Are you familiar with https://old.reddit.com/

How much longer do you think Reddit will keep an option that doesn’t maximise end user engagement metrics?

I was reliably informed at the start of the year that the US was just days away from the best jobs, the biglyest paychecks, and a golden age.

Was I misled‽

Public with conditions on behaviour which can lead to your licence being revoked, just like the current GPL. 🤷‍♂️

Those who use AI to report to open source projects and flood the volunteering devs who keep the World going, should be disqualified from using those open source projects

I propose a GPL-noAI licence with this clause inserted.

Linus was ahead of his time in the human-identifiabilty stakes.

None of this stands up to any sort of robust critical thinking, which is sadly lacking in LLMs.

Eg. All your “high performing” worker input relies on skills gained elsewhere , and others have already asserted that the time spent doing one job is not directly equivalent to the time spent doing another job.

All your renewable energy sources rely on external inputs to manufacture or obtain. “We’ll just use solar panels and battery storage and avoid all the centralised systems”, you fail to understand the enormous resources needed to create such items in bulk, which is what you’ll need when making hyper local energy systems.

Essentially, your dream society is leeching off capitalism to exist, and this seems to directly go against its lofty ideals.

It’s much more fun to just half-ass a new control panel with only a few features, and then hide the old, fully-functional control panel.

Bonus points if you can then begrudgingly finally show the old, useful, control panel when a user clicks 6 layers deep in the new panel.

“Wuh-wuh-wuh”, using pronunciation similar to the start of “wow” or “woman”

“Why do people do X, when in my opinion if you disregard the two top reasons for doing X, it’s pointless? Prove to me that it would be better!?”

But I need my land barge to potentially carry 9000 pounds and 6 people for at least 400 miles without a break, even if I can barely manage to satisfy one of those criteria once a year. Otherwise it’s a miserable failure that must be mocked.