“Inadvertently”

Riiiiiiiight.

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!

Had a winter solstice bonfire last year. I’ve had two since.

Also fuck that private section of the track, that’s horrible.

The rest of the train and bus network for a hundred kilometre radius is 50 cents.

Previous state government in the late 90s “did a deal” with a private corporation to construct the line out the to airport and allow control for 35 years.

10 more years of this shit and then it gets handed over to state government.

It’s mainly because there are 15 stops along the way a couple of kilometres apart through the CBD, plus a 7 minute wait in the middle to change trains to another line.

The trains are capable of 100 km/hr but basically through that area they get up to 40-60km/hr before having to slow for bends/switching tracks/the next stop.

It’s super hard to resist public transit at higher prices

It was 65 dollarydoos for a projected 25 minute uber home from Brisbane airport on Friday night.

I took the train for 55 minutes instead. $22.30 of my train fare was for the 10 kilometre section that is privately owned by “Airtrain CityLink Limited”, the public owned section that took me the remaining 10km cost 50 cents.

Fuck the corporations that want to try to replace public transport.

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.

Saturn V was done with the resources of a nation behind it, because they had to beat the Soviets. That rocket also only went up, and was not reusable, with a tiny fraction of the Apollo mission hardware returning to Earth.

All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.

There was considerable computing power on the ground supporting the missions.

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.

These kind of “manual” a/c units normally have a little sticker or a caution in the manual to “wait 5 minutes before restarting”.

People can easily trigger this kind of thing just by turning the thermostat back and forth, so there is usually a thermal cutout on the compressor to keep them mostly safe.

You can usually hear it when it activates, there will be a hum from the stalled compressor for a few seconds and then a little click, and then the compressor won’t start for a minute or two.

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!

It’ll be fine as long as you don’t try and start it up again within a few minutes of turning it off.

Pressure just needs to slowly bleed from the high pressure side to the low pressure side of the compressor before it starts again, so that it isn’t initially stalled against high pressure.

love that it has to repeat my command back to me before executing it

This is inserted to give enough time for the LLM to process your command. Otherwise Google would have to pony up for a lot more compute horsepower to make it performant.

"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?