What I don’t understand is that the most desirable areas (home price, population growth) in the US are also very prone to natural disasters: floods in Carolinas, fires in S California, hurricanes in Florida, extreme heat in Texas and the southwest. Meanwhile, Great Lakes / rust belt area does not get many disasters, still has seasons, has access to fresh water, and yet, cities/areas populations are slowly decreasing or staying flat.

Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle’s driver.

“We installed postmarketOS on some older hardware, look, we are saving the planet!”

I am being facetious of course, but it would be great if manufacturers+google opened this up to everyone.

The Pierogi?

The last figure I saw for some Ohio data center was $15 million in tax breaks for 10 jobs. At this rate, give 10 random people in Ohio $1.5 million. That would help the economy much more.

As one option, they weren’t old enough, so they did not have to. As another, they moved and GPS app was too convenient, never learned to drive without it.

I mean, at least here in US, smartphones with (easy and free) turn-by-turn navigation apps have been widespread since early 2010s. So anyone born around 2000 had access to the tech in their teens. And even earlier than 2000s if they only needed it as adults. And before that, in-car GPS units were available in 2000s. So not that new either.

Normal people can just read a map easily enough

As someone I know says, “have you met people?”. There are many who cannot get around without GPS and direction, and some are well aware of this.

Love the simplicity and pragmatism of both protocol and gemtext markup (not so sure on TLS requirements though). I even use gemtext to write pages for my web site / gemini capsule.

Read about it when playing with Gemini (the protocol, not Google garbage), but just like Twitter, did not find a good use for it. Saw maybe one page promoting it.

pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs

Works for smartphone manufactuters though

The article says “…had professors assess whether responses might mislead or confuse students.”

professors flagged AI responses as pedagogically harmful only 3.5% of the time, compared to 12% for peer-written answers.

Which makes me think that real people came to some conclusion, sometimes biased or wrong, but AI could have produced inconclusive inflated perhaps-maybe-sometimes text (which it would be good at) 96.5% of the time. Response not being harmful doesn’t mean it’s good.

Don’t worry, we’ll blame teachers for this too. Or make them responsible for controlling it in some ridiculous way.

Isaac Asimov’s future of angry men yelling at uncooperative robots is almost here.

XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.

IIRC (from others, never installed it) McDonald’s app is also obnoxious, requiring permissions and refusing to run on custom ROMs and rooted devices. It was once used alongside some common banking apps as a metric of “how close to Google Android is this ROM”.

Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.

Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it’s not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.

AFAIK Librem claims they use separate verified suppliers and builders (compared to more common Android manufacturers, for example). Kind of a zealot thing too though.

And PinePhone (original) at $200 is not that expensive if you think of it as a compact version of a Linux platform like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi + charger + battery + touch display + 4G modem + GPS unit + microphone + speaker will probably run close to $200 too.

“Software-defined vehicles”? Dafuq?

This reminds me of a story my graph theory professor told me (long before LLMs). One of their grad students discovered that a subset of graphs that are of type A and B at once has fantastic properties, such as fast searching, and a few others, useful in communication networks etc.

Excited about their potential thesis, student asked the professor to take a look. After calculating which graphs actually are types A and B at the same time, professor found that the intersection of such graph types is a null set. So the theoretically nice graphs the student “discovered” simply do not exist.

I know literacy is not their strong suit, but current immigration law already prohibits being a member of a communist or totalitarian party. There are exceptions, of course.