monotremata

It’s also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” That’s usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with “other alleged speakers include…” so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.

Well, okay, but we’re gonna create our own set of secret judges so nobody can keep an eye on what we’re doing. This is about us being able to watch you, not the other way around. --the intelligence agencies

It’s less of an appeals process and more of a peel process.

putting the “ad” in “advent calendar”

https://youtu.be/Reruwp_Fs3Y?si=YM9HhBiwGh3G2zFT

I dunno, I prefer swipe typing and this doesn’t seem like it would work with that.

To me the biggest barriers to long-form typing on the phone are that so many websites screw up form handling for long-form content, and that the cursor maneuvering is still pretty broken.

Websites do weird things when you’re typing. Sometimes the input field won’t scroll, so you can’t see what you’re typing. Other times it’ll force-scroll to put the current line you’re working on at the very top of the screen, so you can’t see anything you wrote previously. At least they finally fixed the weird behavior where if you deleted more than a few characters it would start jumping around in the text and duplicating huge sections of it–I think it was around Android 9 that they finally fixed that.

As for moving the cursor, the “swipe on the space bar to move the cursor left and right” works, but trying to go back further, like going up a few lines, is very, very difficult. The cursor will scroll the text box if you move to the edge, but there’s no delay in the scrolling, so instead of scrolling a couple of lines and then pausing briefly to give you a chance to stop there, it just immediately scrolls again on the next frame of rendering, so effectively your choices are “scroll within the few lines of text still visible” or “jump all the way to the beginning of your text.” Anything else you need to scrub through character by character using the space bar control, which is very slow.

Basically, I don’t think the issue is the keyboard itself. I think the issue is that Android has never prioritized long-form text entry, and so it’s just very buggy.

It is, at least in part. This story cites a Washington Post article, which in turn brings up Project 2025.

An excerpt:

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

They explain earlier in the article that the use of the Insurrection Act would be in order to deploy the military to put down civilian inauguration day protests. It’s a little oddly written, in that it makes it sound like this is the main thrust of Project 2025, though they do eventually mention:

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.

In any case, yeah, they’re not bothering to hide any of this. They know they control the media that their side hears.

Source article (as linked at the start of OP’s article): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/

Honestly, Google killing this will probably be the best outcome for it, because otherwise they’ll try to monetize it, and that could be a nightmare. Just a straight-up conversation partner that tries to wheedle personal information out of you for their advertising profiles. Even their example question about what you like to do for fun is a little uncomfortable in that context.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…

Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it’s a bit of an arms race. They don’t just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from “review farms” that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don’t have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren’t easy for manipulate.

Specifically, the 8 pro has a 5x telephoto 48mp sensor that the base model lacks, a 48MP wide angle sensor compared to 12MP on the base model, a thermometer the base model lacks, 12GB of ram vs 8 on the base model, and a slightly larger and brighter display and slightly larger battery (though the gain in battery is probably roughly offset by the increased power draw of the screen). I believe those are the only hardware difference.

Source: https://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Google-Pixel-8-Pro-vs-Pixel-8-Google-is-about-to-reap-the-harvest_id5921

Good sci fi usually isn’t about the future, aliens, etc. It’s about the present, but portrayed in a strange way so as to bypass your existing preconceptions about the situation, so you can look at it with fresh eyes.

Certainly! Here’s how this might be phrased in a more casual manner if it appeared as a comment on a web forum: “lol git gud noob jk”

Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”

So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.

I dunno. Is it gluten-free?

I mean TVs have volume buttons but also a mute. It’s nice to be able to use volume to set a specific level but then also quickly toggle between that perfect level and silent.

It’s not something you strictly need a physical button for, but the way they implemented it on old iPhones was nice. It was a physical switch rather than a button, and it looked different in the two positions–the slider under the switch was red on one side and black on the other. (or maybe silver, i forget, but it didn’t stand out the way the red did.) So you could tell at a glance if it was muted as well without turning on the screen.

The new button seems like a step back from that to me, but if you don’t use the silencing feature then a reprogrammable button is maybe more useful to you.

I think they were saying “I don’t believe you and I don’t believe that you believe you either.”

Attention is a kind of surplus mental capacity that we have, which isn’t specialized, but can instead be directed to tasks as needed. Ironically, we also use the term for the dedicated mental system which directs this extra capacity, which makes talking about it a bit more complicated.

Most of the stuff we do, our brains just kinda handle for us. Walking is usually like that; it’s an incredibly complex feat of dynamic balance, movement planning, and adaptation to changes in the environment, but it rarely takes any conscious effort on our part. Conscious effort is directed attention.

The tech behind the s-pen is made by Wacom, and they’re in the USI, so I don’t think it’s totally impossible. Pens are just pretty niche right now, partly because the android tablet market is so lousy. I think the tech has improved a bit–supposedly they’re down to a 0.7mm tip now, which is in the range where handwriting on a phone starts to make sense again. So maybe we’ll see more uptake of these, especially if the foldables market grows.

The use cases I really want to see for this tech are things like an advanced calculator that lets you handwrite an integral and then gives you the closed form solution if it exists, or a graph, etc. if it doesn’t; and a nice pen-driven CAD program. Those would be amazing things to have in your pocket all the time, but they’re a little too intricate to work well with fat fingers on a phone.

But for now I don’t think the tech is really quite good enough for phones. It’s good enough for my brother-in-law, who is an animator, to use it to doodle all the time, but that’s kinda it. On the iPad Pro he can do a lot more with the Apple Pencil, but that has more to do with the Apple tablet software ecosystem than with the pen itself, and Google has neglected that aspect of Android. On phones the pens just seem pretty limited.

Even with wired headphones, the volume setting didn’t directly correspond to a decibel level. High quality headphones often have a higher impedance than cheaper ones, which makes them much quieter (unless you use an external amp). The automatic volume reducer thing was just always pretty frustrating in the past.