bigzaphod

bigzaphod, 10 months ago to random

Boost if you're old enough to remember ZMODEM.

bigzaphod, 5 months ago to random

My oldest just brought in his Arduino and breadboard and said, "Look what I made! Press the button!"

I press it and it started playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on the piezo speaker.

bigzaphod, 7 months ago to random

This sounds like a pretty major cancer treatment breakthrough - and it's totally noninvasive: https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/tumor-destroying-soundwaves-receive-fda-approval-for-liver-treatment-in-humans/

Especially wild that by breaking apart the cancer cells this way your body can then learn from the debris and trigger an immune response which then goes on to kill bits they missed with the machine! Like... holy crap?

(Only approved for liver cancer so far. Hopefully it could work for other types?)

bigzaphod, 5 months ago to random

Just showed the kids Windows 95 running in a browser (🤯) and the thing they were amazed about is how clean it was. No toolbars everywhere, no junk in the task bar, nothing that looked like ads, etc. It's sad how things have evolved.

bigzaphod, 5 months ago to random

I just saw a banner ad that I thought said, "HEALTHY POUTINE" and I'm thinking to myself, "that's impossible and defeats the point of poutine and yet I'm now intrigued..." Then I realized it actually said, "HEALTHY ROUTINE" at which point I immediately lost interest in it.

bigzaphod, 1 year ago to random

It's amazing that Reddit, having watched the fallout after Twitter killed off their third party developers, would go on to say, "You know what, that's an excellent idea and we should do it too!"

It seems their new API pricing scheme might very well be a deathblow to @christianselig's excellent Apollo client (along with tons of others, I'm sure).

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

bigzaphod, 1 year ago to random

My "Getting Started on Mastodon" tip is to follow a ton of people.

Follow the people you followed on Twitter, sure, but especially follow new people you didn't know on Twitter. Follow people who follow you. Check out the local or federated timelines and pick random people to follow.

You can remove them later if you don't like their vibe or once you get a sense for how you want to use Mastodon, but in the meantime it's much more interesting to have a bunch of new posts whenever you come visit.

bigzaphod, 6 months ago to random

Apple could spend the next several years just doing bug fixes and calling the releases iOS 18, iOS 19, etc as usual and I swear only the tech press would notice. End users would probably be delighted to find that things that didn't work correctly last year now seem to work this year and think of it as a new feature! Not to mention third party devs having time to adopt the bazillions of APIs in the meantime and thus furthering the impression that new features have kept coming that whole time.

bigzaphod, 9 months ago to random

I love how CNN has "INMATE NO. P01135809" and his mug shot on the screen. And not his name.

bigzaphod, 1 year ago to random

I love that Apple uses "machine learning" instead of "AI." That feels way more honest about what is going on under the hood and helps avoids personification.

bigzaphod, 16 days ago to random

I really appreciate that the long, illustrious internet tradition of shitposting is poisoning AI.

bigzaphod, 5 months ago to random

Weird that Zuck's announcement of testing Mastodon for Threads doesn't include a link to a post on Mastodon that came from Threads.

Of course everyone is totally taking his word for it without any evidence.

bigzaphod, 1 year ago to random

Maybe the real social network is the friends we convinced to move to Mastodon along the way.

bigzaphod, 3 months ago to random

Just realized today is March 0th.

bigzaphod, 1 month ago to random

I didn't like that Apple crushing ad, either. I cringed.

I understand the conceit of the ad - cramming all of this stuff/capability into a single magical iPad - but the execution was in poor taste, IMO.

All I saw was wastefulness. It's one thing to run with the idea that someone can replicate all of those things they probably don't have using just this one device they could buy right now, but it's quite another to imply that all of it needed to be destroyed for the iPad to pop into existence.

bigzaphod, 11 months ago to random

Every commercial social network right now:

bigzaphod, 7 months ago to random

Seems legit.

bigzaphod, 6 months ago to random

Looks like Apple forgot to renew a certificate?

bigzaphod, 6 months ago to random

This demo of Google's AI seems impossible. Holy crap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZAiXYceBI

bigzaphod, 5 months ago to random

"An unexpected error occurred."

Nah, I'm a software developer. I always expect them.

bigzaphod, 4 months ago to random

What better way to celebrate #macintosh's 40th anniversary than by using BitCam https://iconfactory.com/bc.html to take a pic of your current Mac? 😛

bigzaphod, 4 months ago to random

Project Tapestry is roughly 1 Vision Pro away from being funded! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iconfactory/project-tapestry

bigzaphod, 2 months ago to random

Oh, another ridiculous thing we saw on our eclipse roadtrip was another gas station that had an "automated" checkout. It was a pad on the counter and you put your stuff on it and there were cameras above the pad that presumably used AI to figure out what you had and ring you up.

Here's the best part, though: There was an employee behind it fixing every single error it was making. I was in a long line for it and it failed at something for everyone - including me.

bigzaphod, 6 months ago to random

Wow, it's the 10th month of the year already!

checks historical records

Ah. I guess if a system is around long enough, you run out of off-by-one errors and start accumulating off-by-two errors when naming things.

bigzaphod, 19 days ago to random

My feelings about this feature are somewhere between horrified and appalled.

I admit that sometimes it might be useful, but I think at this point I'm willing to live without it because... :yikes:.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/