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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Meh. I got one for free from a job’s tech allowance, and it’s never really a problem. It charges fast and the OS warns you early enough to plug it in on a lunch break or at the end of the day well before it runs out. Not ideal but def not garbage. Honestly, I get more frustrated with noise canceling headphones and keyboards dying at inconvenient times than I ever do the mouse.

    I dont use it daily, but it is a pretty good mouse for my laptop bag. Charge holds a long time for once/week use. If it’s dead when I get to the coffee shop or wherever I’m working, itll be usable in 15 mins or less anyway. It also works nicely with Linux out of the box, which is a rarity among Bluetooth mice (in my experience).

    The other elephant in the room: not having multitasking gestures on a mouse when using macOS is a serious drawback for any other mouse out there, so there is a reason people are willing to put up with the annoyance (if they ever get annoyed in the first place)


  • I was a roku fan for s long time until they really enshittified (which sucks, since their UI overall is superior and their products are supported for a really, really long time)

    I dont see moving away from android any time soon, and i’m not quite ready/willing to take the plunge into alternate ROM’s (the pixel festures are really nice!) so I figure google TV at least isnt going to learn much about me that google doesnt already know. The newer OS iteration isnt that bad a UI, either.

    I do think all this will motivate me to get a kodi device set up and use the smart TV stuff a lot less, though, and I dont think I’ll be in a rush to replace my existing roku TV’s/boxes for secondary room use. I can tell they have a bit of targeted ads, but it mostly seems based on content I watch on the TV itself. Probably helps that most of my online life on home-based internet usage is very filtered of tracking through my router, though i haven’t put a ton of effort into blocking roku specifically.



  • NASA does a hell of a lot more work than just build rockets lol. SpaceX and all the other private space companies focus on a few of the wide array of programs and services NASA does. They certinally have some poor decisions in their history (as does every space program of the 20th century) but comparing SpaceX’s spending with an appropriate context of NASA’s spending is ludicrous. Its not something you can just put into numbers and any comparisons I’ve seen thus far have been wildly skewed in SpaceX’s favor for marketing reasons.

    NASA (and ESA, RosCosmos, others) funding provided decades of R&D SpaceX uses to build its products with and the university curriculums all the engineers at SpaceX learned at.

    Also, we dont know how a NASA that wasnt so de-funded since the 80s would have operated, but it’s well established that the budget cuts and uncertainty those created have been a major factor in its ability to build new programs like Artemis, Orion, SLS, etc. in a manner that would be efficient. SLS was bogged down for years waiting for congressional approval that was repeatedly blocked or maliciously modified last minute by congressional and senate republicans, a form of efficiency knee-capping that the agency never faced in the Apollo or Space Shuttle days.

    have you seen the plastics industry? Let alone consumer packaging

    Not an apples to apples comparison. Check out the many lawsuits and reported criticism of the more careless Starship test flights



  • Also, do you know who built the Saturn V?

    I’m not even going to get into a discussion of NASA competence. There are more than enough records available through widely accepted reporting and media to disprove any of the nonsense Elon cultists spew. Whether you subscribe to the Elon cult mindset or not is your prerogative and not an accusation I’m making…

    Additionally, a significant amount of the funding for starship is coming from NASA, specifically from the Artemis program, to the tune of nearly $4 billion.

    Elon can scream “mars” all he wants but he has virtually zero progress to report other than some wild plans to just throw people in tubes in the general direction. Last I checked, unless I’ve missed something, SpaceX has not put any amount of work into what is required to keep people alive on mars, much less alive on the trip to mars, and seeing as Elon’s track record on delivering promises by self-imposed deadlines is basically 0%… We’ll see if it ever even happens. Especially since he changes the goal post upon “delivery” (see: full self-driving basically never happening on top of killing more people per car than any other self-driving technology, cybertruck having a fraction of the features and capabilities that were promised on top of being extremely unsafe, semi being a massive failure, that ridiculous re-invention of the subway but for cars that makes 0 financial sense, and probably many more items I’m not thinking of at this moment)





  • The central point of that article is certinally valid. Something that was worked on for a while with broad congressional support and public support getting vetoed isnt ideal for a democratic process. No resolution on issues is not a good thing since another 3-6-12 months of no regulation for a theoretically netter bill to work through the system will allow for continued abuse by AI behemoths. Newsom is a corpo dem, so idk what people expected, anyway.

    I don’t buy into the AGI FUD. These are word calculators. But these tools are being hooked up to all sorts of things they shouldn’t be hooked up to and the lack of broad privacy regulation in the US puts LLM usage that handles sensitive data and/or decisions firmly into dangerous territory. Business decisions made by irresponsible management with no regard for data privacy or human safety are already a massive problem that actively cause harm, and hooking current AI tools onto these processes only seems to make the problems worse, especially while AI usage is in this gray space where no one wants to take responsibility for the outcomes.



  • What drives me crazy about its programming responses is how awful the html it suggests is. Vast majority of its answers are inaccessible. If anything, a LLM should be able to process and reconcile the correct choices for semantic html better than a human… but it doesnt because its not trained on WIA-ARIA… its trained on random reddit and stack overflow results and packages those up in nice sounding words. And its not entirely that the training data wants to be inaccessible… a lot of it is just example code wothout any intent to be accessible anyway. Which is the problem. LLM’s dont know what the context is for something presented as a minimal example vs something presented as an ideal solution, at least, not without careful training. These generalized models dont spend a lot of time on the tuned training for a particular task because that would counteract the “generalized” capabilities.

    Sure, its annoying if it doesnt give a fully formed solution of some python or js or whatever to perform a task. Sometimes it’ll go way overboard (it loves to tell you to extend js object methods with slight tweaks, rather than use built in methods, for instance, which is a really bad practice but will get the job done)

    We already have a massive issue with inaccessible web sites and this tech is just pushing a bunch of people who may already be unaware of accessible html best practices to write even more inaccessible html, confidently.

    But hey, thats what capitalism is good for right? Making money on half-baked promises and screwing over the disabled. they arent profitable, anyway.




  • I picked up one of the ARZOPA ones and they are fine. Not the best looking, but good enough for a second monitor on the go. I used to take my ipad 9.7" with me places for this purpose and even though the image isnt as good, its way less effort to carry around.

    I wouldnt use it as a single monitor regularly, nor for gaming.

    I had to keep using the usb-c cable that came with it. Not sure if its a specific protocol that my thunderbolt 4 cables dont support or not. Minor inconvenience i havent looked into further.