This is genuinely so fucking cool. I had never even considered that you could just plug a solar panel into a regular outlet and it wouldn’t like, somehow completely wreck your electrical system or something.

As someone who probably won’t own my home soon, if ever, if I end up living in an apartment where I owe money for the electricity I use rather than it being an inclusive bundle with the rent, it could be genuinely really cool to just have a solar panel or two I can hang off a balcony, offset some of my electricity cost, but still be able to take it with me whenever I inevitably have to move out because the landlord decides he’s gonna try to squeeze me for more rent.

I genuinely feel like half my brain just atrophied watching this guy.

Of course they would. They just showed that people by far watch YouTube more than any other individual streaming service, and that they make more in ad revenue than most other streaming services.

Other streaming services have long, annoying, unskippable ads too. If YouTube has a lot of marketshare, and knows a lot of people aren’t gonna get the content from, say, their favorite YouTuber, on something like Disney+, they can add all the unskippable ads they want as long as it’s close enough to the other streaming services to make people not decide to watch different content entirely.

Turns out there’s not actually much functionality in these at all. An RFID reader and an RGB LED, whoop-de-shit.

Where did you get that idea? They have an RFID reader and LED, yes, but they also have a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, light and color sensor, near-field magnetic position detection, and then have to fit the battery alongside all of that, all in a 2x4 brick.

Here’s an example of what cutting-edge brick tech could look like.

That brick has a fixed option for what it displays without needing to be entirely reflashed, requires a 4x8 powered baseplate to operate, and compared to the smart brick, doesn’t have RFID, LEDs, sound, color, or light sensing capabilities, no accelerometer, and no ability to detect other bricks near it, along with having no internal battery.

The smart brick can play different (fully interchangeable without firmware reflashing) sounds based on nearby minifigures and interactable buttons and levers, can display lights and sounds based on rotation and movement, can change how it interacts based on nearby smart bricks, and can also be charged wirelessly and operate standalone. And of course, it’ll be able to respond to sounds later on too.

The brick from hackaday has a display. That’s it. It’s cool, yes, but it’s nowhere close to the smart brick.

Yeah, normally I can at least understand what they’re trying to say, but here I just… I don’t know anymore 😭

Some of the really expensive chairs like Herman Miller are not only really good chairs, they’re also designed to be beautiful pieces of furniture

Plus they last a while and are pretty repairable/refurbishable due to how widespread they are. Meanwhile most random folding chairs or generic office chairs will have some random part break and then you’ll have to face the unfortunate reality that nobody sells that one random part you need, so now it’s junk.

Before people get all up in arms about the non-replaceable battery… Do you know how small a LEGO brick is? For them to pack all this functionality in there, they have to be EXTREMELY careful with how they use every millimeter of space, and they have to make sure a kid won’t just… pop open the bottom of the brick and eat the battery or something.

The article itself even states:

As you can see in JerryRigEverything’s destructive teardown, it’s difficult to even get at the battery without going through thin, hair-like antennas.

Break even one of them and the entire brick is nonfunctional.

Make sure to sign up via a creator’s link! (the ones they’ll put in the sponsored section of a video where they are “sponsored” by Nebula as one of Nebula’s creators)

Gets you a pretty good discount and drops it to about 30 bucks a year.

The a series have been great to me so far. The specs are usually more than enough for most use cases you’re gonna have for your phone, and the 9a and 10a both have better battery life than the rest of the 9 and 10 series’ respectively.

The a series is substantially cheaper for what is, in my opinion, a totally justifiable Android experience that isn’t gonna be much different than the other models for most people.

HOWEVER, I will say that if you plan on running a lot of apps that need to operate in the background or be constantly on, especially if you play games at the same time on your phone sometimes, the RAM could be too low for your liking and might occasionally lead to an app’s background process freezing for a bit. (e.g. a timer might freeze if the app isn’t actively open)

Genuinely pretty interesting. It’s one thing to know a shadow library like Anna’s Archive exists, but it’s another to see what goes into it behind the scenes. Most people just see webpages. To many, it’s where the books come out of for free, nothing more.

True, but that also depends on the circumstance.

Again, a lot of people just use LLMs now as their primary search engine. Google is an afterthought, ChatGPT is their source of choice. If they ask a simple question with legal or medical implications, with tons of sources, that the LLM answers with identical accuracy to those other publications, should they be sued?

I think it would be a lot better to allow people to sue if it provides false advice that ends up causing some material harm, because at the end of the day, a lot of stuff can be considered “medical.”

Maybe a trans person asks what gender affirming care is. Is that medical? I’d say it is. Should that not get discussed through an LLM if a person wants to ask it?

I’m not saying I wholeheartedly oppose this idea of banning them from giving this type of advice, but I do think there are a lot of concerns around just how many people this would actually benefit vs just cutting people off from information they might not bother to look up elsewhere, or worse, just go to less reputable, more fringe sites with less safeguards and less accountability instead.

To be fair to the massive multibillion dollar megacorporation…

It’s a private credit fund, where you invest money specifically to loan it to corporations at high interest rates, hoping they’ll pay it back, while a lot will just kind of go defunct. Loan sharking for corporations as an investment asset. It’s meant to be semi-liquid, not like a regular bank.

It’s often used for things like when a private equity fund wants to do a leveraged buyout of a company, where the company gets saddled with a ton of debt in exchange for the investors getting to milk it dry. Including companies I know you’ve heard of like Red Lobster, Toys R Us, Joann Fabrics, and a lot more.

Again, loan sharking, but for corporations. Can’t exclude them from exploitative financial mechanisms!

Don’t make trends your identity.

You don’t want to look back on your life and all the photos you have of yourself, just to realize every fashion choice, purchase, event you went to, and way you talked was all because it was seen as cool, trendy, or “normal.”

Live your life in a way that feels right and true to who you are, and what your values are, not what anybody else things is “right” for you to do.

And to clarify, by “harass”, we mean stupid shit like “your grass is 1 inch taller than the mandated limit, mow it today or we’ll fine you $200”, “your trash bins are visible from the street on a non-trash day, that’ll be $50”, or “your house is painted a different color than the entire rest of the neighborhood because we’ve determined the only color your house is allowed to be is a yellowed beige. Repaint your whole house in the next week otherwise we’ll charge you $50 a day until you do.”

Which is exactly why I will never live in an HOA-run community.

I’m not sure I totally agree with this, even as much as I want AI companies to be held accountable for things like that.

The reason so many people turn to LLMs for legal/medical advice is because those are both incredibly unaffordable, complex, hard to parse fields.

If I ask an LLM what x symptom, y symptom, and z symptom could mean, and it cites multiple reputable sources to tell me it’s probably the flu and tells me to mask up for a bit, that’s probably gonna be better than that person being told “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that”

At the same time, I might provide an LLM with all those symptoms, and it might hallucinate an answer and tell me I have cancer, or tell me to inject bleach to cure myself.

I feel like I’d much rather see a bill that focuses more on how the LLMs come to their conclusions, rather than just a blanket ban.

Like for example, if an LLM cites multiple medical journals, government health websites, etc, and provides the same information they had up, but it turns out to be wrong later because those institutions were wrong, would it be justified to sue the LLM company for someone else’s accidental misinformation?

But if an LLM pulls from those sources, gets most of it right, but comes to a faulty conclusion, then should a private right of action exist?

I’m not really sure myself to be honest. A lot of people rely on LLMs for their information now, so just blanket banning them from displaying certain information, for a lot of people, is just gonna be “you can’t know”, and they’re not gonna bother with regular searches anymore. To them, the chatbot IS the search engine now.

Reticulum seems cool since it can work over all kinds of different networking technologies, even regular ol’ WiFi and whatnot. Higher bandwidth channels can talk to lower bandwidth channels, and vice versa.

It has its own problems with scale and actual users out in the wild, as well as I believe some issues getting proper code contributions and consistent maintenance.

Mullvad does have this issue. That is why in their logging policy explaining what they don’t, do, or have to log, they explicitly state:

For credit card, PayPal, Swish, and bank wire, we do use third parties: Stripe, PayPal, and our bank SEB (which handles both Swish and bank wire). These kinds of companies log everything. For that reason alone, it is out of our control that they have records showing which people have paid us money (i.e. processing of personal data).

As a customer of their services, these entities would allow us to request this information if we chose to do so. In short, your payment actions with these two methods are not anonymous and the GDPR and other relevant data protection regulations may apply if you are making a payment by credit card, PayPal, Swish or by bank wire.

This person would have been just as easily unmasked had they paid Mullvad and had that account found by the government, as they were when the government found their Proton account.

It’s preemptive for when you DIE. That’s why in the screenshot you sent it says “in the event of my death”, not “if the government comes knocking, violate the law and delete my data first”.

You can delete your data from Proton, too, but the payment information, which was how this person was identified, is stored regardless by their third-party payment provider.

Mailbox only erases your payment info 4 weeks after you’ve last paid, and ended your contract with them, and they use Ayden for payments, which also has no set date at which they’ll delete your payment information.

If you’re worried Proton could identify you to authorities, either just make a new Proton account and pay anonymously (cryptocurrency or cash by mail), since that’s the only way this person was identified, or you could use what I’d consider to be the next-best, which is Tuta.

Nowhere near as slick a UI, less overall offerings (only email and calendar), but it costs less and generally provides similar security and privacy to Proton. Though again, you’d have to pay via private means, otherwise you’re gonna get identified by the same mechanism this person was if the government really decided to come after you by your account.

Proton uses Chargebee for payments, which has its own data retention policy of essentially “as long as we want to”, but Proton does themselves keep limited data like the billing name, and last 4 digits.

Proton’s privacy policy says nothing about a pre-set time delay after which they’d delete that data. They only claim that they “reserve our right” to remove your payment information if they think it’s no longer valid. So theoretically, that might mean if your card’s expiry date has passed, but that’s not a confirmation.

The best way to reliably make sure Proton wouldn’t have any info on you is to not have ever tied any real information about yourself or your payment info to that account.