jen_h

That wasn't really alarming to me, "Likely reads diverse literary fiction." Nice.

But what _was_ alarming was this persistent banner on the page: "Your other AI assistants have learned about you. Bring that knowledge here for an even more personalized experience."

Okay...so let's click *Import* and see what this is all about...

Step 1: Copy [prompt](https://gist.github.com/jenh/dcad304585e23fccc50ac514bc3605c...).

(!!!)

Step 2: Log into your AI assistant and paste it in.

(?!, okay, let's see what we get...)

Step 3: Paste AI assistant's response. Submit the response from your AI assistant below. We will remember the information you share to improve your experience across Amazon services. *To protect your privacy, we may not save all of the information you submit.*

How about...don't do this at all, or at the very least, please ask users to review the returned response for things they might not want to share with Amazon.

What a strange, hokey, non-vetted, and privacy-violating feature...

This--and also, if you're a US resident traveling abroad, you can't access most health data without a US-based VPN.

Everything's "in the portal" -- you're effectively helpless without a VPN if, for example, a loved one is hospitalized or you need to access to your own data/records. (You can try phone calls, but expect the old, "Well, I can't help you, that's in the portal.")

Well, not conpletely Emperor’s New Clothes: after I got my basic chess clock, I asked for skeuomorphic changes…I got a fantastic “next steps” summary in return…but when I said “Go on ahead, your choice,” it created an incompatible dependency nest trying to add clicky sounds.

Gemini actually dug me out of it, though, with additional prompting (this kind of surprised me; I assumed I’d have to eventually really step in). After all that distraction, though, I had to reset the convo to get it to focus on the files again.

Totally understand that you might be too annoyed at this point, but if you do have a few minutes, it’d be amazing to file a case @ https://firebase.google.com/support/troubleshooter/studio for the team to dig into.

[Full disclosure, work @ Firebase]

But try this:

Open up a blank Flutter template in Studio: https://studio.firebase.google.com/new/flutter

After everything initializes and your Android and web previews set up, open chat by clicking the little Gemini spark at the bottom of the workspace and then add your prompt.

YMMV, but I got a very basic, but working chess clock in one shot with "Can you replace this sample Flutter project with a fully-functional chess clock that works on Android and on the web?"

Yep. My mother-in-law taught me this. Walking is a pretty great universal cure, if you’re lucky enough to be able to walk long distances.

But also: hamstring stretches. YMMV, but whenever I feel the “twinge” that used to precipitate sciatica and a too-long stint of sleeping on the floor, I do some hamstring stretches and it dissipates. I haven’t had “back pain down to the knee” since I figured this “one simple trick!” out…

And back stretches. It really helped me to think about spinal stenosis and to realize and envision that massive cabling of nerves at the base of the spine, and then to remember to stretch several times a day to give that “wiring” some more room (especially after compressing and scrunching them for twelve hours straight hunched over a laptop on the couch!).

Wow. Blast from the past. Just tried to log in after 20 years and it worked…but I didn’t get farther than it requiring full name and a phone number and lots of other mobile web badness before noping out.

If they still have those account creds and first names, y’all reckon VKontacte has our old messages? :X

Oh well, have great memories, pouring one out for ICQ tonight.

Check out Dithertron, it’s got Apple ][ (and >30 other platforms): https://8bitworkshop.com/dithertron/

It’s not just baby powder. It was in Grandma’s Coty powder puff and is in your little niece’s eyeshadow from Claire’s (https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-recalls-alerts/fda-a...).

As declaredapple said: talc and asbestos grow together in many mines.

So it’s difficult to say that any talc is safe without testing or knowing provenance.

It’s disappointing (but not surprising) to see your comment downvoted. And all the diminishing comments.

Yes, cigarettes are dangerous, but those I’ve known that were exposed to asbestos and died (horribly) from it never smoked.

There are entire communities in the US that used asbestos in sidewalks and playgrounds.

Companies like Johns Manville dumped it by the truckloads onto playgrounds. People spread it over sidewalks and driveways and drive-in theater parking lots, sprayed water to harden it. That stuff was the definition of frangible. Kids played in it when it was dumped, played on it when it hardened. People reminisce about the powder, falling like snow, from the factories, and wiping it from their cars.

In the 90s, EPA officials showed up in hazmat suits, ripping up sidewalks and driveways and basketball courts. The company responsible created a fund for victims, went bankrupt, and now is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway .

“Lung cancer” shows up prominently in the obituaries in those towns many years later. And the billboards in those areas are dominated by meso ambulance chasers (it’s good money for the lawyers and the victims’ families can be strung along, many reports of “penny checks”).

It’s an environmental disaster we should learn from and not repeat, but I don’t have a lot of hope reading this thread.

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/CurSites/cadminrecord.cfm?...

I live in Florida, where these subscription-only car washes proliferate like kudzu; they’ve crowded out the good old gas station stalwarts that you might or might not get stuck in for several years now.

And the cause for their spread has been widely and publicly known for years: somebody found out that these things print cash. You own the land, you pay for one or two employees on-site max. Once PE woke up to the “strategy,” it was game on.

PE gets excited and overdoes it, wealth extraction hearkens enshittification, corner car washes are the new dollar store.

So I almost didn’t read past the subtitle, what’s actually new here? Oh:

“The omnipresence of the car wash in American life may be underappreciated: There are twice as many car wash outlets as McDonald’s and Starbucks locations combined.”

That’s almost unbelievable. Twice as many as McDonalds+Starbucks!

(Another concern: Who’s on the hook for all the PFAS cleanups when the scheme goes bust? Because you know it won’t be PE.)

This is awesome! Have really been thinking about this a lot lately, and my SES->Google Workspace solution works, but isn't viable if we ever left Google Workspace. I might set one up because abdullahkahlids' statement is compelling and correct: "If enough people do it, then over time it will become easier for more people to host their own email." (Plenty folks did this in the heady 90s...)

A few questions:

- I see that it seems to require Ubuntu, assuming this would work on Debian as well without too many needed tweaks? And are there plans to support CentOS? Ubuntu is my daily driver as a desktop OS, but I rarely use it for server apps due to all the "extra stuff" installed and the network stack is slower out-of-the-box than CentOS and I am usually too lazy to do anything about that other than put my server stuff on CentOS.

- Is more documentation available (especially a hardening guide)? For example, I see that Munin's installed (huge fan of Munin, but I'd want to firewall it off for sure), Roundcube used as the front-end management, there are variables you'd want to configure (like support email), I'd probably want to not have sieve open to the world, etc. Basically, I'd love to see a concise list of services and open ports at minimum, so I could figure out what to omit from installation and what to firewall off.

I've been using it for over six years now, I'm always worried it'll stop working...but besides having to bump my node.js version a few times, so far so good, knock on wood.

When I requested to escape the sandbox, my request was granted in nine hours...admittedly, this was six years ago, but it looks like the process is the same (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/request-production...).

I had not heard that man’s name in several years—and was happier for it. Larry Summers making decisions for OpenAI doesn’t bode well at all.

A few years ago, my parents were downsizing and I wanted to find a respectful home for some of the amazing stuff he had in the garage, so we donated to the Vintage Computer Foundation: https://vcfed.org/artifact-donations/.

They don't take everything, but it felt better to give this to them than to have folks who didn't know these systems' import taking them to the dump.

Also highly recommend attending Vintage Computer Festival events if you get the chance.

* A script that periodically screenscraped booked-up campsite reservation sites for cancellations during dates I wanted and sent me text messages (thanks, Twilio!). We got to stay at a bunch of amazing places at the last minute this way. We’re currently grounded, but I recently ran it again for my parents and was shocked to find it still worked!

* An Alexa app that provides a search interface to Old Time Radio shows on archive.org and saves your place (this was technically for my mother-in-law, the proof-of-concept with arcade sounds for my spouse). We all ended up using it a ton, though, it was kind of magical (the random function was really fun). I also set up an Alexa app to read me recent CVEs, but it’s more of a goofy parlor trick than useful. ;)

* A Rube Goldbergian bunch of terrible scripts that I can feed PDFs to, OCR, poorly-translate (using the expected engines or my own diymodel) and generate epubs from. And a bunch of scripts that convert Markdown to LaTeX and epub for personal book publishing projects.

Thanks for asking this question, it’s so neat to see everyone’s responses! I might ping my spouse on this post, too, who’s developed a crazy amount of personal projects that combine software and hardware to fixup our/our families’ lives.

The current chatbots are kind of like a calculator for language—they’re not going to do all your work for you, but they’ll definitely speed and streamline the process.

That's one thing I really like about subscribing for services and news through Amazon or Apple, it's so much easier to cancel or pause the subscription when I want and I've never had a gigantic price hike without warning (looking at you, McClatchy...).

Yes, oh my goodness. And it's not just software--I've been feeling this pretty acutely while holiday shopping. Have lost way too much time funneled and sidetracked onto subscription-only "box" sites.

And I just got dark-pattern-suckered into a nakedwines.com subscription...

More like, move slow and jump titles. When they finally did send registration paperwork to our DMV, the state had it turned around in two days. Pretty quick!

I went through this, it was a total battle to get them to legally register our car and I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone.

I’m really surprised to have had to have scrolled down this far to see their registration hijinks mentioned…

This argument is almost completely specific to conputer-aided art, but has some applications to our current situation.

Thank you for posting this, we need more discourse about AI’s involvement in (or overtaking of) human-created art.

(Personally, I feel blessed to be able to send a weird post to a locally-running server and get a useful image back…but I also feel guilty about it undercutting skilled artisans.)

Hrm, I really goofed by linking the `clock_divider` Verilog file and not the Atari Tank clone, which is way more fun (for some of us!):

https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.0/?file=tank.v&platform=veril...

It’s linked at the bottom, the next release:

http://8bitworkshop.com/docs/posts/2021/8bitworkshop-release...

IDE: https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.0/?file=clock_divider.v&platf...

:D

Yeah. Random data point: One of my most favorite SRE interviews ever (serious fun!) involved hands-on troubleshooting that eventually required gdb.

It may be that some of us didn’t know there was an extension that did this in vscode! ;) I definitely wasn’t aware of it until your comment.

Are you using LaTeX-Workshop?