tambeb

Google and every one of its apps and services sucks now except for Fi, which has been life changing for me with regards to spam.

There's a setting that only allows calls and texts from your own contacts, period. (Though anyone you've texted or called recently is allowed for a month.) Prior to enabling this I had all the usual stuff like Call Screening and even though it caught most spam I still was annoyed at seeing the silent notification that meant is was in the middle of getting a call, and honestly even the few junk calls that made it through just irritated me to no end.

Gift link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/10/giant-african-sn...

You think Microsoft does a joint venture with them and it gets named MSAnthropic à la MSNBC?

The performance improvement can actually be pretty significant, depending on the exact setup of course. In my case I delidded 3 Intel CPUs a few years back (i9-9900k and similar vintages) and replaced the thermal paste under the lid with liquid metal (from Thermal Grizzly) and also used liquid metal between the outside of the lid and either a water cooler block or a heatsink and fan. I forget the exact figures but I wanna say idle and even maximum load temps were around 20 degrees cooler... and all 3 were max overclocked to 5GHz. In fact I still use all three as network storage servers now.

Yes, nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness.

At the same time I can say with 100% certainty that LLMs (or any current "AI") is in any way, shape, or form, conscious. Not even close. A decade or two ago it was the Internet that was a possible emerging consciousness.

> According to him, the agent operated largely autonomously, with only minimal guidance

"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.

I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy confirmation letter in the mail.)

Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show unused categories' button.

Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.

I also like this solar system model from NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/learning-resources/how-big-is-the-s....

They compare it to a US football field.

"On this scale, the Sun, by far the largest thing in our solar system, is only a ball about two-thirds of an inch (17 millimeters) in diameter sitting on the goal line — that's about the width of a U.S. dime coin. ...

The inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are about the size of grains of sand on a football field scale. They would be dwarfed by a typical flea, which is about 3 millimeters long.

Closest to the goal line is Mercury, just under a yard from the end zone (.8 yards to be specific). ... At this scale, Mercury's diameter would be scarcely as large as the point of a needle.

Venus is next. It is 1.4 yards from the end zone. ...

On to Earth, sitting pretty on the 2-yard line. ...

Mars is on the three-yard line of our imaginary football field. ...

Jupiter remains pretty close to our end zone on the 10.5-yard line. ...

Saturn is on the field at 19 yards from the goal line. ...

Uranus ... is about 38 yards from our end zone.

Neptune is where things start to get way out. It is 60 yards from our solar goal line on the imaginary football field. ...

Tiny Pluto is much closer to the opposing team's end zone. It's about 79 yards out from the Sun ...

On this scale, our little friend Voyager 1 has left the game and is well out in the stadium parking lot or beyond."

Also for focusing a digital camera for astrophotography.

Very common in the Middle East too.

So far I've found 88 combos involving the poop emoji.

Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wCNxKjzi61rCJUsU8

For any Arrested Development fans out there, a friend sent me this link related to the iceberg today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/arresteddevelopment/comments/13309l...

I've been using VirtualHere since 2015, with multiple paid licenses.

It's a great tool with infinite use cases. I'm glad that it's a successful business for you!

I haven't been with Wells Fargo for a few years now, but I did get a check for about $200 in the mail the other day due to some fees that had been processed in an "unintended manner" apparently.

Microsoft's Edge on Windows lets you annotate and rotate PDFs.

My Raspberry "Shake & Boom" has an infrasound sensor.

https://shop.raspberryshake.org/product/turnkey-iot-atmosphe...

At least the Opinion Rewards app isn't going away.

I've made $177 over the years. Not a fortune but it paid for a bunch of app buys and movie rentals.

Sean Carroll I listen to as a podcast, and Quanta I read. :)

In no particular order:

The Royal Institution (https://youtube.com/c/TheRoyalInstitution)

Team Coco (https://youtube.com/c/TeamCoco)

World Science Festival (https://youtube.com/c/WorldScienceFestival)

Sabine Hossenfelder (https://youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder)

3Blue1Brown (https://youtube.com/c/3blue1brown)

PBS Space Time (https://youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime)

Tuesdays with Stories! (https://youtube.com/c/TuesdayswithStories)

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (https://youtube.com/user/PIOutreach)

Science & Cocktails (https://youtube.com/c/ScienceCocktails)

Android, since Pie, supports DNS over TLS, and I personally use it for ad blocking.

Haven't played with this one yet, but I have messed around with the BirdNET app from Cornell. It's very accurate as long as the neighbors don't have their landscapers mowing the lawn and using leaf blowers right next door.

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

I was a Patreon supporter for about 2 years, at the 2nd biggest pledge level of $250/month. I only stopped because of my own, um, cash flow issues... :)

I'm saying this not to show off or signal my virtue. I'm saying it to let everyone know it's a fantastic channel that is well worth your time and/or support. They have never ventured into click-bait land, nor do I think they ever will.

If you like science, and physics specifically, give 'em a look.

Bought this little guy[1] back in 2015 to get around DRM and rip, with the exact same philosophy as you. I'm happy to buy, but if I buy it I'm gonna own it forever, regardless of account changes or ["AI" based auto-]shutdowns.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089DSLMY/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_B3R9...

One can develop* what serves as the edifice[1] of a $1B hedge fund that handles signals, orders, trades, positions, and p&l, among other things, using a system not unlike this one.[2]

[1] Merriam Webster definition of edifice: a large abstract structure

[2] Source: Me

* Or inherit and maintain

My question exactly. In another comment here I asked for some examples for the claim that some .ru domains were being black holed.

Could you give a couple of examples of the black holing you've seen?

I've seen Sabine Hossenfelder do a few NordVPN ads in her videos and I don't think she's an idiot.

To be clear though, this isn't a judgement about VPNs or me saying I trust her and so I'll buy that VPN. It's more that as long as the product isn't something too crazy, most content producers will probably happily take the ad money because they need to eat.

While on the topic of NordVPN... a few months ago I was looking to get a little bit of podcast marketing going for my project and spoke to the person responsible for ads on a comedian podcast I like. It's one that is pretty small and would've been affordable for a small operation like mine, but it turned out that NordVPN was already in negotiations to buy out the next year of ads and that was that.

For anyone that does challenge-response with a Yubikey like I do, I'd suggest Keepass2Android Password Safe[1] if you're on Android. I've been using it for years and it's well maintained in terms of updates and features, and it supports the KeePassXC challenge-response method. Edited to add: And it's open source[2].

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...

[2] https://github.com/PhilippC/keepass2android