I’m reminded of this video about how changes to the construction industry starting in the '50s resulted in the loss of ornamentation in architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4

It’s an interesting piece of tech ephemera, but devils advocate here, I’m not sure that I agree with the implication that this is a bad thing. The UI works. It gives you all the options you need with no major downsides or pain points. In this case, I think there’s something to be said for: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I got 8 in the span of about five hours today. Absolutely insane.

Yep, I got a series of those recently claiming that I had unpaid paid tolls. Each messagr came through as a group text with two or three random numbers, which were immediately removed from the group after the text arrived. I’ve been wondering why they started doing this. I assume they’re trying to exploit some kind of loophole in the carriers spam filtering.

Ceci n’est pas une rock

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I’m just gonna leave this right here: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smart-rotary-knob-w-1-28-round-touch-screen

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

After explaining the destructive force of a single raindrop over a kilometer in diameter:

Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme

Poetry. True poetry.

I second weawow. It’s got everything I want in a weather app: clean UI, customizable homescreen widget, and you can pick which provider it uses for the weather data.

Nice 'course there’s an Emacs command for that.

You might be interested in the pop-sci book Soonish: ten emerging technologies that’ll improve and/or ruin everything. I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve read the authors’ other book about space colonization, and it was excellent so I would expect this one to be as well.

I mean, this is definitely going to be a disaster but I think the title and article here are a little misleading. The author implies that Warner Brothers is spearheading (and paying for) this venture, but I just read through the buzzword salad of a press release and it barely mentions them. The project is driven by an independent company that licensed the ready player one IP from WB. The whole thing very carefully avoids any details about money changing hands, but my guess is either that WB is getting paid, or they’ve negotiated a cut of any theoretical future profits. Of course, the chances of there ever being profits are slim to none, but I’d say at worst they’re net $0 on the deal, and at best they actually made some money by getting paid up front. They might suffer some reputation damage if it becomes a real catastrophe, but as the author of the article mentioned they are billions in debt, so its probably a risk they’re happy to take.

Relevant XKCD