Lighting system as a wake up tool.

Have now been using a light or lighting system as a morning wake up for over 15 years. It’s life changing.

Lights start off dim and red/orange, and brighten very slowly to warm white. Works every time.

I wake up without the jolt of an alarm at home.

In fact - automated lighting in general - just so good.

Recently decided to try Linux for gaming. It wasn’t without a hitch or two, but largely fine. A number of games I play don’t even need an emulation tool like Proton.

The only reason windows was lying around was for gaming.

Looks like it’ll only get used for flight simulation.

For those of us who work in (or love) tech - we (myself included) grossly overestimate how much the general public cares about, or cares to be informed about, this stuff. Heck, even people in tech who know better.

I wish it wasn’t the case but look how long and hard Microsoft moved on Internet Explorer and ActiveX back in the early days of the web.

Google and Chrome is just another bit of history repeating.

As an aside, I’ve been using Zen for about a week and it’s been wonderful. Easy transition from Firefox because it largely is Firefox, so all my containers, extensions, and settings carried over. Zen’s workspaces provide exactly the promise I’d hoped “tab groups” brought with Safari (but never worked right). I just wish there was an equivalent to the Hush plug-in on Safari (even after a year of full-timing FF, consent-o-matic is quite poor).

The mastodon version of a post or, sadly, tweet.

It’s, uh, not the best name.

But maybe, just maybe, it more appropriately attributes correct value to a social media thing. ;)

Agreed. Companies should be required by law to release source code, build guides, documentation and service architecture for services or apps that are required by hardware they sold.

While there are bigger fish to fry at the moment, socially speaking, the problem is only going to get worse if legislators don’t step in.

Pros:

• you run a home lab

Cons:

• you run a home lab

As someone who’s experienced the same thing, some of the messages I received were shockingly well written.

The fake “find my” site they tried to use to convince me to log into my iCloud account was wildly convincing, if not for the index.php at the end of the URL - something Apple would never configure for service endpoints.

They continued to try - but never threatening. However I never engaged and eventually they just stopped trying.

You’re conferring a level of agency where none exists.

It appears to “understand.” It appears to be “knowledgeable. “

But LLMs do neither of those things.

Take this note from an OpenAI dev:

It’s that these models have leveraged so much data they’ve been able to map out relationships between words (or images) in way as to be able to generate what seem like new versions of those things.

I grant you that an LLM has more base level knowledge than any one human, but again this is thanks to terrifyingly large dataset and a design that means it can access this data reasonably reliably.

But it is still a prediction model. It just has more context, better design and (most importantly) data to make predictions at a level never before seen.

If you’ve ever had a chance to play with a model at level where you can control some of its basic parameters it offers a glimpse into just how much of a prediction machine it can be.

My favourite game for a while was to give midjourney a wildly vague prompt but crank the chaos up to 100 (literally the chaos flag at the highest level) to see what kind of wild connections exist but are being filtered out during “normal” use.

The same with the GPT-3.5 API in the “early days” - you could return multiple versions of the response and see the sausage being made to a very small degree.

It doesn’t take away from the sense of magic using these tools. It just helps frame what’s going on under the hood.

I look forward to the day we can use our “dead” car battery as the battery backup for our home.

64kWh * 0.8 is 51kWh.

Even 40kWh would be a great battery paired to a solar system.

The used car batteries could have great second lives.

As a non-American it seems they want a very particular reading of certain parts of the US Constitution.

Much like how the same people pick and choose the parts of Christianity that serve them and ignore the parts that don’t.

One nation, under God.*

*Terms and conditions apply.