flax · HackerLangs

I don't particularly care about Android Auto (I generally prefer standard bluetooth for audio, and directly setting the phone up for navigation), but if a manufacturer supports CarPlay and not Android Auto, they can get lost. I hate how Apple stuff is an assumed default.

flax

10 days agodiscuss

Gee, I sure hope pump 6 never fails.

flax

22 days agodiscuss

Right. Exactly. I'd be a fool to refuse that first free hit of heroin.

flax

23 days agodiscuss

I'm probably in the minority, but I do not want a "connection" with a business. I want transactional interactions that actually work.

That is something that AI is not giving us today. By design. Companies are not switching to AI customer service because it's better or cheaper for the same service. They are choosing to replace customer service with AI chat bots that simulate the customer service experience without actually providing the service part.

flax

3 months agodiscuss

Yes, but the Awful registration fee is more like a speedbump to make banned behavior at least a little expensive to the offending users. Most of the revenue comes from completely optional aesthetic purchases: avatars, avatars _for others_, smilies, etc. I suspect it's a whale based economy.

flax

5 months agodiscuss

I really like the idea. But my one attempt was disappointing. "playful energetic urban fantasy at night" ended up set to "very slow" by default.

I would really like to be able to run this on my phone. Use my Brilliant smart glasses to periodically take a picture, ask a model to describe the mood/setting, and get an ambient stream to match the mood.

flax

5 months agodiscuss

That appears to be more than a centimeter thick, and not particularly flexible. It's more like ski goggles than a sleep mask.

So yeah, a product exists that claims to be a sleep mask with these features. Maybe someone could even sleep while wearing that thing, as long as they sleep on their back and don't move around too much. I remain skeptical that it actually does the things it claims and has the battery life it claims. This is kickstarter after all. Regardless, this would qualify as the device in question for the article. Or at least inspiration for it.

Without evidence such as wireshark logs, programs, protocol documentation, I'm not convinced that any of this actually _happened_.

flax

5 months agodiscuss

This smells like bullshit to me, although I am admittedly not experienced with Claude.

I find it difficult to believe that a sleep mask exists with the features listed: "EEG brain monitoring, electrical muscle stimulation around the eyes, vibration, heating, audio." while also being something you can strap to your face and comfortably sleep in, with battery capacity sufficient for several hours of sleep.

I also wonder how Claude probed bluetooth. Does Claude have access to bluetooth interface? Why? Perhaps it wrote a secondary program then ran that, but the article describes it as Claude probing directly.

I'm also skeptical of Claude's ability to make accurate reverse-engineered bluetooth protocol. This is at least a little more of an LLM-appropriate task, but I suspect that there was a lot of chaff also produced that the article writer separated from the wheat.

If any of this happened at all. No hardware mentioned, no company, no actual protocol description published, no library provided.

It makes a nice vague futuristic cyperpunk story, but there's no meat on those bones.

flax

6 months agodiscuss

This "game" sounds horrible. It seems designed to maximize anxiety and conflict, and extract kompromat. What is the upside supposed to be?

flax

6 months agodiscuss

I've been mostly happy with Action launcher. It has the few features I really liked from Nova that are missing from pixel launcher: I can make my home screens scroll in a circular/infinite manner, I can remove the search bar and the google news feed or whatever they call the left page, I can set more than one page in the dock.

Unfortunately, the app list page isn't quite as configurable. There are folders rather than tabs, and there's an extra click necessary to search by app name. Overall, it does the job.

flax

6 months agodiscuss

Oh good. Now the documentation will be written by The Machine That Lies to You. Wonderful. What could possibly go wrong?

flax

6 months agodiscuss

Could you explain why? I have been interested, in theory, in Kotlin Multiplatform. But I'm already very comfortable in Dart and Flutter. I have decades of experience with Java, Javascript, and quite a few years with Typescript. Kotlin feels like a different kind of language, one I find grating. I think this is primarily aesthetic, but it's still enough to make getting over the initial hump annoying. As petty as it is, I think the lack of statement-terminating semicolons is a major reason I do not like it. I would welcome a factual list of things that make the KM experience better for you.

flax

7 months agodiscuss

Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.

flax

7 months agodiscuss

Every single YouTube video does this right now. They are all incredibly slow and take forever to get to the point (if there even is one).

I have heard this is because there's a magic duration number for monetization.

flax

9 months agodiscuss

Neither "wanting to be liked" or "wanting to avoid being disliked" rings true to me, at least as applied to my own social anxiety. I want to avoid being thought of at all. The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked. Possibly more so. Every relationship with another person, positive or negative, is another cognitive burden to maintain. I would vastly prefer most of my interactions to just remain at the default/stranger level where I can re-use the same anticipatory model for most people I deal with.

Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.

I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her. Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.

I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.

flax

10 months agodiscuss

I looked at several yesterday. I landed on Action Launcher because it has a scrollable dock and infinite scrolling homepages. It lacks tabs in the app drawer, but it does let you create folders there.

Hyperion seemed to have all necessary features, but the UI was unintuitive and the documentation non-existent.

I also liked Lynx, but that would be a major change for me.

flax

10 months agodiscuss

I don't watch Youtube, but my young kid loves to watch screaming Minecraft morons pretend to scare themselves. I've been growing increasingly concerned by the ads he's incidentally seeing and was just yesterday looking at giving in and subscribing to a premium. There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane. Instead, I installed revanced on his tablet. For free.

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