DynamoSunshirt's recent activity

  1. Comment on Current state of, and future of, the smart glasses industry in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
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    I've often dreamed of a smart glasses device that would do two things, and two things only: ad blocking, just replacing every billboard with black is fine IMO but eventually it would be great to...

    I've often dreamed of a smart glasses device that would do two things, and two things only:

    • ad blocking, just replacing every billboard with black is fine IMO but eventually it would be great to replace it with a convincing continuation of the world

    • captions, especially in crowded or loud places like bars and parties

    Translation would be nice as well, but is much less of a daily driver use case.

    I couldn't care less about any other functionality. In fact, if it has even a basic impact on battery life, I don't want it. I would prefer battery life, or a lighter design. No internet connection, no bluetooth, and no wifi would be fine.

    2 votes
  2. Comment on Can you recommend tv shows with themes of grit, endurance, survival under hostile circumstances? in ~tv

    DynamoSunshirt
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    It probably requires some passing familiarity with the Stargate family of shows, but Stargate: Universe is one of my favorite (and largely unappreciated by the masses) shows in this vein. I still...

    It probably requires some passing familiarity with the Stargate family of shows, but Stargate: Universe is one of my favorite (and largely unappreciated by the masses) shows in this vein.

    I still harbor the slightest hope that they could pick it back up and answer the show's Big Questions, given the way they left it when they got cancelled. But the character arcs are satisfying overall even with the cancellation.

    1 vote
  3. Comment on What are some accidental life hacks you've stumbled into? in ~talk

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    That is one interpretation! And no worries, I had forgotten about that definition. IMO emails are small enough that I prefer to leave them all in my inbox basically forever; a year of email...

    That is one interpretation! And no worries, I had forgotten about that definition. IMO emails are small enough that I prefer to leave them all in my inbox basically forever; a year of email storage typically takes less space than a hundred photos. I make a backup of my inbox every couple of years, and it would be nice to automate that. But my inbox zero style doesn't require me to hide away all of the read emails. Just marking them read is fine by me :-)

    3 votes
  4. Comment on DeepSeek FAQ in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    I feel the same. Seems like we've moved the goalposts on AI in the last few years (what OpenAI etc are calling 'AI' now is not the scifi concept I had always imagined). Specifically, I grew up...

    I feel the same. Seems like we've moved the goalposts on AI in the last few years (what OpenAI etc are calling 'AI' now is not the scifi concept I had always imagined). Specifically, I grew up imagining AI as a general, humanlike intelligence capable of independent thought, reasoning, and some level of motivation. 'AI' chatbots in the industry today have no independence whatsoever, let alone true autonomy.

    And it's likely that we'll see them shift the AGI goalposts as well before long. All so they can make some timelines to brag about during quarterly reports.

    But hey, we already saw the same thing happen with self-driving cars. Companies love to brag about how many millions of (remote human-assisted) (mostly Bay Area and Phoenix) miles their 'self-driving cars' have driven. But IMO it's not a self-driving car until I can get in one at my driveway, take a nap for 6 hours, and wake up in NYC metro area (preferably a train station to get into the urban core, for sanity and speed's sake). Reasonable weather, construction, and lighting conditions -- essentially anything besides a blizzard or horrendous downpour -- shouldn't be an issue.

    1 vote
  5. Comment on What are some accidental life hacks you've stumbled into? in ~talk

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link
    Inbox zero: to keep my email organized, I use 'unread' to indicate TODO items. And I remove the 'unread' from every other piece of mail ASAP. Makes it very very easy to tell when there's something...

    Inbox zero: to keep my email organized, I use 'unread' to indicate TODO items. And I remove the 'unread' from every other piece of mail ASAP. Makes it very very easy to tell when there's something new to deal with. And if you're thinking that you get too much mail to implement this... for the love of god, hit 'unsubscribe' on all of your advertising spam. Then you can use email for communication again!

    If you have a long-running TODO item that you don't want to leave unread for too long, I tend to open it in a separate window (double click on the titlebar in macOS) or I document it in Obsidian, my personal wiki and notetaking software and then mark it read in my email.

    8 votes
  6. Comment on To those who have been trying out Kagi: what do you think of it? in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    My thoughts exactly. I tried the 100 free search trial last year, but it wasn't enough to convince me to pay. But now that I'm deep into a 3 month trial and I've gotten comfortable, customized,...

    My thoughts exactly. I tried the 100 free search trial last year, but it wasn't enough to convince me to pay. But now that I'm deep into a 3 month trial and I've gotten comfortable, customized, and filtered... my god there is no way I could go back to Google and the increasing levels of AI spam. DDG was fine, but I use search often enough for work (let alone for personal research) that it's worth it.

    If anyone from Kagi reads this, your 3 month trial was very much a success with me. I just needed to whet my appetite!

    13 votes
  7. Comment on We're bringing Pebble back! in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Still wear my Pebble Time Round to this day! It's treated me well for almost a DECADE!

    Still wear my Pebble Time Round to this day! It's treated me well for almost a DECADE!

    7 votes
  8. Comment on Moving to the other side of the Earth in ~life

    DynamoSunshirt
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    I've studied abroad back in college, and spent significant amounts of time for work living in a different country and time zone (5 hours difference). I've also moved 2 time zones away in the USA...

    I've studied abroad back in college, and spent significant amounts of time for work living in a different country and time zone (5 hours difference). I've also moved 2 time zones away in the USA to a city where I didn't know anyone for my partner's work. So not quite as dramatic as you're considering, not by a long shot. But hopefully I can help as a vague kind of mental state peer.

    My biggest question is: why do you want to make such a dramatic move?

    Consider the downsides, first: You'll be giving up easy contact, even by text and video calls, with friends and family. You won't be able to visit your favorite restaurants and parks and shops. Your life will include SIGNIFICANT amounts of travel, expenses, and faffery for any life events that friends and family have. Funerals, births, birthday parties, holiday parties, etc.

    Only once you've really deeply considered those downsides should you take a look at the upsides. When we moved across the USA, i enjoyed embracing the change of lifestyle. I started to bike and spend time outside in ways I never did before. I got TAN! We made friends like I'd never made before, except perhaps college. We went on adventures. We took a lot of really cool pictures and made some great memories. Our hobbies really took off.

    But then get back to the abstract reasons you're considering this move. Recently, I stopped considering an even more dramatic move for work. I was ultimately looking for a solution to global problems: walkability, car culture, lack of community, crime, etc. But as I've since learned, even when moving to another country, you'll never fully escape these systemic issues. The best you can do is trade them off for a different set of systemic issues that won't start to truly bother you during the "honeymoon phase". But you will eventually get annoyed with them, and you'll have to figure out a coping mechanism... unless you want to move again and artificially extend the "honeymoon phase".

    If you're really truly convinced that the grass is greener, consider a lengthy vacation of a couple of weeks or so to the place you're considering. Ideally at a crappy time of year. Try working remotely if you can, to really simulate your potential lifestyle. If you're still interested after a couple of weeks of 9-5 lifestyle and grocery shopping and weekend traveling and isolation from friends and family and known places, it's probably a good move.

    Regardless, if you're ready for an adventure, I say go for it. But don't think it'll make your life better. Just different. If you feel stuck in your life now and want a fresh start, it can't hurt. This sort of move certainly helped me grow out of a rut. Just make sure you get the company to pay for most (hopefully all) of it -- visas and international flights can really rack up the expenses fast, especially if you need to fly back and forth to get documents signed physically as part of the typical Kafkaesque government nightmare.

    32 votes
  9. Comment on United States: What personal (non-business) tax software/program do you use? in ~finance

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    I think my last few FreeTaxUSA returns have cost a total of maybe $20 each? If you're comfortable sharing, I'd love to know an order of magnitude for CPA costs. As I start investing more of my...

    I think my last few FreeTaxUSA returns have cost a total of maybe $20 each?

    If you're comfortable sharing, I'd love to know an order of magnitude for CPA costs. As I start investing more of my nest egg it's become increasingly attractive... but I'd rather not spend hundreds or thousands, of course. My taxes are quite basic at present.

    9 votes
  10. Comment on United States: What personal (non-business) tax software/program do you use? in ~finance

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Less upselling than Intuit's garbage. Faster. Easier. Cheaper. Less scummy feeling and confusing. And they aren't actively lobbying to keep the tax system in the USA as labyrinthine as possible....

    Less upselling than Intuit's garbage.

    Faster.

    Easier.

    Cheaper.

    Less scummy feeling and confusing.

    And they aren't actively lobbying to keep the tax system in the USA as labyrinthine as possible.

    That being said, I have heard that the IRS has its own free tax filing system that should be available to more people this year. I might check that out before I go back to FreeTaxUSA.

    16 votes
  11. Comment on US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel (Bluesky vs. Mastodon) in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Excellent point. I agree completely; this argument is fundamentally about choice. My grandma should be able to use Twitter. My weird uncle should be able to use X. My nephew should be able to use...

    Excellent point. I agree completely; this argument is fundamentally about choice. My grandma should be able to use Twitter. My weird uncle should be able to use X. My nephew should be able to use Bluesky. And I should be able to use Mastodon. But even more importantly, we should all be able to interact and follow and reply to each other through a common standard! Because they're all at the root level the same.damn.thing.

    That's why I use Mastodon. That's why I refuse to use X or Bluesky. Cory Doctorow articulates this well in some recent posts: if the product is entirely controlled by one company, particularly the app experience in thr age of smartphones, you're being held hostage and so is your data. We need interoperable standards so that when Musk buys Twitter and starts pushing his own political agenda we can keep the same identity and follows and followers. That's what Mastodon is all about; the federation isn't the main appeal, it's an implementation detail of the fact that ActivityPub is a standard that gives users freedom to read and write and recommend content however they wish. Exactly like you can do in the real world with a book or an article.

    Censorship and moderation is a distraction. If your community shards down to reasonable sizes and a manipulatable algorithm doesn't force-feed 'viral' content to the masses, local communities can self-moderate just fine. The problem comes from scale. Think of it this way: a small town doesn't need a standing police force that patrols the streets aggressively on your typical day. You just need s couple of officers around to respond to calls, anf maybe a tiny bit of proactive policing. But when a total solar eclipse happens and 100x the town's population in tourists shows up in a couple of hours, you damn well better have a bunch of cops to deal with the scaling factor of accidents, troublemakers, and confused tourists who mess up because they don't know the area.

    Ghost is starting to take this to an even more interesting level this year, trying to create a one-stop ActivityPub hub in a single (potentially self-hosted) site. That'll let you consume blog posts, microblog posts, image posts, and more (RSS as well, perhaps?) all in a single feed that you run yourself.

    RSS and Atom and XMPP and HTTP(S) are the fundamental building blocks of so much on the internet, including these hostage-taking ad-feeding radicalising Skinner boxes we call social media today. We really need a new standard to cover the higher level of abstraction built on top of the existing standards to implement social media. Because interacting with your friends and family online shouldn't (and for the health of society, can't) be middlemanned by a few corrupt billionaires for the sake of profit.

    3 votes
  12. Comment on The day Google killed the Pixel 4a in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Likewise. I keep considering going to dumbphone or pseudo-dumbphone route with something like the Titan Pocket or one of the e-ink phones, but security updates hold me back. Then, of course, I...

    Likewise. I keep considering going to dumbphone or pseudo-dumbphone route with something like the Titan Pocket or one of the e-ink phones, but security updates hold me back.

    Then, of course, I look at the phone store in the Google Fi store and I realise it's actually cheaper to buy a brand new Google Pixel 9 with $800 of subsidies than just buy the $300 simple phone I want. And then I get decision paralysis and kick my 4a down the road another few months.

    1 vote
  13. Comment on The day Google killed the Pixel 4a in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    See the update on the linked post, but unfortunately it looks like the update can still come through with this setup! You can at least hide the OS update notification in Google Play Services...

    See the update on the linked post, but unfortunately it looks like the update can still come through with this setup! You can at least hide the OS update notification in Google Play Services notification settings, if your parents don't see (and click on) the notification, it shouldn't install even if it does update.

    You can also block the update via nextDNS or pi hole DNS blocking (or potentially in your parents router?) but unless you use an always-on VPN it could still sneak through the cellular network. Better to hide OS update notifications to keep it from ever installing. And while you're at it you can disable some other spammy Google notifications.

  14. Comment on The day Google killed the Pixel 4a in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    To be fair, they met the (ludicrously minimal) software support commitment they made for the Pixels 1-5a. They actually decided to give the Pixels 6(a) (Pro) an extra coupl of years of security...

    To be fair, they met the (ludicrously minimal) software support commitment they made for the Pixels 1-5a. They actually decided to give the Pixels 6(a) (Pro) an extra coupl of years of security updates over the original commitment, presumably because they were already committed to supporting the 7(a) (Pro) for that time period and the hardware was mostly the same.

    I do hear you on Apple, though. I got an original SE back in 2016 and used it for 7 years until early 2023. And it still gets some minimal security updates. Unfortunately apps dropped the supported version of iOS in 2023, and even before then stopped testing on the 4" screen size. But I still think that was a good support period.

    At least Samsung, Google, and Fairphone are pushing support out to 5-7 years of security (sometimes OS) updates now. And the EU is forcing 5 years for security updates legally for phones released after June 2025 in the EU, I believe. I hope brands like Sony and OnePlus get their act together with support periods and update timeliness instead of forcing consumers to test them legally, but that EU protection is IMO exactly what governments should be doing to help the little people.

    4 votes
  15. Comment on Recommend your social/softer science fiction books in ~books

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    And I just found out today that an Apple TV+ show has been in the works for a couple of years, and will likely debut this year or next!

    And I just found out today that an Apple TV+ show has been in the works for a couple of years, and will likely debut this year or next!

    1 vote
  16. Comment on Recommend your social/softer science fiction books in ~books

    DynamoSunshirt
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    I found Murderbot Diaries very similar to Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. Well worth your time, if you haven't read it yet. And the books are all short and digestible, much like Chambers' work.

    I found Murderbot Diaries very similar to Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. Well worth your time, if you haven't read it yet. And the books are all short and digestible, much like Chambers' work.

    7 votes
  17. Comment on The trouble with Elon Musk in ~tech

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    I have seen quite a few people dramatically transform into monsters as they grow increasingly addicted to big social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, mostly). I can only guess that it's a...

    I have seen quite a few people dramatically transform into monsters as they grow increasingly addicted to big social media (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, mostly). I can only guess that it's a result of algorithmic bubbles, having never gone through the same experience.

    18 votes
  18. Comment on After almost a century, the bike valve is finally getting an update in ~engineering

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Aha, thanks for clearing that up. I've somehow wound up in the Presta world for some time now, and Schraders have failed me a couple of times in annoying ways, so I've probably judged them...

    Aha, thanks for clearing that up. I've somehow wound up in the Presta world for some time now, and Schraders have failed me a couple of times in annoying ways, so I've probably judged them unfairly. Good to know that both have removable cores!

    1 vote
  19. Comment on After almost a century, the bike valve is finally getting an update in ~engineering

    DynamoSunshirt
    Link Parent
    Presta is pretty popular among the more expensive side of bikes. IIRC you essentially need to use Presta to go tubeless because you can remove Presta cores -- I've never seen a Schrader valve with...

    Presta is pretty popular among the more expensive side of bikes. IIRC you essentially need to use Presta to go tubeless because you can remove Presta cores -- I've never seen a Schrader valve with a removable core, so it would be really hard to 'top off' your sealant with that kind of valve.

    In my personal experience, Presta seems to hold air better than Schrader. But it doesn't matter that much.

    Prestas DID confuse me an awful lot when I first got them, though! Unlike Schraders (which I grew up with), you need to twist the valve into the open position (though it won't leak without pressure) before you attach the pump. Otherwise it's impossible to add air!

    FWIW an awful lot of modern pumps support both Presta and Schrader, usually with a switch on the pump head. My setup certainly works for both, thougbh I've only ever used the Presta side to help anyone out!

    3 votes
  20. Comment on After almost a century, the bike valve is finally getting an update in ~engineering

    DynamoSunshirt
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    I eagerly await running into someone with these valves on a ride with a flat tire... and then having to explain to them that Big Bike made a new valve standard and my 10 year old pump won't help...

    I eagerly await running into someone with these valves on a ride with a flat tire... and then having to explain to them that Big Bike made a new valve standard and my 10 year old pump won't help them.

    Presta valves work amazingly. I really do not understand the argument for replacing them. The bike industry really loves reinventing new standards that create more problems than they solve.

    12 votes