Both sw and hw.

SW is usually hard to use, offering no meaningful settings or making them hard to get to with meaningful QoL features simply absent. Search in any kind of mainstream product is an absolutely excellent example.

If someone does need something other than the default workflow or encounters any error then that is too bad for them.

For a lot of hw products there is little to no meaningful choice alongside absent repair options. The best example is probably smartphones which are excessively thin bricks with a charging port, camera bump, sealed in battery and hard to impossible to change os.

Features decreasing longevity and contributing to waste(plug in for global warming) are simply accepted and even welcomed by end users for bizzare reasons.

For now there are still workarounds depending on how much effort you want to expend with that effort sometimes being truly excessive.

A few months ago, my credit card number was used in a few unauthorized transactions. The charges were reversed, and I got a new card, so overall, no big deal. But I am curious as to how the thief actually got their hands on my information.

Are there any lookup tools for leaked credit cards, similar to Have I Been Pwned, that might tell me how my credit card number was exposed? Since my card has already been cancelled, I don't even mind typing the number into a somewhat sketchy site.

This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

• Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
• Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
• Planting the seeds in the right place
• Watering the plants regularly
• Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
• Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
• Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
• Washing and cooking it

It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.

Looking at the submission rules for Clarkesworld Magazine, I found the following:

Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT

We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.

EDIT: I assume that Clarkesworld means a popular, non-technical understanding of AI meaning post-chatGPT LLMs specifically and not a broader definition of AI that is more academic or pertinent the computer science field.

I imagine that other magazines and website have similar rules. As someone who does not write directly in English, that is concerning. I have never translated without assistance in my life. In the past I used both Google Translate and Google Translator Toolkit (which no longer exist).

Of course, no machine translation is perfect, that was only a first pass that I would change, adapt and fix extensively and intensely. In the past I have used the built-in translation feature from Google Docs. However, now that Gemini is integrated in Google Docs, I suspected that it uses AI instead for translation. So I asked Gemini, and it said that it does. I am not sure if Gemini is correct, but, if it doesn't use AI now it probably will in the future.

That poses a problem for me, since, in the event that I wish to submit a story to English speaking magazines or websites, I will have to find a tool that is guaranteed to be dumb. I am sure they exist, but for how long? Will I be forced to translate my stories like a cave men? Is anyone concerned with keeping non-AI translation tools available, relevant, and updated? How can I even be sure that a translation tool does not use AI?

I often like to go on the App Store or GitHub and look for new and interesting apps, but very rarely I find really good ones. So I turn to you - what niche apps are you using, why are they niche, why do you use them specifically and would you recommend them?

Here's my Top 3:

Novel writing: I use a tiny app called uFocus for all my Markdown writing. It's lightweight, the developer is a real cool guy and it's entirely free. It has barely any features, and I like that about it. I don't use Word because it's too distracting and complicated, I used to use iA Writer but it's really not justified the updates it's gotten and is straying away from Markdown.

Email: I use MailMate, which is an insanely complicated and user-hostile email client that only works with IMAP/SMTP and does NOT support Gmail or Exchange, but is incredibly powerful at email management and search if you learn how to think like it does. It looks like it hasn't been updated since Mac OS 8, but it's getting regular updates and is very charming in its aesthetic.

Programming: I don't do much, barely some web design, but I like Zed as my editor of choice. It's not very popular, doesn't have a huge user base and barely any extensions compared to a juggernaut like Code or Cursor, but does what it does well and isn't written in Electron. It's also very performant.

I really like this instructional video. I even downloaded a copy. The copy I downloaded is as blurry as the copy on YouTube.

Is it possible to possible to sharpen my copy of that video?

If it is possible, can it be done with freely available software on Linux?

Thanks either way.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently getting close to releasing a piece of software and I think that engaging users and collecting their feedback to inform the development of future features is valuable. So, I am currently evaluating different specialized solutions to see which one is best.

Does anybody have a preference for a particular tool, or otherwise know which tools are the best in terms of functionality etc.?

Thanks in advance for your input!

I'll go back to comparing options and I'll check back in here later on. Have a nice one.

Edit: To clarify, I am looking for an end user-facing tool for a (currently closed-source) SaaS (I may eventually open-source it, but I'm a bit on the fence-I would have to weigh the pros and cons).

I have a relative whose 8 year old has shown a keen interest in coding. He even takes books out of the library about coding even though he's never done it and I dont think he understands most of what he's reading. Seems like a little Bill Gates just dying to get started.

I used to teach LOGO to kids back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and I looked at some recent versions. Its good, and the logic is all there, but the end results are fairly mundane for a kid who's already experienced amazing video games. Then I stumbled across Scratch, a much more visual programming tool and it seems to fit what we need. Scratch allows kids to make animations, simple games, even do motion detection, music all with sprites that they can manipulate using drag and drop coding blocks. Lots of online video tutorials that he can follow himself too. https://scratch.mit.edu/

Before I dive headlong into Scratch, just wondering if there are other even better tools for teaching coding to kids? Or what your experience might be with them?