DamnInteresting

> How is there any legitimate justification for designing it that way?

Without such an internal battery, automotive thieves could instantly mask the car's location by merely pulling the fuse or disconnecting the main battery. I imagine that is their justification (not that I agree with it).

I wrote an article about this exact technology almost 20 years ago, back in 2006[1]. Nifty to see the product actually reaching the market.

[1]https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/no-more-cavities/

My five year old watches some YouTube under supervision, and the algorithm has been recommending a new variety of "quiz" videos that are partially or entirely AI generated. It's usually around a theme, such as Super Mario Brothers, and it asks open-ended questions like "Would you marry him?" without revealing the "him" until after a countdown. Then it shows an obviously AI-generated image of a character such as Bowser.

Another variation asks the viewer things like "which car would you pick?", with options to select the "black", "white", "rainbow", or "gold" gift box, then after a countdown shows a grid of AI generated images corresponding to the colors, where one color seems to be the intended "correct" answer, but it is left to the viewer to decide.

These videos are dumb and lazy, and I'll bet they'll become a lot more common soon.

The tech job market is indeed brutal right now. Until recently I was in the same boat as you, applying for lots of jobs and hearing nothing back. For context, I am an early graybeard, I've been coding since the late 1990s. Until ~2020 I never had trouble finding a job--then it suddenly went from falling off a log to nigh impossible.

Rather than repeat some of the advice already given, I suggest you cultivate at least one uncommon niche skill. Doing so adds keywords to your resume that don't appear on all of the others, and demonstrates the ability and willingness to learn new things. It's also possible that there is some employer out there who really needs work in that niche, and they're struggling to find matching applicants.

One potential niche is legacy code. I landed my current position because I know Perl, and this employer has a lot of legacy code. I also found some traction with ColdFusion. If you can't stomach learning old-timey stuff like that, maybe learn how to build browser extensions, or Wordpress plugins. Those aren't super rare skills, but they're not as common these days as React or Angular. You don't have to master anything, just offer a running start.

Also: Don't be afraid to be slightly silly on your resume. The people who have to review those things see a lot of very boring stuff, and something with a little personality can stand out.

Good luck.

Anecdotally, I established a website in 2005 featuring long-form nonfiction, and it gained a respectable following. After years of posting several new articles per month, I started feeling the burnout, so I took a break, and then slowed my publication rate to one new post every few months. I soon became the recipient of a deluge of nasty emails from people who were furious that I had reduced the amount of free content I provided. This small, vocal subset of readers obviously enjoyed my work, otherwise they would be indifferent to a reduction in output, yet they were emailing me imploring me to kill myself because I am a failure.

I really wonder what their day-to-day internal monologue is like.

Point 1: Negative "kids these days" sentiments are as old as humanity, and so far they are universally incorrect[1].

Point 2: This is a link to a reddit post with zero citations. It is anecdote, not data.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916

A better source than the tabloid New York Post: https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-radio...

If I'm not mistaken, 'play on demand' in this context is a backronym[1]. The iPod name is apparently a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey:

> The name came from a freelance copyrighter who, after seeing the prototype, thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!"[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

2: https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-visual-history-of-apple-ipods

My kid has an Amazon kids Fire tablet. It allows parents to prevent specific apps from appearing on the home screen, and it seems to work fine, but it doesn't allow any kind of keyword blocking. For example, I have blocked a bunch of apps/videos/books by the YouTuber 'Blippi', but he releases new stuff all the time, and the new ones often pop up on the home screen. If I could preemptively block everything containing 'blippi' (or any other keywords) my life would be easier.

Regarding YouTube, the YouTube Kids app lets me block videos and whole channels, and it's great. But there is no equivalent functionality in the main YouTube app. On various devices (e.g., Roku, Google Nest) the kid sometimes manages to find some YouTube channels I'd rather they didn't watch. But I have to manually intervene each time, I can't just block those channels from being watched or recommended in the future. YouTube/Google obviously know that it's valuable to block videos/channels, since that feature exists in the kids app, yet they omit the feature from the main app, even for a paying customer like me. It is obnoxious.

> The problem isn't Google, it's the internet.

I partially agree, but Google itself has also been going downhill in my experience. For example, in recent months the topmost Google results often omit one or more of my search terms, and I have to search again with quotes to force words to be included. I understand the reasoning behind including results that omit a term, but putting those at the top is just silly. Yesterday I did a search that included "discontinued", and the top result along with most of the first page of results ignored "discontinued"[1], so the results were mostly the opposite of what I was searching for.

1: With the text below the result "Missing: discontinued ‎| Show results with: discontinued"

This documentary probably had something to do with it: https://vimeo.com/83750163

In it, a man investigates various means of execution, and concludes that nitrogen asphyxiation is the most 'humane' because the victim just passes out and then perishes. The presenter isn't necessarily wrong, but the caveats include a) the victim must breathe pure nitrogen, any oxygen present will prolong the experience; and b) if the victim is aware they are being executed, it is unlikely to be peaceful regardless.

Edit to add: Also, the physical discomfort from holding one's breath comes from increased concentration of CO2 in the blood, not the absence of oxygen. So as long as one can expel CO2 as usual, the lack of oxygen does not cause physical distress.

I've always liked this theory about Jar Jar, and it's fun to look at the little hints that his villainy might have been the original intent. But I suspect that the force (pun intended) that prevented such a thing was merchandising. George Lucas knows how to sell toys, and he likely foresaw the blowback if kids' beloved action figures, posters, etc. suddenly represented an evil character rather than a good one.

We humans are not very good at risk assessment. Realistically, flying in a 737 MAX is nowhere near as dangerous as making a left turn in a car (in the USA). Yet many of us do that every day without a second thought.

That being said, one underrated health risk is stress. If it alleviates your stress to avoid a particular air frame, you may be preserving your health by eliminating a burdensome worry.

Having known people who correspond with Stallman, he would likely reply to this comment with a rant about how you should call it "GNU/Linux" rather than just "Linux", then proceed to ignore the remainder of your points.

A few years ago I made a tool that fetches content from a big list of primary sources (via RSS or HTML), and pushes each link it finds through filters (keyword blacklist, duplicate check, etc). I made a UI that lets me accept or reject links Tinder style, and when I have a scrap of time to fill, I assess a few links.

I also have a small group of well-read friends who make an effort to send me stuff, that helps a lot too.

On another side note: I have been running an interesting link recommendation feed for many years now, and evidently in ~2018 someone curating links for Digg found my feed and started relying on it heavily to populate Digg's front page. It went on for months. Some days as much as half of the links I posted would subsequently show up on Digg, including links to unusual and old content (which was a strong signal that the overlap was no mere coincidence).

In 2019 Digg posted a job listing for a links curator, and I cheekily applied, noting that I'm already doing the job anyway, so they might as well pay me for it. They didn't take me up on it, but like magic, the poaching went away.

I've had a similar idea simmering in my head for over 10 years, I even purchased a fitting domain name for it. It's always been a "one of these days" kind of project. My idea is different enough that it might have a shot where Flattr fell flat, but it's exceptionally hard to gather users, even if you build a superb product.

I have deeply mixed feelings about the way LLMs slurp up copyrighted content and regurgitate it as something "new." As a software developer who has dabbled in machine learning, it is exciting to see the field progress. But I am also an author with a large catalog of writings, and my work has been captured by at least one LLM (according to a tool that can allegedly detect these things).

Overall, current LLMs remind me of those bottom-feeder websites that do no original research--those sites that just find an article they like, lazily rewrite it, introduce a few errors, then maybe paste some baloney "sources" (which always seems to disinclude the actual original source). That mode of operation tends to be technically legal, but it's parasitic and lazy and doesn't add much value to the world.

All that aside, I tend to agree with the hypothesis that LLMs are a fad that will mostly pass. For professionals, it is really hard to get past hallucinations and the lack of citations. Imagine being a perpetual fact-checker for a very unreliable author. And laymen will probably mostly use LLMs to generate low-effort content for SEO, which will inevitably degrade the quality of the same LLMs as they breed with their own offspring. "Regression to mediocrity," as Galton put it.

An air fryer. I was a skeptic, thinking that an air fryer is unlikely to outperform my conventional convection oven in any meaningful way.

When my pressure cooker died, I replaced it with a multi-purpose machine that also included air frying capabilities, and I gave it a try. I was pleased to discover that my prior skepticism was misplaced. It's not perfect for everything, but it heats up fast, and it really shines in a few areas (e.g., making fries, reheating fries/pizza, cooking seasoned chicken, etc).

I wrote my own front controller, and used htaccess rules to direct all requests there instead of to Wordpress. If the front controller deems the request safe, it just hands off the request to Wordpress. Otherwise it quarantines uploaded files (if any), and responds with an error. Lemon squeezy.

Around 16 years ago, Wordpress security was just not up to snuff yet, and my popular Wordpress-based site kept getting hacked by pharmaceutical spammers and the like. After several such incidents, I wrote a "wrapper" that loaded before Wordpress to scrutinize incoming requests before a lick of Wordpress code was executed. It had blacklists, whitelists, automatic temporary IP blocking, and that sort of thing. There was no reason for visitors to upload files, so any non-admin POST request with a file upload was automatically smacked down.

It wasn't pretty, but the hackers never got through again, and that clunky thing is still in service today. I coded it to quarantine all illicit file uploads, and as a consequence I have many thousands of script kiddies' PHP dashboards from over the years.

"Fastest growing" is a suspect statistic even when it is technically accurate. A company can go from having one customer to three, and honestly exclaim, "We tripled our user base in one day!"

I made this about 7 years ago: http://voyager.damninteresting.com/

"Instead of" seems to frame this as a false dichotomy. Enjoy most of the moments, capture a few to warm future moments. It's another example of 'everything in moderation.'

Looking at her video list, she released 20 videos between the bed video and this hanger video. This one -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYqz1F6eAVU <- came out about 2 weeks after the bed video. So, she very much kept her promise. Just sayin.

And, for better or worse, modern humans will lose their ability to let go.

FTA: "It’s fine if people want to call it a “glorified golf cart”, though I’m not sure I’ve seen a golf cart that can tow a boat, haul furniture, dump mulch, and that comes with creature comforts like air-conditioning, infotainment screen, power windows and locks, and a frunk."

My setup is similar, but with an Elecom Huge trackball on the right, and a magic touchpad on the left for quick gestures such as swapping desktops. It's excellent.

I had the same issue, so now I use them without any of the tips. The noise cancellation isn't quite as effective, but they're still better than average earbuds.

A solid ergonomic office chair. It's one category where you really get what you pay for.