blendo

I tend to share your optimism, but it also seems smartphones have some very different qualities from previous tech. Yes, the sounds and images, but mostly a new kind of socially remote yet nearly instantaneous communication style.

And a surprising amount of sexting.

Getting to this: https://xkcd.com/1414/

And a couple of the apps are from companies from Utah, so putting them on your kids phones is basically outsourcing their online information flow to the Mormon Church.

“plans to start commercial production in the US by 2028.”

Stellantis/Factorial is claiming solid state batteries will appear in the 2026 Dodge Charger:

https://electrek.co/2025/04/28/jeep-dodge-maker-validates-so...

All else being equal, having to grow food for 1 billion people would be a lot easier than for 8 billion.

And apartments would be a lot cheaper, too.

In the 1980s, I very much took to heart Grace Hopper’s advice that it’s easier to apologize than to get permission. This suited 20-something me just fine.

Now I’m more in the camp of “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment”.

I started programming professionally in 1980, so this video hits close to home.

My own observation is that more “aesthetic” code is often more readable.

AC is overly complex and too reactive.

I’ve seen cars improve a lot over that last 10-20 years. Faster, smoother, quieter, and safer, they can cruise all day at 80-90 mph.

Sadly, this is completely incompatible with 25 mph city speed limits. Thus, the need for engineering kludges like automotive speed limiters.

I’d really like a new vehicle classification, perhaps along the lines of Medium Speed Electric Vehicles. Designed with a top speed of 40 to 45 mph, they might make a reasonable primary vehicle for many, and a good second car for even more.

“The event started Tuesday morning and ended Thursday afternoon. A source in the room this week explained that the event was “very unstructured.” On Tuesday, engineers wandered around the room discussing how to accomplish DOGE’s goal.”

It’s possible there were some good, rational developers present, but this reads like a nghtmare retreat.

Hopefully, they at least got some nice T-shirts.

As a private pilot, I always carefully watch the safety videos on the off-chance they’ll help me avoid dying.

What’s the margin of error of each question?

What is the risk the stats have been gamed by bad actors?

Text entry fields that don’t look like text entry fields.

I knew it as “The principle of least astonishment”.

Back in the 90s, they were the “suits”.

Andreessen, Scott McNealy, & Ellison were, to me, the ones that left a particularly bad taste.

It appears there are no checks and balances in place. Congress could impeach, or the Supreme Court could enjoin (is that the word?), but I see no prospect of either happening soon.

“SOA does not collect any vehicle-generated data unless the vehicle is associated with an active STARLINK subscription service. To sign up for the STARLINK service, you must have a MySubaru account.”

https://www.subaru.com/support/privacy-policies/vehicle-priv...

So looks like you’re only tracked if you are signed up with Starlink, having first obtained the prerequisite MySubaru account.

Did users have to explicitly sign up for Starlink in order to enable tracking? Or is that the default behavior for all new Subarus?

And, can this tracking be deactivated? I have a Mazda, and it required a phone call to Mazda to get it disabled.

Prior to retirement, I cut back to 32 hrs/week at 80% pay (well, closer to 85% because I kept my full health). I backfilled the pay cut by beginning a small 401k withdrawl.

All of a sudden, every Thursday evening felt like the start of vacation!

Is that why all the “next arrival time” displays on SF’s bus stops stopped working several years ago?

I used to try and stare at the inside of my eyelids, as if looking at a TV screen. It seemed like once images started to appear, while my eyes were closed, my brain began to think it was dreaming and just gave up on being awake :-)

“The city already has more than a dozen red light cameras that automatically ticket motorists who run the red. Since 2019, those cameras have been used to issue over 56,000 citations, according to Sernoffsky. That figure, which isn’t included in SFPD’s data on traffic citations and may help explain why citation revenue hasn’t dropped as dramatically as the moving violation totals would seem to predict, will continue to grow as the city installs more cameras.”

SF is also planning to install dozens of speed enforcement cameras.

In 1985 I had fun implementing Tower of Hanoi on a Tektronix 4115 using Fortran. With recursion, even!

What a wonderful waste of government hardware.

Yikes! Did it also have a blast suppressor? Those things make gunshots MUCH louder to folks beside you.

In my experience, the rubbery Apple ear tips in the AirPods have better sound isolation and audio quality, but foam aftermarket tips better keep the AirPods from falling out.

Yes, +1 for etymotic. I’ve used them for years.

I used the WSPR protocol to send a message from San Francisco to Georgia using a 250 milliWatt transmitter, operating in 20m.

It sends tiny messages (current lat/long, transmitter power, and your call sign) with so much error correcting code that each 50 bit message takes a minute or two to transmit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)

It’s the only time I’ve used my General class privileges.

I’m imagining quite the redneck-y front yard.

I read Orwell’s 1984 in junior high in the 1970s, during the Nixon/Viet Nam era.

I started it thinking it was just another scifi book about the future, but it served as a really good inoculation against governmental lies and cant.

“Radian’s solution is a rocket-powered sled that runs along a two-mile rail and accelerates up to Mach 0.7 — 537 mph (864 kilometers per hour) — before releasing the space plane”.

Once released from the rail track (a flat track at ground level, I assume), won’t air drag hit it like a ton of bricks?

Maybe if they put the track on top of a 20,000 foot mountain, and/or somehow released the spacecraft at a 45 degree angle?

And also says struggled with speech and language began BEFORE the pandemic.