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blendo

798 karma · joined February 21, 2014

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blendo··on Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts
I enjoy Apple's Hide My Email, and it would be nice to have a similar Hide My Phone Number.
blendo··on Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald
He said he didn't do political jokes, except this one, from 2016:

"Americans hated Hillary Clinton so much, they voted for someone they hated even more."

blendo··on Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald
Norm would have a funny story about this.
blendo··on Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents
High school class of 1974 here. We loved the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 60s, but we also were keenly aware of the impermanance of the hedonistic lifestyles of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
blendo··on Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity
:-)
blendo··on The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI
Our company offered all programmers $1000 to spend the night in the office. But they sent us home around 4am.

The same time many of the overnight jobs started up :-)

Fortunately we had zero issues.

blendo··on A retrospective of my time on the internet
Like Chuck Norris, chuds don't sleep. They wait.
blendo··on US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid
Special forces training and force vetting seems astoundingly poor for such an "elite" outfit.
blendo··on San Diego rents declined following surge in supply
"we've shown a pretty significant increase in the number of new housing permits each year, we’re closing in on the 10,000 mark for the last two years"

Does that mean the "surge in supply" is really a surge in permits?

blendo··on NASA Force
Searching for more DOGE-boy wrecking balls?
blendo··on Mullvad VPN: Banned TV Ad in the Streets of London [video]
I'm in SF where they advertise a lot, and the ads are incredibly niche and nerdy.

But a general sense of paranoia comes through quite strongly.

blendo··on Lessons from the PG&E outage
5G C-V2X New Radio might be helpful.

https://www.telecomtrainer.com/lte-v2x-vs-nr-v2x-key-differe...

blendo··on Tektronix equipment has been used in many movies and shows
Back in the 80s, the Tek 4115 (color, 1280x1024) was so much fun for a young programmer working at RADC/Hanscom AFB.

Mandelbrot sets and Towers of Hanoi were so exciting to write in Fortran (I think Fortran 77), running under, iirc, CP/M.

blendo··on Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board
And the US never revolted against our domestic aristocracy, as they never revolted against our clergy.

Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?

blendo··on Mullvad VPN present And Then? (Chat Control is back on the menu)
For months, Mullvad has been papering San Francisco with smart and cheeky ads, like "Mass surveillance is made by machine men with machine hearts".

I admire that they're saying this, and wish other VPN companies would do similar public relations to highlight the risks of ad targeting.

Tbh, I'm a customer. Before Mullvad, I used PIA.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyon...

blendo··on The Goon Squad
"When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror."

Terror? If you're steeped in guilt, perhaps so.

blendo··on Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
The duck curve tells us prices are lower at noon due to tons of new solar, but what about the rate of price change?

Are electricity prices at noon climbing faster, or less fast, than prices at 6pm?

blendo··on Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness
Yes. With $10 million in the bank, earning 4%, you'll see $400,000 a year, less taxes.

Whereas with $10 billion, you'll get $400 million a year, or about $7.5 million PER WEEK!

I think guys like Musk and Andreesen (&SBF) might have gone insane just trying to spend their money.

blendo··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting: over the counter. Like booze or a lottery ticket.
blendo··on The Bluesky Dictionary
What are the table sizes?

And what ingress bandwidth do you have?

blendo··on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption
I think most parents are really uncomfortable with adolescents accesing smartphone porn, and also sexting.

Particularly highly religious parents, like those in Utah.

blendo··on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in
I need to prove my age to buy a lottery ticket or purchase alcohol. The merchant typically doesn't save my id info.

What if I could purchase a unique QR code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to prove my age?

There'd still be problems in the US with 1st amendment issues, but I'd at least remain anonymous.

blendo··on Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work
He's quite religious:

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2011/07/geektheologian/

blendo··on The $25k car is going extinct?
People like cars that can go 80-90 mph for hundreds and hundreds of miles while carrying 4 people. With crash protection.

Add electrics with thousand lbs of batteries, and you've got today's 4000-6000 lb SUVs, all costing an arm and a leg.

blendo··on Cell Towers Can Double as Cheap Radar Systems for Ports and Harbors (2014)
I wouldn't go so far as to call this RF "pollution", but it is a reminder that the EM spectrum is getting a lot busier.

Me? I just want a car to be able to detect me so they don't run me over.

blendo··on As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI's economic fallout
"If there is job loss, then we should convene a collective group of thinkers to talk about mitigation."
blendo··on US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates
A shrinking economy is likely to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, won't it? Might the effect be detectable?
blendo··on What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard
I’ve already gotten to the point where I talk into my iPhone rather than type for many interactions.

I think Apple cannot currently associate my apple id with my queries.

blendo··on Please Fund More Science (2020)
If you’re a billionaire, at 4% interest you’ll earn $40 million a year, or over $100,000 a week.

You and I, we earn money and hope to put a little aside. But these guys worry “How will I spend this incessant flow of money?”

blendo··on The NSA Selector
This seems viscerally “correct”, in some crazy sense.
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