[–] 3 points 3 months ago

There's a local restaurant that still does their own delivery, and we order lunch from them each week on the same day pretty regularly. We recently moved (still in area) and he was like "Hey wait you moved!" and we had a nice lil convo, it was pleasant. I miss that.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Impossible! Everyone has a smartphone with which to download The App:tm: to handle that. The only people who don't have smartphones are actual criminals. There are senators completely ready to endorse this line of thought! Too poor? Nonsense, you're a criminal. Straight to jail.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Regarding alternatives, I remember for a little while NymVPN was considered a hot item and then suddenly crickets. Did something happen to make folks disinterested in them? I do think they're pretty heavily involved in cryptocurrencies, but I could be misremembering.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Sometimes it feels like people forget this used to be the only option. Was it a little annoying? Yeah. But oh well.

    Ironically I remember reading somewhere that part of the reason people are so consistently shitty to each other is they forgot how to deal with the millions of little face to face interactions we had pre-internet in order to get things done in life. How ironic would it be if big tech forced us back into that mold and we all became a bit nicer because of it?

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Agreed, it's an odd move when so much else about the phone is being marketed as having the user's interests at heart. If you scratch a bit and squint at the wording they're using, though, it feels more and more like the CEO has his own idea of how people should be using their phones and is pushing that. The fact that it is more privacy respecting is incidental to the fact. I could be wrong, but that's the vibe I've certainly gotten.

    It's too bad. I wouldn't mind having a phone with no social media but no browser is probably going to be a dealbreaker for me. Their FAQ says it's basically a way of 'cheating' to get to social media sites and that's incredibly condescending. I probably just want to look up if a nearby store is still open or something.

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    The Commodore Callback 8020 is a nostalgic rejection of modern smartphones.

    The blocking of browsers might be a tipping point for me, and I'm sure others. Their FAQ basically treats it like a too-tempting cheat to get on social media. It feels a bit like I'm being parented.

    That said, for anyone who just wants a phone for calls/texts and maybe GPS & music, this is pretty perfect.

     

    "This is it. We're dead. We're going to die right here in the Waymo."

    This combined with another recent article from some insiders at Tesla saying, along the lines, "You couldn't pay me to let one of these things drive me somewhere."

    And yet I still know people who are just so chuffed about "never having to drive again."

    EDIT: Comments have pointed out that this story is, at best, overblown and semi-fabricated otherwise. Take it with a massive grain of salt. But feel free to discuss self-driving, waymo, etc in the comments!

     

    Hello everyone!

    I did it. I reached a point where I got everything exactly how I wanted and now... Now I am dissatisfied as I look over my home lab's chaotic mess of a setup. This was my first time selfhosting things, and I learned a ton of stuff. I'll probably want to tear it down and start anew in the near future, being much tidier and mindful of what goes where.

    Does anyone have any tips they want to impart to someone who's not an entire newbie but still learning stuff? Kind of a "If I could tell myself this before I set everything up, I would say..."

     

    A reporter for The Verge was thankfully unharmed after a white hat hacker seized control of a Yarbo lawnmower robot.

    Original title, which I removed for being sensationalist:

    Hacker Takes Over Robot Lawnmower, Runs Over Innocent Man

    Noteworthy sections

    Alarmingly, the Yarbo robots all had the same root password, Makris found.

    Even changing the root password wouldn’t necessarily protect owners, either, because every time a Yarbo robot updates its firmware, it resets the root password back to the default, Makris found. And there’s a twist: it appears that this backdoor for remotely accessing the robots was intentionally created by Yarbo.

     

    The project would be more than twice the size of Manhattan and could consume more electricity than the entire state currently uses.

    Some quotes near the end that I want to point out.

    For his part, O’Leary has claimed, without evidence, that much of the opposition to the project was “paid” and that the meeting was filled with “professional protestors.” “We think that over 90% of the protestors are actually not people that live in Utah or Box Elder County. They’re being bussed in,” O’Leary said in a video posted on X.
    He also claimed backlash on social media surrounding the project was AI-generated.

    I mean sure, might as well keep using that playbook it's not like it ever stopped working, but at this point I'm shocked these assholes don't just go "And there's nothing you peasants can do about it! Mwauahahaha"

     

    All roads lead back to the iPhone.

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman might have hinted at this user experience change. In an X post shared before Kuo’s report, Altman said that it “feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed” and “(also the internet; there should be a protocol that is equally usable by people and agents).”

    “Only by fully controlling both the operating system and hardware can OpenAI deliver a comprehensive AI agent service,” writes Kuo.

    That comment about updating the internet's protocol really feels like a buried lede.

     

    Maine is not moving forward with a moratorium on AI data center construction until fall 2027.

    Relevant clarification from the article:

    While the bill passed both houses of the Maine's legislature on April 14, and Mills has suggested she'd support a temporary moratorium, the governor wanted a bill that would exempt an existing data center project in Jay, Maine.

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