DamnInteresting

Published in 2022. I despise this trend of news sites hiding the publication date. It's news, the date is important.

Apart from watching videos, I use mine for making music (podcast scoring) and for drawing (formal illustrations, doodling, and sketching out designs). There are also a few games that I feel play best on an iPad, such as Balatro.

> I'm not by nature a luddite

Our modern view of the Luddites is not a fair shake. The Luddites were not opposed to technology in general, they merely (and understandably) opposed having their own livelihoods replaced by automation.[1] It's a familiar sentiment in these times.

Incidentally, I'm not implying that you don't know what the original Luddites were about; I add my comment for the benefit of anyone else who may be unfamiliar with the backstory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> Right now, AI has the potential to increase productivity.

The detail many seem to forget is that "AI" is Artificially Inexpensive. It must eventually turn a profit, or collapse. Once providers start charging what they must to remain solvent, and/or the output is burdened with advertising, the gains, real or perceived, will likely evaporate.

Now that is range anxiety.

As LLMs continue to train on their own output, we're going to start seeing some serious Habsburg Jaw[1] effects.

[1] https://history.howstuffworks.com/european-history/habsburg-...

Last year I got a phishing email at my work address, and it was more convincing than most. I knew it was phishing, but it might have fooled me if I'd been less attentive.

When I see these sophisticated phishing messages I like to click through and check out how well-made the phishing site itself is, sometimes I fill their form with bogus info to waste their time. So I opened the link in a sandboxed window, looked around, entered nothing into any forms.

It turns out the email was from a pen testing firm my employer had hired, and it had a code baked into the url linked to me. So they reported that I had been successfully phished, even though I never input any data, let alone anything sensitive.

If that's the bar pen testing firms use to say that they've succeeded in phishing, then it's not very useful.

It's just like spending time with a human bullshitter. At first, their energy and confidence are fun! But the spell is broken after a handful of "confidently incorrect" moments, and the realization that they will never stop doing that. It's usually more work than it's worth to extract the kernels from the crap.

Or perhaps 'Filidelfian.'

I'm in the same boat, watching Google preparing to capsize it. I'm a paying customer, and they keep making my life more difficult.

Thanks for the kind words! It is not at all profitable, but it gives me purpose, and scratches a particular intellectual itch. I wish I could afford to make it my full-time job and just write every day without worrying about day-job income, but alas, the universe currently desires otherwise.

I have a curved monitor on my regular desk, and a flat panel on my treadmill desk. Switching between the two takes a few minutes of adjustment for things to look right.

I had a similar peculiarity with eyeglasses. I'd always had great vision, but middle age recently hit me like a truck, and my eyes have started to go. I got a prescription, and there was a difference between the two eyes. For the first few days, everything looked misshapen, larger on one side than the other, until my brain compensated. Most curious.

A few years back I updated my site[1] so all of the UI graphics (e.g., logos, icons in the menus) are SVG sprites baked into the HTML. It resulted in a lot fewer requests per page, lower overall page size, and sharp navigation on any device at any resolution. It works great, though it was a lot of initial work to get it working.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com

I am a liberal person who lives in a deeply conservative area (Utah). I have had many conversations with staunch conservatives, some of them close friends and family. One-on-one is different from the one-to-many format, or the one-to-one-in-front-of-others format. It's quite possible to have a civil conversation about such things when there isn't an audience.

I have seldom (probably never) seen anyone have a big change of heart from such discussion, but often both sides concede a little, and it feels like progress toward common ground, minuscule though it may be.

Oh no, a spooky ghost!

(Unless, of course, you were saying "Boooourrrns")

I went to college at this place (when it was Utah Valley State College [UVSC], before it was UVU). I spent a lot of time in that part of the campus over several years. How strange to see these events unfolding there. Kirk seems to be a person with whom I have scant philosophical agreement, but I prefer to converse with such people rather than watch them die. What an awful mess this all is.

> "War and Peace" had a working title "War, what is it good for" before his mistress insisted he change it.

I suspect that you are being facetious, but for the benefit of anyone else reading, this is not true. It's a "factoid" (an invented fact mistaken as true)[1] spawned from a joke on the TV program Seinfeld[2].

This has been your daily wet blanket.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqS1Ty79mOE

> While the exposed database did not contain passwords or sensitive consumer data, the stolen business contact details have been used in a wave of phishing campaigns that mimic legitimate communications from Google.

It seems unlikely that changing one's current password will ameliorate future phishing using these data. The password isn't the problem here.

Something like 16 years ago I added a custom filter to my WordPress functions.php to convert "--" to a proper emdash in the output. If I had a nickle for every emdash in my back catalog I could finally buy that detached backyard office I've always wanted.

Agreed, I love the emdash, and I have 20 years' worth of online writings that are positively peppered with those flat fellas. I have no intention of abandoning the character yet, but the future may be a bleak place for handsomely-formatted asides. It gives one pause.

As a former gearhead, I must say that an EV with get-up-and-go has been worth the tradeoff for me. Sure, I miss the roar of the V8, and the manual shifting. But the instant torque of an EV is so satisfying, and the low center of gravity is fun to toss around. And I don't miss all of the gas station stops, oil changes, transmission fluid changes, fouled sensors, overheating, spark plug changes, clutch replacement, brake pad changes, dripping fluids, fumes, shouted conversations with friends over the engine noise, et cetera.

We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."

Colloquially known as "bullshitters."[1]

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/bulls...

I was about to make approximately the same comment. My site has been front-paged on HN multiple times, as well as in some big subreddits.

A link from HN: Usually comes with thoughtful discussion, and a detectable but temporary uptick in site donations (it's an ad-free, reader-supported project). There are always some detractors, but that's to be expected.

A link from a popular subreddit: A LOT of site traffic and server overload (once in 2015, Google Analytics showed over 6,600 concurrent visitors from /r/TodayILearned), and a lot more bile in the inbox and discussion thread. No uptick in donations.

No surprises there really, but it's useful to verify assumptions.

It's a fun intellectual puzzle, but I find it questionable that onion dice uniformity is always a worthwhile goal. Sure, it ensures more even cooking, but in most dishes, is that desirable? Texture and contrast are nice.

I know someone whose work is cited in the "Try and" paper, and she asked me to pass this along in response to your comment:

> Feel free to let djtango know that the paper they're looking for is Bergen (2001), "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto". It's a minor classic and deserves any attention it gets!

I searched for the title, and this PDF was among the top matches: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf

OpenAI has built the world's most impressive and sophisticated generator of blog posts about ChatGPT.

For ages I have been wishing that one could go into just about any restaurant and order a meal in small, medium, or large. I would almost always order small.

According to the Library of Congress, this was all due to a "coding error."[1]

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/librarycongress.bsky.social/post/3l...

Whoa, the first film poster it presented to me was for Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 film I was unfamiliar with until I saw it in a Metafilter post just this morning[1]. Baader-Meinhof in action[2].

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/209750/Godfrey-Reggios-Koyaanisqa...

[2] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...