Lendal

PFAS levels have gone down because we drink treated water. Making municipal water safe to drink is a big industry now. Anyone drinking only rainwater is exposed to those higher levels of whatever is in the rainwater. A small amount of rainwater is probably fine, but if you really do live off the grid year round then you need to treat your rainwater.

Because we don't drink rainwater.

Aha! This is the first explanation that reveals the most common error. The fact that the reveal isn't just a random door. The host must not reveal the car. That changes everything. I believe that's what most people are missing. But if you actually stated that explicitly, you would give away the answer and the problem wouldn't be fun anymore.

The fun is in not explicitly stating every unconscious assumption you have about the problem.

I bet Neil deGrasse Tyson will be on that flight.

Zooz ZEN51 and ZEN52 are what I've been using, but there are other brands I'd like to try.

My delay could be just that my hub is pretty old & needs to be updated.

With any luck, the roles most suited to AI replacement will be CEO, COO, and CFO. But I'm sure if that turns out to be the case, the researchers will be promptly fired and the information quickly buried before anyone ever learns of it.

I use Hubitat but everything is Z-wave except for one Alexa-only bulb, which was a gift so I can't get rid of it.

What I've learned is that smart wall switches of all types are still too failure-prone for me. Now I'm converting back to standard wall switches with Z-wave relays wired in behind them. I don't like the extra lag they have, but I do like that standard wall switches last forever compared to smart wall switches.

If anyone knows how to reduce the lag, I'm all ears. The switch operates the relay which sends its signal to the hub, which then sends a signal back for the light to turn on. This process introduces a noticeable time delay between the switch closing and the light coming on.

They are indeed completely arbitrary, which makes "Category 6" completely meaningless/useless, just like the rest of those silly numbers. A storm with a wind speed of 130 mph is not 20% more dangerous than a storm with wind speed of 128 mph. They are equivalent dangers. It's a ridiculous system and should be abolished, but it won't, because it's good entertainment.

The same laws benefit you as well as politicians. You can pick up the phone, call your neighbor, and discuss politics at any time without fear of reprisal from the authorities. Try doing this in Cuba or China, you will end up in prison. In my view, every citizen in a democratic country is not only permitted to but obligated to participate in the political process, which is why political activity is exempted. If you don't want to participate, if you don't vote, or inform yourself of issues, you still benefit from all the same freedoms & protections of the law as those who do participate.

This is an important point, because the exemption of political activity is due to the protections of political speech. Imagine if it were not this way, the party in power could simply fine or even arrest their opponents for trying talk to people over the phone. This happens every day in nondemocratic countries. This protection should not extend to AI though. AI doesn't vote. AI doesn't have a voice in a democracy. So allowing AI to benefit from this exemption should not be permitted. I tolerate PEOPLE calling me, because I am a voter and they are voters and we must all discuss the direction our laws should go or who our representatives should be (when we have time). But AI should have no place in the political process. Not for robocalls, not for choosing representatives, and especially not for lawmaking.

This is specifically about AI-generated voices you'd recognize, like spoofing Joe Biden's or Nancy Pelosi's voice, for example.

Maybe they could "remember" where your eyes were looking at a few milliseconds ago and click on that, but then they wouldn't know the difference between that or maybe you actually did mean to click in the center of the content area.

The problem is the Vision OS has no cursor. Cursor position is critical. Your eyes move around a lot more than your cursor moves, but in Vision OS, cursor position and eye position are the same. Very annoying. Maybe they could put a little cursor in the center of the screen that you could move around with another gesture.

Seems like you could just implement a simple delay to solve this.

Let's say I want to click on the "reply" button below this text box. If I'm perfectly honest, I DO look at the button for a moment, then I move the mouse pointer over to it. But then right before clicking, my eyes switch back to the content I've created to observe that my click is having the desired effect on it.

I'm not actually looking at the button at the moment I click on it, but I DID look at it just a few milliseconds prior to the click. Why can't the UI just keep track of what I looked at a few milliseconds ago, to figure out that I actually wanted to click on the button, and not in the center of some text box?

One issue could be maybe I thought for a moment about replying but then changed my mind and decided to edit the content some more. But the UI has decided that I meant to click the "reply" button and so now it's been submitted prematurely. Yeah, I can see the problem now. The position of the mouse cursor is meaningful when clicking, and the Vision OS doesn't have a cursor. Cursors are important.

There are not many people who would say that McDonalds' hamburger is the best hamburger in the world, and that Starbucks' coffee is the best coffee, yet brands like these dominate the world like none others and in multiple ways, not the least of which is market share. That doesn't mean they did anything wrong. Or maybe they did. Who knows? Does it matter?

I use Firefox daily. I'm typing this into Firefox. I feel fortunate to live right now when such a thing is possible. I'm not all that hopeful about the future though, because I know that we as a society collectively ask for shitty things on a regular basis, and we get exactly what we ask for.

The funny thing to me about this title is who brought that term to English in the first place. It came into the vernacular back in 1991 when Saddam Hussein claimed the Kuwait War would become "the mother of all wars". It didn't. It lasted about 24 hours, but the phrase has lasted much longer. It's so weird how language evolves, who has the power to do it, and who doesn't.

So for me, the title means that this breach is only of importance to the people who want it to be. Everyone else will simply ignore it after 24 hours, just like the first Kuwait War.

It is. But just because you speak English doesn't mean you use sarcasm constantly. Sarcasm is a lazy way of communicating in almost any language. It reveals lazy thinking and poor vocabulary. I never assume someone is using sarcasm when they could actually be speaking intelligently, albeit with a common grammatical error.

The circumstances suggest that it's probably just a simple error and not sarcasm. Not everyone in the world really loves sarcasm so much. People who use it frequently are usually trying to mask a poor imagination and small vocabulary. So I prefer to believe it's just a simple mistake. No big deal.

You might see some confused faces. To most English speakers "fortune" mostly means good, unless it is preceded by something that specifies that it is bad fortune, like "ill fortune" or misfortune.

It's all about the chipset hardware and drivers, which are not standardized across the PC world. Some people don't care about Bluetooth, and they want to pay less for their boards, so manufacturers oblige them. On a PC, you have to pay extra for decent wireless performance. On Apple Macintosh you pay extra always, whether you want it or not, but you get consistent quality in return.

It's not really numerology though. Yes it's a dumb trick with base-10 math but that doesn't make it numerology. It's not trying to draw any connections between otherwise unrelated things. I think of numerology as trying to use stupid-glue to connect things that aren't connected. Like, I was born on the 8th day of the 2nd month, 8 - 2 is 6, the sixth planet is Saturn which also has 6 letters, and Jeffrey Epstein's first pet fish was named Saturn! OMG! That's numerology.

Numerology is far stupider than this admittedly useless arithmetic game.

I wonder how much of my $14/mo Premium subscription is paying for YouTube Music, which I have never used.

Not inexperience. Motivated reasoning.

True. There isn't any actual untouched forest land in north Florida. It's all been harvested and replanted many times. Almost certainly it was private sale or leased land. But those farm trees still produced more oxygen and stored more carbon than the solar panels will.

Well, actually Florida (FPL) along I-10 is right now constructing new solar farms where there used to be forests. I'm not sure if what they did with the trees constitutes "clear cutting" but the solar panels are there now, and the trees are not. I've driven the route for many years. It was all forested.

Is there any news source in the world that isn't in some way connected to one of the parties of this war? It has to be a news source that has significant presence in the region so that they have some topical credibility, but also is not located in a country that does any business with either the Arab world or Israel. I'll wait.

For me it's the Firefox sync feature. I install Firefox everywhere so I can instantly be up and running anywhere with all the settings, bookmarks, open tabs, logins, and addons ready to go on any new computer. It's a huge convenience and time-saver.

What? Just because passwords are flawed doesn't make passkeys the answer. The article does not say passwords are perfect. It says the current implementation of passkeys that has been created so far is worse.

I was told the battery is supposed to be fully water sealed. According to Elon, "it can serve briefly as a boat." Are such statements completely worthless? Consumers are buying these cars based on these kind of statements, and Elon knows it.

Petrochemicals are never going to go to zero. We'll always need them. We won't always need to allow every person on the planet to burn them as fuel, but we will still need them to manufacture the many other products that aren't destroying the atmosphere.

Thank you for writing the only comment here that expresses any amount of compassion. I believe this is the true root of the homelessness problem in the US. American society values compassion at just about zero.

I often wonder how construction gets done in Europe. Everyone in the US who works construction or even has the possibility of maybe one day needing to carry a shovel claims they absolutely must drive a truck with a 3-ton curb weight everywhere they go. How does Europe build anything, without these massive trucks everywhere?