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TallonRain

57 karma · joined April 8, 2016

Software, infrastructure, gamedev, etc.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tallonrain; my proof: https://keybase.io/tallonrain/sigs/F-B76FcDN82WPYVW10kp56KB39ny8SIYqzBPNdRTwp4 ]

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TallonRain··on Belling the Cat
Interesting, this is a phrase I’ve never heard before. But this is a concept I’ve had to articulate quite a number of times in recent years, as it has been quite pertinent as of late. This’ll be useful shorthand.
TallonRain··on ReMarkable Paper Pro Move
I have two of these devices (RM2 and the Paper Pro) and haven’t experienced anything of what you’re describing despite using them extensively for a few years. I would recommend getting in touch with support about that, or trying a factory reset to see if that improves anything.
TallonRain··on Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
I've noticed this too and I agree it's unacceptable practice. Journalism in general has become wildly resistant to properly citing their sources (or they simply make their citation as difficult to find as possible through various obfuscation techniques) and this is making independent validation of any information online that much more difficult while further entrenching a culture of "just trust me, bro" on the internet in general. It's a deeply infuriating and destructive practice that needs to die out. At least when I was in school & university, properly citing your sources was everything when it came to writing any sort of report or essay. How the adtech industry managed to quietly undo that standard expectation so thoroughly for the sake of engagement metrics is rather nuts to me.
TallonRain··on Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos
They shouldn’t even need to access the camera roll at all in the vast majority of cases. The OS should simply pass photos and videos as an input to the app as an explicit user action; the camera roll itself should be a black box as far as the app is concerned.
TallonRain··on Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine
Yes, pen and paper. The approach is to pseudocode the solution, minor syntax errors aren’t punished (and indeed are generally expected anyway). The point is to simply show that you understand and can work through the concepts involved, it’s not being literally compiled.

Writing a small algorithm with pen & paper on programming exams in universities of all sizes was still common when I was in uni in the 2010s and there’s no reason to drop that practice now.

TallonRain··on No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming
I’m seeing the same problem, the page crashes on Safari on iOS, saying a problem repeatedly occurred. Haven’t seen a webpage do that in quite a while.
TallonRain··on Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)
Same here. As someone who has spent his life around many animals, either as pets or in the wild or other contexts, it’s very plain that humans are surrounded by respectably sentient creatures. It always floors me whenever people are shocked at the complex thoughts, emotions, behavior and planning capabilities of non-human animals. It really just seems fundamentally obvious if you bother to interact with other creatures long enough. Heck, I’ve run into way too many people who refuse to even acknowledge that we humans are animals as well and I feel this innate arrogance persists to our detriment.
TallonRain··on Open-Sourcing our Firmware
I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware, but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these devices. What has your experience been like?
TallonRain··on Telegram founder says over 70M new users joined during Facebook outage
Not really, plenty of users were unable to connect for some time. Just about my whole friend group and I myself were unable to use Telegram for about an hour or so around the peak of the surge.
TallonRain··on Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums
> I'm pretty confident that most of the services he is complaining about will last longer than his own blog post.

Ironically, I can’t actually read this blog post because it has become unavailable. I suspect that undermines his entire point.

TallonRain··on Echo Frames – Eyeglasses with Alexa
I have a pair. They’re pretty neat and my general take on them is that they show some great promise for the principle of the technology and North’s implementation works as advertised. I particularly appreciate the notifications and ability to make some quick text messages with it. I look at my phone a bit less now because of it, which is nice.

I’m mildly skeptical of the ring controller and I have had a couple of them break on me. However, their customer support has been great and they replaced them immediately with no problems whatsoever. Overall though it’s pretty solid and I sometimes catch myself missing the ring if I’m not wearing it, but that might just be my fidgeting habit.

North definitely sold me on the concept and I’m looking forward to more advanced implementations of the technology going forward. I’m not completely sure if I would recommend any of these glasses products coming out (like from Amazon or North or Facebook) to my friends at this time, but if you’re curious about them or if you like having the cutting edge, then they’re absolutely worth a look at least. If anything, the display will be a cool thing to experience if you haven’t seen it before.