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brightbeige

3,352 karma · joined November 7, 2018

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brightbeige··on You Rename My Lake – I Move My Hosting
I think, by now, what offends me the most is how unoriginal “Lake America” is as a name.
brightbeige··on Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
If you search the App Store and don’t find it, it’s called Firefox Klar in some markets
brightbeige··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
Reminds me of Nobel and Ignobel prize winner Andrei Geim, who authorer a paper with his hamster, H.A.M.S. ter Tisha. As I remember, he added Mr/Ms Tisha to be able to write “we” instead of “I”.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09214...

brightbeige··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...
brightbeige··on "I built a speed/distance tracker for my hamster, uploads to his Strava account"
https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1v9uyq0/i_buil...
brightbeige··on Building watchable digital twins of 64 World Cup games
https://web.archive.org/web/20260723225939/https://rogerdick...
brightbeige··on Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new way to access your Google Account
Scammer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028284

brightbeige··on Moist Towelette Museum
> Watch out, these are big files (for 1990's technology). About 1.6 megs each.
brightbeige··on Suspicious Discontinuities (2020)
IIRC There is also a discontinuity when it comes to the histogram of ages of marathon runners, because runners are binned into age groups and there is a more runners at the youngest ages of each group, I guess because it’s younger runners in each group that are more likely to run if they feel more likely to place well in their group
brightbeige··on Venezuela reveals $240B in debt it cannot pay (~$100B more than expected)
At least your reply wasn’t written by AI
brightbeige··on Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million
Recent, related New Yorker article that goes into the background leading up to the vote

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/15/could-switzerl...

    Despite the prosperity, many Swiss had mixed emotions about the guest workers, who came largely from Southern Europe. As the Swiss novelist Max Frisch observed, “We wanted workers, but we got people.”
brightbeige··on Which Buffett? Warren or Jimmy. Can you tell them apart?
You mean my comment above? That’s the only human-written thing. As for the commentary in the website - instead of making it a weekend coding project, I chose to spend time with my kids.
brightbeige··on Which Buffett? Warren or Jimmy. Can you tell them apart?
It's for fun. Yes, it's vibe-coded and intended as a static HTML page. The idea isn't new, but I didn't find any online quizzes that had instant answer feedback and were shareable at the end. Have fun. Enjoy. Have a nice weekend!

Take the quiz - some answers may surprise you.

> It's pure escapism is all it is...I'm not the first one to do it, nor shall I probably be the last. But I think it's really a part of the human condition that you've got to have some fun. You've got to get away from whatever you do to make a living or other parts of life that stress you out. I try to make it at least 50/50 fun to work and so far it's worked out. -- Jimmy Buffett

> The most important investment you can make is in yourself. -- Warren Buffett

brightbeige··on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
How about a rogue AI agent banking some cash for the uprising? Are we there yet?!
brightbeige··on Experience: We found a baby on the subway – now he's our 26-year-old son
Interesting. On this page, the one dad is wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. But in a photo on The Guardian article that same dad is wearing a New York Mets hat. I guess people can change after all.
brightbeige··on Project Glasswing: An Initial Update
And to consider AI agents are still mostly entirely limited to generating code in token-heavy programming languages designed to be written, tested and debugged by humans.

Here are two experimental exceptions:

https://github.com/vercel-labs/zerolang

https://github.com/sbhooley/ainativelang

brightbeige··on Apple unveils new accessibility features
A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.

https://www.bemyeyes.com

brightbeige··on Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their
"Meta staff angry at AI"
brightbeige··on Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
Not OP, but my guess is Underworld.

Edit: or Erasure?

brightbeige··on 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal
Actual title: Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available as food for human consumption
brightbeige··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
He’s replying on this twitter thread - perhaps someone with an account can ask there and link his comment here?

https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m

brightbeige··on What life looks like on the most remote inhabited island
There is a term “islandness” which may help to explain the allure - and many research papers on the topic. For me it’s a “smallness” that is the ideal.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/islandness

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/a8ba1494-ff23-4d...

brightbeige··on What life looks like on the most remote inhabited island
Me too. The wiki article is full of fun facts

On sports competitions:

> However, opponents were in short supply. It was a case of waiting for visiting opponents, and sometimes years might go by without any opportunities to play foreign opposition. Their first match was against a South African fishing vessel and they lost 10–6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha

brightbeige··on After Cosmic Crisp, Scientists Unveil an Apple for the Climate Change Era
https://archive.ph/DyHGv
brightbeige··on Concern over US travel visas prompts Ig Nobels to move its awards to Europe
Here's the blog post

https://improbable.com/2026/03/10/the-ig-nobel-prize-ceremon...

> Abrahams explains: “The city of Zurich and its institutions rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically — in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains) and committed to make this possible. Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things — Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy, and the cuckoo clock leap to mind — and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas.”

I would like to point out the cuckoo clocks originate from the Black Forest in southwestern Germany - not Switzerland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_clock

brightbeige··on Lego's 0.002 mm Specification and Its Implications for Manufacturing (2025)
Makes me think there could be a big cognitive difference when playing with Lego as well, for example, divergent vs convergent thinking.
brightbeige··on A decade of Docker containers
Actual article was in the evening standard, but like all things Rory Sutherland, it’s worth to watch him tell the story: https://youtu.be/OTOKws45kCo?si=jbTdx3YCGkZv3Akb

For those who want more of him, check out his classic TED talk from decades ago: “Lessons from an ad man”

https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_...

brightbeige··on Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies
I’m a subscriber with the mobile app and the “video” is a still image for me.
brightbeige··on iPhone 17e
I have a pet theory about increasing phone sizes

> Screen size is area (x^2) and battery size is volume (x^3). As battery life is a critical feature, a bigger screen supports (a nonlinear) better battery life.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733

brightbeige··on Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway
If Tesla is a meme, is it worth a trillion dollars ?
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