yabatopia

A fingerprint is unique. A snowflake is unique. But for some reason we find it difficult to face the possibility that intelligent life - on planet earth - is in a similar way unique.

Ironically I had to use AI to get to the point. It reads like a recipe with a long-winded introduction/story.

This is the AI generated (CoPilot ChatGPT 4) Tldr; :

- *April Fools’ Marketing Stunt*: - Planned a fake company sale announcement as an April Fools’ joke. - Generated significant buzz and reconnected with many contacts. - Ultimately revealed the joke, gaining positive feedback.

Here’s the full AI generated summary in bullet points:

- *Founders and Background*: - Ilias Anwar and Johannes Naylor, founders of Tapped Ai. - Ilias ran TCC Entertainment; Johannes ran hackathons and a tech startup. - Met through a podcast interview after college.

- *Initial Collaboration*: - Discussed issues in the music industry. - Decided to stay connected and explore startup ideas.

- *Startup Evolution*: - Explored various ideas: badge verification, LinkedIn-style platform, Ai record label. - Gained significant online traction but realized ChatGPT could outperform their tools.

- *Antler Program*: - Accepted into the Antler Residency program in Austin, Texas. - Moved to Austin, worked long hours due to poor hotel wifi. - Realized they needed to pivot from Ai record label.

- *Mentorship and Pivot*: - Spoke with mentors and attended New York Tech Week. - Decided to focus on live music data analytics. - Launched a matchmaking service for performers and venues.

- *April Fools’ Marketing Stunt*: - Planned a fake company sale announcement as an April Fools’ joke. - Generated significant buzz and reconnected with many contacts. - Ultimately revealed the joke, gaining positive feedback.

- *Current Focus*: - Shifted to a live music data analytics company. - Continued to innovate and adapt their business model.

Huh, that’s not my experience. My wife rides to work on her R&M e-bike, every working day, all year round, in sun, rain or snow. Daily distance is about 40km (25 miles), two hours back and forth. Not a single major problem caused by water in more than 5 years.

No recall, no refund, no replacement. The customer gets a 2 months free subscription and that's it.

And the death penalty for the engineer who didn’t patch a vulnerability or the software developer who wrote the buggy code. That will teach them! Judge Hindsight is ready to punish the victims.

Hacks happen. Where starts or ends someone’s responsibility? Where stops the buck? Can we really expect that every layer in an organization is always fully aware of security and security risks, even unknown vulnerabilities? Security practices change over time. Not so long ago 12 character passwords were considered safe, 2FA didn’t exist, …

I don’t think that harsher punishments and victim blaming is the way to go.

Well, they already had the Xictionary, a "dictionary" of Xi-related words, thoughts and quotes. I guess a complete LLM based on the CCP cult leader is the next new quality productive force in this whole-process people's democracy. If that last sentence looks like insane word salad, you clearly haven’t read the Xictionary!

I wonder what the LLM will say about the free and independent country Taiwan, the Tibet invasion, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre or the current Uyghur genocide. Probably as speechless as the Xictionary?

Bakfiets is Dutch/Flemish for cargo bike.

It's a bit deceptive to claim you have a Privacy First policy when it's opt out. True privacy is not opt out, but opt in.

The Joe Blogs Channel was hacked and hijacked on 29th March. At that time he had 360,000 subscribers, over 108 million views and around 1,000 videos. In this video he provides an update on the situation and says thanks for all of your support.

It’s a bit weird to see a French translation of the Flemish proverb right in the middle of the engravings, although in a smaller type. The engravings are from the 16th century, already then there were apparently tensions between the Flemish and French speaking parts or classes in the region.

> they totally threw out objectivity as a goal.

Seems a bit hyperbolic. Could you share some examples of that? Not from the opinion pages, but from the news section?

I think nearly all the house cleaners will be extremely surprised to hear that they earn $50 an hour. Even more, they get all their travel-related costs reimbursed! Oddly enough, that's not what they see on their payslip. And that's assuming they get a payslip at all.

I do remember Steve Jobs wanted "to go thermonuclear" on Android (mostly Samsung and Google), saying "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product."

Other motives, same behavior.

That last paragraph didn't age well:

Regardless of the cause, health experts in China are optimistic that the outbreak will be contained and that response efforts will be better than they were during the SARS outbreak. Xu Jianguo, a former top Chinese public health official, noted to The Washington Post in a report today, "More than a decade has passed. It's impossible for something like SARS to happen again."

Comedy gold.

I’ve seen it a few times on the web with cookie preferences pop-ups, to set your tracking and personalization preferences. Dark patterns to confuse and trick website visitors into enabling all tracking settings.

I don’t trust Apple. Looking at the company’s modus operandi in China - and Hong Kong - tells me more than enough. And by extension, the treatment of Jon Stewart. And I write this in Safari on my iPad. So no, I don’t hate Apple.

It’s a g? To me, the logo looks like a depressed, lonely circle sitting on a bench. But that’s probably just me.

Actual arguments? Yes. All smear? No.

Would you like to have a TL;DR too?

Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?

No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps... .

It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because paywall)

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

> it doesn't hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a rock

Falling like a rock? Where is this comming from? What Europe are you talking about? The EU, the continent, the eurozone, the UK, Russia?

Granted, high inflation, primarily caused by higher energy prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has slowed down consumer spending in the EU, but generally speaking the outlook isn't that bad.

- Total financial assets of EU households grew almost continuously during the period 2011–2021, falling only in 2018. Their total value increased from €21 331 billion in 2011 to €34 982 billion in 2021, a 64.0 % overall increase. (Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

- Consumer Spending in European Union is expected to be 1804.00 EUR Billion by the end of this quarter, according to Trading Economics global macro models and analysts expectations. In the long-term, the European Union Consumer Spending is projected to trend around 1836.00 EUR Billion in 2024 and 1869.00 EUR Billion in 2025, according to our econometric models. (Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/consumer-spendin...)

- In June, Eurosystem staff revised down slightly the outlook for growth in the euro area for the next two years. The economy is expected to slow to 0.9% in 2023 before rebounding to 1.5% in 2024 and 1.6% in 2025 as energy prices moderate, foreign demand strengthens and real incomes improve. (Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2023/html/ecb.sp230...)

The reaction of China and South Korea is hilariously hypocritical. Both countries have been dumping nuclear waste water in the ocean for years - and continue doing that.

Geopolitics at it's worst.

That's interesting. Could that be the reason why Instapaper doesn't retrieve and save archive.{etc} pages? Is Instapaper using Cloudflare DNS to do so? Pocket or Raindrop.io for example have no problems with archive.{etc}.

How about Google bloatware? Samsung Internet browser is far more superior than Google Chrome, but you can't uninstall Chrome. Of Gmail. Or Play Store. Much of the bloat is coming from Google. After all, it's a Samsung device, not a Google device.

I used to be some kind of Androis purist, owner of multiple Nexus and Pixel devices. But for several years now, I'm sticking with Samsung.

> Rival ebike maker Cowboy is making an app[0] that supports some VanMoof bikes and they say it will support more models in future.

That future can be very short. Cowboy is like Vanmoofs twin: proprietary parts, ridiculously VC funded, mountains of debt, more losses than revenue, no realistic path towards profitability, ... All that in a ebike boom decade. It's another bankruptcy waiting to happen.

Here's the link to it: https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.auct.twitter2nitter/ .

Going from Vanmoof to Cowboy Bikes is like switching from the plague to cholera.

Same modus operandi: excessively VC funded, lots of hype, proprietary parts, mounting losses, loosing money with every sale, ... and it's getting worse every year. Cowboy Bikes is just another bankruptcy waiting to happen.

They lost the plot when they started selling Evernote-branded socks (and other accessories). No bugs smashing, better search or faster/more reliable sync: flush with VC money, the smart guys at Evernote decided that Evernote-branded socks was what their users really wanted.

I still have a few Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks lying around. They came with a 3 month voucher for Evernote Premium, I think. Anyway, heavily discounted on Amazon, it was almost cheaper to combine the notebooks with vouchers than to subscribe online.

And then you had all the different apps, like a recipe app. My God, all the apps. Complete waste of resources, complete lack of focus.

When the VC money dried up, the penny dropped. Prices were hiked, new subscription tiers with artificial limitations were introduced, management changed, but by then the writing was on the wall and I switched to alternatives.

Being one of the first 1000 Premium users, I still feel bad about the loss of my second/forever brain, though.

Vivaldi or Brave are good Chrome-based alternatives with ad blocking and anti-tracking features built-in. Vivaldi has even better translation integration than Chrome, IMO.

They're a bit expensive, but from personal experience and recommendations from friends: Riese & Müller, Stromer, Koga and Flyer. Be aware of trendy brands like VanMoof or Cowboy. An electric bike is not really high tech, no need for brands that act like they're a tech company or the Tesla of electric bikes.

But first of all, look for local dealerships and find out which brands they're selling. You need regular maintenance for your electric bike and many bike shops refuse to work on bikes bought elsewhere, especially cheap bikes bought online, and I can't really blame them.

A good electric bike ain't cheap, but lasts a lot longer than a no name/cheap one. A cheap bike with one problem after the other sucks all the joy out of owning one and is the surest way to a dust collecting piece of metal in the back of your garage, nevermind the extra costs.

And get electric bike insurance. Budget for it in advance. Getting your brand new expensive ebike stolen is quite traumatic.

That's a whalesome thought.