zevon

There is a (relatively recent, for the Pebble-verse) Home Assistant app on Rebble that works with the current Home Assistant version. You can even do voice control and stuff.

You can also do timers, reminders, web searches and similar basic assistant things with Bobby - another recent addition to what the Pebbles can do: https://rebble.io/2025/03/24/introducing-bobby-our-new-pebbl...

It's not e-ink but a transreflective LCD.

As to "why": I'm not interested at all in Garmin's sports and health features and their cloud stuff. Pebbles work well, get out of the way and have a nice, friendly and slightly quirky interface. There are many apps and watchfaces out there. As of the new ones, the OS is open source. Reasons enough for me. ;)

The contrast between all that fancy equipment and the actual work surface being a cheap-as-can-be fibreboard (that will get nasty quickly and suck up all liquids) with a more or less unfinished edge that will probably feel uncomfortable is a bit too much of the designerly touch for me...

It may be easy to get a simple(ish) one now, but there are already a lot of e-bikes out there with "smarts", apps, vendor-lock-ins up the wazoo, cellular connection and the like. If electric cargo bikes ever go mainstream, I expect the majority of them will be techifyed in the same vein as the Hyundai the author wrote about.

This is a bit of a two-edged sword. I kind of doubt that Carplay and Android Auto will keep working with new phones as long as a car can. At which point you will end up with an old smartphone in your car or some workaround like that.

I was serious (though I like irony, yes). People are messy and if you want facts and knowledge, getting as close to source materials as possible is what one always has to do. LLMs can help but they are no replacements for knowledge work and learning.

Even my last paragraph served a purpose: To express that you probably will never get interaction in real life like you would with an LLM (if you are not in a position of power - take my slave example or take a retail sales experience for a less extreme example).

Not sure what you mean by "audience", through.

I think immersing yourself in a university is a good thing for a few years. It almost doesn’t matter what you study as long as you don’t treat university as a school or degree machine. Sit in on courses from other fields of study. Engage in student politics. Build a plane / car / student coffee shop. Stick your head in a lot of research labs and ask the people there questions. Roam though the cellars, liberate an old mainframe / robot arm / CNC machine and make it work again. Do theater. Whatever. Universities are big, interesting places and there are not many other environments where you can learn, try out and hack on so many different things.

If you want factual, how about the source material the LLM was trained on?

If you want human interaction, you will probably have to deal with people being messy (just as LLMs are - they just hide it better beneath a veneer of sickly „politeness“).

The closest analogy might be to move somewhere where you can get slaves, find a few well-educated ones and interact with them like you would with an LLM. You could even make some psychedelics available to them so they can occasionally hallucinate a bit.

Because I can only guess what experiences you need to go through to see your spouse in an LLM. They are probably not good experiences.

Oh my. This subreddit makes me sad.

I have the same attitude. While I don't keep them as long, I've rarely ever had a car that was less than 20 years old. And why not? Keeping stuff that works around instead of throwing it away is good, it's cheap, there is long-term data available on what works / didn't work / the spare part situation, fuel economy and safety mostly depend on what models you chose and compare. Working on old stuff is often also easier (no matter if you do it yourself or pay someone else). Also: Switches, stalks, locks that also work without batteries, no huge displays, no ride-by-wire - nice! ;)

This may be true under certain conditions but there are many cars around that are much older than 10 years and have never needed major surgery along the lines of an engine replacement. It's not unreasonable to expect a car and its engine to run for the 25 years or more mentioned by the person you were replying to. Maintenance and routine repairs can be had for reasonable prices if you find yourself a good, fair mechanic and drive a car that's not too rare and has an OK spare part situation.

Interesting. Can I ask if you use Apple's cloud services? If so, I understand. I don't use those, even on Apple devices, so to me, the whole setup is similarly annoying on both platforms with maybe a very slight edge towards the iPhone because it has most things I need out of the box. Other than that, I really don't think I miss anything on the "basic stuff" front on my Pixel compared to my iPhone (I use them both daily, with the former being my personal phone and the latter the job-issued one).

I've been doing the dual-driving iPhones and Android devices for a long time and times were definitely worse, in my opinion. The last thing I remember really annoying me on the regular was the lack of AirDrop but with alternatives like LocalSend and KDE connect, that's fixed as well.

With their canes, sound and tactile information, for example. I'm sure you've seen visually impaired people around and about on their own, no?

Great to see that Touch Mapper is being developed and maintained actively. I've used it (I think - maybe it was something similar) years ago together with a blind student and it was very helpful for them.

There are many, many K.I.S.S. cars out there. They are used, old, cheap and can still run great. Personally, I really do not want to have a car with any kind of computerization (other than a basic ECU) and more complexity and weight than it absolutely needs to have. Fortunately, I'll be fine - I doubt the supply of old cars runs out before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

I have been in similar situations and I've quit without having anything new. These decisions were very hard and, to some extent, haunt me to this day but they were the only way out.

While I generally agree with the advice of quitting only after having something new, I also think there are situations and contexts that can fuck you up in ways that make it very, very difficult to search for something new while you are in the shit.

There may be compromises depending on the system you live in. A long sick leave, for example (however, those processes can be similarly mentally exhausting to interviewing for a job). Other people have suggested putting in 8 hours and no more - I also think that is generally good advice (but again - depending on context, this can come with stress factors like social pressure).

I can relate to not wanting any of the tech giants near my shit but may I ask what your Google concerns are on GrapheneOS?

I also have an iPhone as well as a GrapheneOS phone. They are different but I'm quite happy with those alternatives to the apps you mentioned:

Etar as a calendar frontend app. DAVx5 for syncing CalDAV and CardDAV (so calendar data, contacts and optionally also tasks). I manage tasks within my notes, so I do not really use a todo/reminder app at all but there are different options. tasks.org plugs into DAVx5, for example.

Depending on your server-side setup and your willingness to compromise on open source, are also other options. For example, if you work with an Exchange server, there is the "Nine - Email & Calendar" app which is a very powerful all-in-one-client similar to traditional Outlook on the desktop.

For photos, there are quite a few solid options, depending on what you want. I use the Fossify Gallery with only my Camera folder visible for day-to-day stuff and also have Aves Libre installed for a more advanced interface to my pictures and videos.

If you can live with SMS instead of iMessage: KDE Connect on Android works very nicely for messaging from the desktop (the Desktop application is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Functionality varies per platform but SMS works on all of them). https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I get that it's always be about money in the end but I understand this sub-thread to be a bit more specific: Is there an ad sales platform run by Apple where your Benjamins have influence on the search ranking in the App Store? I and many other people here are not talking about things that are clearly ads (like a "featured" result or the ads shown by google and other search engines).

Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.

I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).

The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).

If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).

Depends on what you need or want to do with it, I guess. Storage via USB-C or Thunderbolt and Ethernet over an adaptor works fine and is plenty fast for my music and video library and as a backup target.

Well, there is the Fabricademy (an offshoot of HTMAA / the Fab Academy) for all sorts of things related to textiles: https://textile-academy.org/

But yes, generally speaking, the focus is on digital(ish) fabrication which is probably not entirely surprising - it's a course by the Center for Bits and Atoms.

Just a random powered USB-C Hub with a few external drives on one port and a Thunderbolt SSD I had from an old project on the other. For now, I just use the SMB server built into MacOS because I've not gotten around to installing Asahi on it.

I think I turned auto update off on this machine but if it reboots, you would have to login first. Doesn't bother me, though. I don't have any uptime requirements.

I agree, especially about the integrated USP and peripherals.

In my case, I currently use a Macbook Air M1 (my personal one which I currently don't need as a laptop). Absolute overkill and in some aspects annoying - only two USB-C ports for example - but it was available and it's fanless and doesn't need much power.

Going around a CS research department and asking the population there to justify their cron jobs and other stuff they run sounds like an excellent use of a (rare-ish) university admin / IT staff's time... /s

And deal with the ire of Professor Foo (and grad students Bar and Baz) who want/need to use obscure software XYZ and have done so for years (or decades) without any fuss. And build some interface between your HPC clusters and Github. And keeping with regulations and agreements on privacy and security. And so on and so forth. All that for the low, low cost of... Well, certainly not less than keeping and maintaining like one to three unix machines that don't need no fancy hardware or other special attention in the data center you are maintaining anyway?! Why?

edit: By the way, from their documentation, the department mentioned by the author runs their own E-Mail-Servers (as many universities do - fortunately, in this world, there often still is a bit more choice than 'use Gmail/Outlook in the browser').

Free and available is always good (especially in a research environment). ;) The author also says this in the P.S.:

"I believe the reason people run IDE backends on our login servers is because they have their code on our fileservers, in their (NFS-mounted) home directories. And in turn I suspect people put the code there partly because they're going to run the code on either or both of our SLURM cluster or the general compute servers."

In this context, it is a Unix machine configured for general purpose use (so no minimal web-server-centric OS, for example) where everybody in the organisation gets a login (probably automatically and tied to whatever SSO they use). There may also be some niceties installed and/or preconfigured - like software used frequently by this and that research group or auto-mounting the user's file share from the central storage cluster.

I'm of the "my NAS/home server is an old Laptop and a bunch of more or less random drives in a box" persuasion, but this is great work and great documentation! :)

The material thing is debatable. 3D printed Polyamide - possibly with a fibre filler - is really nice for phone cases, in my opinion. The surface texture is grippy, it's quite durable (and I like the look).