Sometimes manufacturers "do their own thing". Nintendo USB-C power supply can somehow power my soldering iron at 20V, but cannot charge a laptop.

Ran into the complement/opposite of this with a cheap handheld. It cannot be charged with a USB-C PD charger, but can be charged with a "dumb" USB-A to USB-C cord, all because the manufacturer cheaped out on 2 resistors.

Relatively, the tolerances are low and surface is too rough for a true ball bearing like spin, but it does not bind or get stuck.

/uj

The "money spent on survival" is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.

...made by developers with a special student/hobby account, only for a limited number of devices.

Half-assed "solution".

forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider

Whose CEO publicly stated that "Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses". Oh, the irony.

No vibe coding needed. Many years ago, my friend, a new yet overly-confident web developer, pulled the entire list of usernames and passwords from the back-end when the login page opened. It was to "check if password is correct faster".

(And yes, he stored passwords in plaintext)

Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.

Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it's not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.

Some years ago, mentioning Linux for daily non-gaming use:

Guy: "Installing Linux is complicated though"

Me: "It wasn't bad 10 years ago, and now it's as hard as clicking Next a few times, even faster than Windows"

Guy: "Well duh, you have ten years of experience installing it!"

Difficult to argue with this non-logic.

Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.

Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:

What's up with these brand-new "Discord alternatives" being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320

AI? Or "i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now"? /s

Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.

Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.

Were you able to run it yourself? What.

Has been since 2018, and acquisition news caused quite an upset at the time.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)

Three Body Problem is what I call "big ideas" sci-fi. Large-scale problems, global crisis, often detailed world-building, sometimes decent plot, but boring characters, who often act simply as reader's eyes / observers.

Many of Alastair Reynolds' novels are like that, so was Red Mars, and even Blindsight and Rosewater.

Not everyone's cup of tea, and I completely understand why.

AI is a tech debt generator.

Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)

AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.

Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.

And it's just fun to make something that most people consider "obsolete" perform well, or well enough to be usable.

Not sure what role gender plays into that though.

Isaac Asimov's future of angry men yelling at uncooperative robots is almost here.

This is hilariously absurd to me

OpenPhone is an AI-native Android OS that turns the phone into an agentic device: a system-level AI agent that can see the screen, operate apps, remember commitments, monitor phone events, and continue work in the background

Usually people install custom ROMs specifically to avoid surveillance and random crap running in the background and improve performance, but this is the complete opposite.

It always seemed like shouting in a room full of people. Any coherent thought instantly became an unreadable mess due to the post character limit. Never understood live-tweeting. You could DM some company's support person... but why?

And I blame link shorteners' existence on twitter, too.

Could someone please enlighten me on what is the companies' endgame with putting AI chatbots everywhere in their products? (Especially generic ones like this) What are they looking to gain by doing so? And if money, how? Injected ads?

Honest question.

In 1920-30s, there was an obsession with radiation and radium, radium springs, "radium infused" drinks and beauty products, and so on.

A number of water sources (such as bottlers or artesian hot-spring spa hotels) rebranded themselves as "radium water" or radium springs to capitalize on the craze

"We are radium-first company"

Because a lot of current "AI" is a solution in search of a problem, being shoved into every product and hyped up as the next revolution, at a great expense. Even without the obvious environmental and financial impact, it is a huge nuisance. So people are upset and annoyed by it.

You could ask the same about pop-up ads, invasive apps, spammers, scammers, mandated age verification, Amazon's treatmeant of employees, and so on. No one would defend bad choices made by powerful people.