I’m reminded of this video about how changes to the construction industry starting in the '50s resulted in the loss of ornamentation in architecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4

These days, the only ones I stay permanently subscribed to are independent platforms: Dropout and Nebula. They’re both cheap, entertaining, and they feel like responsible companies trying to make a positive change in their industry.

For all the others, I subscribe on a month by month basis when there’s something specific I want to watch. I try not to have more than one active subscription at any given time.

I got 8 in the span of about five hours today. Absolutely insane.

Yep, I got a series of those recently claiming that I had unpaid paid tolls. Each messagr came through as a group text with two or three random numbers, which were immediately removed from the group after the text arrived. I’ve been wondering why they started doing this. I assume they’re trying to exploit some kind of loophole in the carriers spam filtering.

Fun fact: Victorinox has been operating since 1884 and has never had to lay off an employee.

To avoid this they set aside profits during boom periods to supplement recessionary periods

What a novel idea.

https://labor411.org/411-blog/this-company-has-never-laid-off-an-employee-100-of-which-have-been-with-the-company-for-over-40-years/

Huh, I was under the impression that they used their own index. I just did a quick search found a blog post they publisted back in 2023. Here are some relevant excerpts:

At the time of publication, Qwant has in its servers 20 billion indexed web pages

Qwant uses Bing to supplement search results on which we do not have sufficient relevance, and on images where storage capacities are very important. On the rest, the main SEO logics are often the same which explains why you often find the same search results, ranked slightly differently according to the weight given to one or the other.

Of course, that’s the company pushing their own preferred narrative, so take it with a grain of salt. But assuming it’s not an outright lie, then they’re definitely more independent than a lot of other search engines.

I’m partial to Tom Cardy’s view: Pluto isn’t a planet, but that doesn’t matter because it’s still hot shit.

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

I think I can answer that, although I’ve never actually seen it explained, so it’ll be interesting to see if anyone else has a different take.

The Lemmy posts with “rule” in the title are all made to the 196 community. Per the sidebar, rule #1 of 196 is “you must post something before you leave.”

Putting “rule” in the title is basically shorthand for “I don’t have anything specific to say, but I have to post, so here’s some random shit I find funny.”

At least, that’s how it started. At this point, it’s evolved into a bit of a meme in its own right.

All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.

FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that’ll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.

You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I’m just gonna leave this right here: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smart-rotary-knob-w-1-28-round-touch-screen

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

Remember kids: the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

Actual quote from Adam Savage on an episode of Mythbusters.

For me, probably Big Fat Liar. “Starring” Frankie Muniz and Amanda Bynes, but the real highlight is Paul Giamatti as the villain chewing the absolute shit out of the scenery for an hour and a half as the kids subject his character to a series of increasingly elaborate pranks.