From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.

In Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.

Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.

Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.

And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.

YSK that OverDrive (developer of Libby) is a private for-profit company that makes obscene amounts of money. Pretty much a prime example of private-public “partnership” taking taxpayer money.

• Before COVID, they made enough to pay each of their ~300 employees half a million dollars. This figure increased during COVID. Guess who got bonuses? Not regular employees.
• OverDrive charges 30% overhead on top of publisher prices (which are usually already up to 4x higher for libraries)
• They criticize some publishers, but publisher raising prices conveniently plays into their hand. Publishers’ abusive “borrowing” models, such as limited “digital copies” or “pay-per-borrow” still work for OverDrive (see above)
• They were one of the first to market and are vertically integrated: they own the marketplace to purchase titles from publishers, hosting of titles, and the application. This is easy for clients (libraries), but difficult to switch away from.
• They partner with LexisNexis, who has been collaborating with ICE for deportations.
• Many of their employees are former teachers, and with miserly teacher salaries in Ohio, it’s another convenience to hire knowledgeable people for cheap.

I am not too familiar with animism either, but as far as I understand from the book, it’s the belief-idea-philosophy that humans are a part of nature, including both living and non-living things. (Contrary to modern idea of separating the “human” and “natural” worlds). In addition to awareness and careful choices, it believes in reciprocity, giving back what was taken from the ecosystem. Similar to what was/is practiced by many native communities.

(Please correct me if I am wrong)

Not just about climate, but Less Is More by Jason Hinckel. It is anticapitalist and pro-animist (!), and I found the historical parts interesting, particularly the philosophical angle of how separating the human from the rest of nature happened (and how it played into abuse of both nature and humans)

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid by Thor Hanson is about climate change, how animals adapt to it, how forests can migrate, and local climate anomalies.

I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.

A lot of them are getting blocked too, presumably by datacenter IPs. I suppose it’s possible to run it off a residential IP.

The article matches my experiences.

I knew a guy, not MAGA, but a self-identified libertarian, with very bigoted and bad takes (racism, misogyny, general lack of empathy). His responses for being called out or criticized were:

• This is a joke
• You are too stupid to understand the joke
• The joke I made is supposed to be making fun of people who say the same offensive things seriously (except the joke has no hint of irony or self-awareness)
• You are too stupid to understand the point I am making
• You don’t know stuff about life
• You lack EQ to understand my situation
• General insults about intelligence
• Why are you being an asshole to me?

Eventually, I also figured out that the only way to win is not to play the game. Shame, we were good friends back in the day.

IMO tech terms evolve a bit faster and are more accepted with their new spelling and meaning. Older words are less prone to such adjustments, but “alot” puzzles me as well.

Here are a few more to add to the confusion:

• From your own post, we now type “website” not “web site”
• We use email now, not e-mail, and definitely not “electronic mail”
• “Blog” is shortened “web log”
• Is it “username” or “user name”? They could mean different things, but might not
• It’s always “password”, not “pass word”. Same with “passphrase”.
• Is it “filename” or “file name”? In software, this becomes even more confusing since “filename” could imply a full path to the file, or just the name (sometimes without extension)

Mailbox.org

Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:

• Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don’t need custom domains, €1/mo)
• More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
• Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
• Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn’t happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
• Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)

Ukrainian “не лізь поперед батька в пекло” (“don’t rush to hell before your father”) - a mix of “don’t be foolish / try to prove yourself / hurt yourself doing so” and also “let experienced people do their job / lead”.

Also Ukrainian “або пан або пропав” (“Either [you become] a lord, or you disappear”), an important risky choice, or sometimes used as YOLO of yesteryear.

AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).

Don’t get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)

Samsung Galaxy S5 checks all of these. I prefer it with Lineage 14 (Android 7), but ran it with Android 8, and it can support up to Android 10 or 11 IIRC, although later versions are somewhat slow.

Samsung Galaxy J7 (2015) might also fit the criteria, even though it’s not a “flagship”.

If you’re looking for alternate OS list for smartphones and tablets, I compiled a list.

I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers’ ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it’s own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.

And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a “Microsoft-certified” NAV developer.

deleted by creator

LCDs from older devices (DVD players, cheap picture frames, even off-brand tablets, as long as LCD has a ribbon connector) can be salvaged and used with any other device using a ~$15-20 LCD driver.

Some old digital cameras can be used as a webcam via USB.

Very old keyboards might have DIP chips that could be reused (if the rest of the keyboard is damaged and you’re into building your own keyboards that is)

What’s your usage pattern for those devices? Almost full discharge + fast charge?

Asking because I only noticed a very small degradation (judging by reported charge %) in a flagship device after 3 years. A midrange phone from 2020 with heavy usage (charged twice a day sometimes, often using a fast charger) for 2-3 years did not have noticeable battery degradation. A low-end device from 2016 had no noticeable degradation after 4-5 years. Another 5+ years old second-hand phone had some, but nothing catastrophic. The only case of bad battery degradation (shutdown at 20%, unreliable gauge, etc) I have only seen in 10+ year old devices.

I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)

Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.

Any details on the technology? “Beaming phone signals” doesn’t tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?

Satellite phones aren’t new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.

Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is “no coverage” for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside “conspiracy theory” was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.

Have no idea if the situation changed since then.

I love the Revelation Space world. Just the right mix of plausible-yet-not-handwaved for me. Some factions but no grand Empire or militaries. No FTL travel, so you are never coming back to the same world you left. Technological nano-catastrophe (and horrors related to that). Semi-intelligent algae that rewires the brain (Turquoise Days is a great short story about it). Galactic-scale projects and space anomalies.

Thank you for telling me about Revenger, I haven’t read those yet.