Is America Great Depression, yet?

Just for fun, I tried three more pens and writing in an inverted position (i.e. towards the ceiling):

• A Bic Crystal
• A Papermate Gel
• Some random pen from an auto shop with a nonstandard ballpoint tip (so probably some brand other than the first two).

All of them failed. Interestingly, the Crystal lasted the longest, but when it failed, it was almost immediate.

I’m not saying this is an especially scientific test, but I’ve now tried four different ballpoint pens, all from different manufacturers, and none could write upside down. Gravity is an important part of how they work on Earth.

It may be that you can still write in space, but I would hazard a guess that it has to do with whether you can keep ink on the ball. Since there’s no “down,” how you write or how you hold the pen when you take breaks might make things better or worse.

It’s cool, though, that he put it to the test. When I just put my pens to the side, they get refreshed and are able to write again, which is why my hypothesis is that it’s down to whether you can keep the ball continuously wet or not.

Yeah, I know it’s not precisely correct, but it’s a fable that’s commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I’m open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!

Did a check of their Terms, and they appear to be incorporated in Delaware (a common practice, since Delaware hides and protects a lot of information from public disclosure), but any legal challenges go through Santa Clara, California, so that’s probably where their headquarters is actually located.

Big yikes.

Just tried it, and the ink stopped. There’s no wick in it and apparently any capillary action is stopped by gravity. It wrote for a little bit for as long as there was enough ink sticking to the ball, but that didn’t last more than a few sentences.

In zero gravity, since there’s no gravity pulling the ink in either direction, a typical ballpoint pen would likely write inconsistently as the ink shifts in the tube from inertial forces, like a pen that’s drying out.

You may be right. It’s just easier to get the sentiment across that way than expound about how it’s ridiculously complex and overbuilt to achieve menial results.

AI: The “pen that can write in zero gravity” when pencils exist.

This framework was tested on nine complex challenges. It achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate. This suggests its applications in various multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.

85% isn’t good. It’s a vast improvement, but it’s not a good rate at scale. If you have 100,000 actions, 15,000 are wrong. If you have 1M customers, 150K are calling customer support.

Also, even if we’re talking about smaller scales like scheduling airline crews or managing machine time, how is AI not overkill? You have to have relatively massive amounts of hardware for the payoff of what a handful of people could do. Or a “dumb” algorithm. Or a signup sheet. And now we’re adding additional computing overhead?

AI is still a solution in search of a problem.

I would, but I just switched to LibreWolf, and in the process, my settings got wiped out, so I’m still rebuilding.

Surprisingly, there’s still plenty of websites that don’t need much JavaScript at all, so I think it’s better to just start fresh for your personal use.

NoScript is pretty straightforward. Default behavior is to block most JavaScript, but they have a few that have been let through to keep the web mostly functioning. You can go into settings and change the default behaviors or just ignore all that and start whitelisting things as you go.

Gotta have something to do when we’re unable to retire. 😉

Another DIY option to look at is Mycroft. They used to sell devices, but they’ve since stopped all development as of 2023. There’s likely still a community tinkering away, so I’d imagine you could still run your own if you wanted.

As will I, but those look like legit release notes and not a joke. Nothing jumps out as too good to be true or just bizarre.

Yes! NoScript is my tool of choice.

It can sometimes be annoying to have to whitelist things, but after seeing that when I allow the main domain (and maybe their CDN) through the filter, and ten more domains will try to do whatever it is they do—Google Tags and Analytics, some data broker, some cookie tracker, etc.—I’m willing to take that extra step just to keep all these companies from snarfing up my data.

A little annoyance is a small price to pay, in my mind.

Fr, though, duck typing in Python is one of my biggest annoyances.

I run a whitelist. I’d rather be more private than know what to blacklist (and there’s often a lot of extra JavaScript that gets called, mostly for tracking).

It’s not that tedious. You just add as you use the internet. Refresh the page when you’ve whitelisted.

I took a general comment and said something very specific. What you saw as dual meaning, I saw as one. OP did not make their intended meaning clear.

Maybe we can be better than Reddit and be more charitable with each other here, yeah?

I keep an old ring, that doesn’t fit, in a box. I got a silicone ring and honestly prefer it to my titanium ring. If I gain or lose weight, or get arthritis or something, the ring is a little more adaptable.

Plus, you can get silicone in lots of colors, so I like it for the fact that you can accessorize more easily!

Related and from a “history of religion in the US” POV.

https://youtu.be/LvmwGwnJf7c

Bruh, why are you taking umbrage? Chill, I didn’t shit on your birthday cake.