DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”

National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”

Sadly, many wifi-enabled devices only work with some proprietary cloud-service and even if not, they’re only one configuration error (or intentional backdoor) away from talking to the outside. Better have something that isn’t physically able to talk to the internet no matter how badly I fuck up its configuration and my firewall.

The solution is not more but different connected devices so I can decide for myself what needs to be connected and by which protocol. Get the dumbest device on the market, no wifi, no internal clock, maybe not even a humidity sensor and then, if and only if I need to remote control it, for example to put it on a schedule, I can use the cheapest “smart” device on the market to connect it to an in-house machine that can turn it on and off.

I run home automation with lights, switches, outlets, heaters and some more and not a single device has internet access. They all use Zigbee (a simple radio protocol) to talk to homeassistant which is open source and hosted on a machine that lives under my desk.

Separating tasks between the dehumidifier and outlet has the advantage that each individual device can be a lot simpler, leaving less attack surface. My power outlet can’t read the humidity sensor, it doesn’t need to talk to an external server, it doesn’t even need to know that the thing connected to it is a dehumidifier. It’s just a chip that receives a radio signal and toggles a relay on or off. That’s it.

Separating the two concerns also lets me replace the devices separately if one breaks or my requirements change. If I suddenly need wifi or bluetooth instead of Zigbee or if it’s for some reason no longer supported by homeassistant, I can just replace a 9€ outlet instead of the whole dehumidifier that could get bricked by the proprietary app losing support.

This can be done with something like Zigbee. Or even simpler: you hook a non-connected device up to a “smart” power socket. No need for the device itself to talk to the outside world.

Do NOT, I repeat NOT do this. Someone very close to me did something similar and got irreversible brain damage that still shows itself years later in the form of epilepsy. Our brains are not made for that little sleep over long periods of time.

Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

Until they notice that cleaning up after failed AI-written code is more expensive than writing working code from the start. Which is already happening for some companies.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

I‘ll give my best to give you some feedback if you post something

Dooo iiiiiit! I really enjoy reading about niche homebrew settings.

I even made a new account specifically so I could make it there and not on my personal instance.

There is one effect that I’ve seen described in an article a while ago that seems plausible:

Every dating app user base tends to separate itself into one group that’s relatively popular and one that is less popular. For this post, let’s assume women are the popular group but on some apps it could be the other way round or an entirely different split when you consider non-heteronormative matches. The problem is that this effect causes a feedback loop. Women get a lot of matches so they get more and more selective and give out fewer and fewer likes. This causes men to get fewer matches so they give out more and more likes so they don’t miss the few potential matches they might get. Which in turn causes women to get flooded even more and so on. In the extreme case, women can assume that almost every time they swipe right on someone, this will lead to a match while men need to swipe right dozens or even hundreds of times and include people who don’t really match what they are looking for until they get a match.

There is no easy way to fully solve this but making incoming likes visible might at least reduce the fear of missing a potential match if you don’t swipe on everyone who’s even remotely interesting. Of course this is the number one feature that dating apps try to monetize.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.

From what I can tell from the article, that’s exactly the point. This is not about manufacturer-sanctioned intentional fingerprinting but about every printer making slightly different mistakes by accident that just happen to be consistent enough to be recognizable.