ilinamorato
@ilinamorato@lemmy.world
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 10 hours ago:
Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.
- Comment on How do middle aged family men handle it? 20 hours ago:
This. It might be financially difficult, but you know what’s harder financially? Mental breakdowns, hospital stays, divorce cases, jail time. All of those are on the table when you work that much. Quit your job if you can, take as long a vacation as you can afford, remember why you enjoy your family’s company, and then ease your way back into working—at a reasonable schedule.
It’s not a cure-all. You probably still need therapy (there are places that offer grants and assistance with counseling). But a good work-life balance makes everything else feel like something you can handle.
- Comment on Is Fast Charging Killing the Battery? A 2-Year Test on 40 Phones 2 days ago:
No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 5 days ago:
Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.
They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 5 days ago:
True, though I think you might be able to use entertainers to overcome the rating drops long enough? I’m not sure.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 5 days ago:
Nice. I learned Qbasic to make a Pokedex.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 6 days ago:
Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.
- Comment on At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something 6 days ago:
Huh. I’m reminded of Roller Coaster Tycoon, which has scenarios where you have to have a certain number of guests in your park at a specific time; and a valid strategy is to get enough people to come into your park, and then delete the path behind them so that they literally can’t get out.
- Comment on Why Trump hijacked the .gov domain 1 week ago:
“Because he can?”
- Comment on Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline 1 week ago:
Brooms are technology too, they were just invented thousands of years ago. They need to just switch to dirt floors like God intended. Oh wait, floors are technology too.
Yeah, everyone has to choose what “modern” means to them I guess, but I think people who are happy to use smartphones and computers but draw the line at robot vacuums are kind of silly. There’s a difference between the original post’s (very reasonable) desire to have a disconnected robot vacuum that can’t collect data, and the further level of derision that seems to come up anytime anyone wants to use any kind of convenience or time-saving device.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 1 week ago:
They’re offloading authentication to your email provider. It’s basically quick and cheap oauth. I think it’s because they’re trying to avoid being a vector for a data breach.
- Comment on Why have so many services started using single-factor passwordless authentication in the last little while? 1 week ago:
Most phone OSes now have a “lockdown mode” which temporarily disables biometric authentication until you use a PIN to unlock it.
- Comment on How did we go from being against fake pictures of the moon to accepting things like changing out the entire sky? 1 week ago:
I don’t like the sky replacement stuff and never use it, but I can imagine that it’s because a photo of the moon is a photo of the moon, while a photo with sky replacement is a photo of something else where the sky just happens to be in the background. Pretty substantial difference.
One is a touch-up. The other is just replacing my photo with a better photo.
- Comment on How did we go from being against fake pictures of the moon to accepting things like changing out the entire sky? 1 week ago:
The difference was before, it didn’t make the fuzzy moon a clear moon when they took a photo. It was a misleading ad for a feature the phone didn’t actually have.
No, it did. The “feature” was actually released.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
My wife and I have phones where we keep our shared calendars, yes. But we have four kids who also have their own lives and schedules, and they often want to know what’s going on, what our plans are, etc. They would value being able to see the day’s upcoming events, too; when the play dates are, when the dentist appointments are, when the days off of school are, what we’re eating for dinner, all of that. Currently, their only access to that information is through our phones.
Having a screen in the kitchen that only shows calendars and a couple of other pieces of data would be useful. We wouldn’t want to be able to watch videos or browse websites on it, though.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
Interesting. I have not had that experience, on Tiktok or elsewhere. I do have a similar experience with tech reviewers’ videos on Youtube, though. Albeit not the sponsored ones.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
There’s an archive.is link in the original post: archive.is/…/samsung-family-hub-smart-fridge-ads-…
I’m wary of running afoul of copyright laws to literally paste it here, but I think you should be able to get it there.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
We’ve tried paper. And dry-erase. The problem is that we keep our calendars and todos and schedules on our phones, which don’t automatically update the paper; and by the second week, we tend to just stop manually updating it. There’s a paper calendar in my office that I just flipped to October last week (from August).
The only way that really seems to work, where we don’t forget an event, is having a single digital shared calendar.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
I agree with you there.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
We’re a family of six, and the kids don’t have phones. It’s tough to coordinate schedules already and it’s only going to get worse.
I recognize that I’m an edge case.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
This is an amazing article. I’m serious. Very well written. This is my favorite part:
I asked Higby why they were bringing ads to the fridges. He said via email, “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”
This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of Devices & Services, made to me last month when I asked him about advertising on its Echo devices. He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”
Do these people actually believe this? Do they see advertisements in their own lives and think, “ah yes, that was useful and contextual. That was a helpful ad, elegantly elevating my information.” I’ve seen some delusional people in executive-level roles, but that would be a special new class of delusion. Nobody likes ads. I recognize that some people have higher and lower tolerances for them, but nobody is actually grateful for them. Right?! I need to believe this is true.
Both companies claim they want to offer “curated,” “relevant” ads that might “enhance the experience.” I can buy that to some extent when it’s ads for features that your smart fridge or smart display offers. This tech is complicated and capable, and most people only tap into a fraction of what their devices can do.
That’s generous. But ok, maybe I can grant the premise.
But there is no future where third-party advertisements will ever be welcome in people’s homes like this — even if they happen to show me a brand of pet food right when my dog is looking at me with hungry eyes.
Right. Exactly. No matter what, I can think of no situation in which an ad is serving the customer’s interests. Maybe in the case of a coupon? But even then, I think it’s dubious.
- Comment on Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like 2 weeks ago:
Not a “smart” fridge per se, but I can see the use of a screen on my fridge; something where we can see our family calendar, leave notes for each other, and maybe also be able to access the grocery shopping list. Weather would be nice too, though you can keep the news widget (yikes). Something in a visible location in our house, where we go every day.
I’m not sure what other features they advertise with a smart fridge, but those few would be nice; especially if I could just plug a raspberry pi into it and skip all of the Samsung nonsense entirely.
- Comment on Study Claims 4K/8K TVs Aren't Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes 2 weeks ago:
Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren’t Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?
The rare exception to Betteridge’s Law.
But yeah, this matches my experience. I can tell the difference between 1080 and 4k from my couch if I work at it, but not enough to impact my enjoyment of what I’m watching, and definitely not as much as the difference HDR makes.
Even at computer monitor distance, running a 4k monitor at 1440 with high pixel density is probably going to be a better experience than wrenching every single pixel you can get out of it. Framerate is better than resolution for gaming, for the most part.
- Comment on Your Kindle Can Finally Be Jailbroken Again. [22:00] 2 weeks ago:
This is what I did. Haven’t felt the need to take it off of airplane mode yet.
- Comment on Did it really used to be common for guys to go to a bar every night like in Cheers or The Simpsons? 2 weeks ago:
Sir Patrick Stewart’s autobiography has a heartbreaking account of his father’s nightly bar visits, and it sounds like he didn’t drink alone.
- Comment on "Analog bags" are in. Doomscrolling is out. 2 weeks ago:
This is probably a good methadone, though. It’s way easier to kick a watercolor addiction than an addiction to an app purpose-developed by a whole team of engineers to string people along with the minimum possible dopamine drip for as long as they can manage.
- Comment on ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure it’s RAG at best. There’s no way I can conceive of that they’re actually training individual models for each user in a performant or economical fashion.
More likely, as you said, they’re just zero-shotting the relevant personal data into the context window. And honestly, I’d be a little surprised if they had a smaller model trying to evaluate relevance; a simple heuristic or basic frequency analysis algorithm would probably perform about as well and be a lot cheaper. The big final model can probably toss away the noise well enough.
- Comment on Honestly Bizarre 3 weeks ago:
Great word, topological.
- Comment on Honestly Bizarre 3 weeks ago:
Hmmm. Since breakfast cereal is demonstrably soup, that makes strawberries, Cheerios, and Reese’s Puffs all vegetables. Good to know.