JohnEdwa
@JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on GenAI website goes dark after explicit fakes exposed 3 days ago:
Pictures of clothed children and naked adults.
Nobody trained them on what things made out of spaghetti look like, but they can generate them because smushing multiple things together is precisely what they do.
- Comment on Logitech is dropping support for its oldest Harmony remotes 1 week ago:
Or you could just winamp it.
Oh, wait, that’s a terrible idea.
- Comment on Why Anthropic’s Claude still hasn’t beaten Pokémon 1 week ago:
They don’t. But nevertheless, the progress they’ve made in a year is very impressive.
The question left to be seen is how it’ll look in a year or two: hardly any improvement, or a beaten elite four?
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
That’s weird, it isn’t for me.
Try archive.ph/iULP4 or web.archive.org/…/the-inside-story-behind-pebbles… - Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
The Pebble app was removed from the App store, so you have to manually sideload it every 7 days.
And:
Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone:
- There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
- You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
- It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble. Basically iOS does not have the concept of ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like on Android. What we did before was publish an SDK that other apps (like Strava) could integrate to make their own BLE connection to Pebble. It was a clunky quasi-solution that other apps didn’t like, because it was hard to test (among other things)
- If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet
- Impossible for watch to detect if you are using your phone, so your watch will buzz and display a notification even if you are staring at your iPhone
- You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.
- Because of iOS Appstore rules, it would be hard for us to enable 3rd party watchface/app developers to charge for their work (ie we can’t easily make an appstore within our app)
- Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS — creating a compiler inside the Pebble iPhone app that in itself needed to be written in (cross-compiled to) JS to work with Apple’s restriction on downloadable code can only be JS
- As a Pebble watch/app developer, using the iOS app as relay to the watch sucks since the “developer mode” terminates every few minutes
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
There was/is a companion app called PebbleNav/NavMe that worked okay-ish, as long as you could survive with “Turn left in 100 metres” type instructions with no map view (not really something you can do with 144x168 pixels).
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
Yet they are also the same - E Ink is an e-paper display. Electronic paper is a category for any low energy display tech that looks kinda like paper, E Ink is a very specific technology from E Ink Corporation.
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
Pretty much the only thing Pebble that Google owns any more is the trademark itself, which is why these aren’t called Pebbles, they are Cores.
The watches have nothing to do with Google whatsoever, with the exception that Google is the who open sourced the old Pebble software so it could be used again. - Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
Pebble still works thanks to the Rebble project. Everything else is free, but the dictation and weather services require a monthly $3 subscription to use as those are the parts that have rather hefty API call costs.
Though the experience is miserable on iOS thanks to Apple.
- Comment on The Pebble Has Been Brought Back 2 weeks ago:
due to Pebble selling out to Fitbit.
Due to Pebble going bankrupt, and managing to sell its software assets to Fitbit to gain just enough money to refund the kickstarter pledges and pay off it’s biggest debts.
- Comment on No More Parts Guesswork With iFixit’s Device Compatibility Checker 3 weeks ago:
That would require starting a database with the purpose of cataloguing every single part number in every single device that exists, which while technically possible, is rather unfeasible without extensive manufacturer cooperation.
What iFixit is doing is the other way around, they are telling what device a certain part number they carry fits in - as in their example, what Lenovo laptop that specific battery is compatible with.In a perfect world though that information would be available in the repair manual and schematic that came with your device, as they usually did a few decades back. Alas, that’s something that’s never going to happen again because it hurts profit margins.
- Comment on Pinterest changes user terms so it can train AI on user data and photos, regardless of when they were posted 3 weeks ago:
IANAL, but the way the federation by necessity copies your posts and information to every instance there is and to be able to do that it all needs to be under a licence that allows it to happen, those blurbs almost certainly are legally entirely meaningless. The only thing I can think of is claiming a non-commercial use violations, but that could put every instance that runs on donations under fire as well.
- Comment on “They curdle like milk”: WB DVDs from 2006–2008 are rotting away in their cases - Ars Technica 3 weeks ago:
Disk rot usually happens when air gets in contact with the reflective coating and oxidises it. With CD’s, it’s actually the top side you need to be worried about, as it’s right there under a thin lacquer coating. Any ding to that can expose the layer or just literally chip off a chunk of data.
At least on DVD’s it’s sandwiched inside the disk, so usually the only reason is a manufacturing error, and not really something the user can cause.
- Comment on Brazilian court gives Apple 90 days to allow sideloading on iOS. 4 weeks ago:
Sideloading (is supposed to) mean just transferring files between local devices, as in, you aren’t uploading or downloading them, you are going sideways. E.g you download a song to your pc, then sideload it to your mp3 player.
That’s also where it comes to installing phone apps, as you transfer the app to the phone yourself.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 4 weeks ago:
English is my third language, it’s hard to remember which parts of it belong to a fourth one and shouldn’t be translated (because “en masse” is literally French for “in mass”)
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 4 weeks ago:
If you cross-post, that sub gets it’s own up/downvote count. You would have to open the link and go to the original post to see and affect them, so it already discourages brigading
NP is when I link you directly to somewhere, e.g np.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/…/barbie_doll/ won’t have voting even if you are logged in, not on the post or the comments.
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 4 weeks ago:
When one community goes in mass to affect the votes in another. E.g someone is doing a poll/vote, and you link that to somewhere else with the hope, or sometimes direct instructions to go vote on it in a certain way.
That’s why reddit has cross-posts and the np (no participation, disables voting in the linked content) subdomain that try to keep the votes separated.
- Comment on Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn a 5-star safety rating in Europe | Euro NCAP will introduce new testing rules in 2026 requiring physical controls for the highest safety score 5 weeks ago:
Only if mandatory rear lights come back as well. Having them animate in the direction they are going to turn are very helpful when the car has no other rear lights whatsoever.
- Comment on Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn a 5-star safety rating in Europe | Euro NCAP will introduce new testing rules in 2026 requiring physical controls for the highest safety score 5 weeks ago:
Which are really easy to use when you have to indicate you are going to leave the next exit on a roundabout, btw.
So easy that Norway is banning the use of Teslas for driving schools.
- Comment on Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn a 5-star safety rating in Europe | Euro NCAP will introduce new testing rules in 2026 requiring physical controls for the highest safety score 5 weeks ago:
Also it accelerates the design-to-manufacture cycle of a new model - just slap a huge touch screen on it and start building the car, and hope the software is ready. If not, well, just ship it as is and patch it later.
- Comment on Can you Dehydrate Food in a Filament Dryer? 1 month ago:
Anywhere from 35C to 75C depending on what you are making. 50C is just about right for most vegetables and mushrooms.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 month ago:
It’s not three straight rows of keys with the other buttons on a fourth row at the bottom. That’s what BB had a design patent for.
- Comment on BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired 1 month ago:
My HTC Desire Z (aka T-Mobile G2) got many years of extra use as a dedicated emulation machine for exactly that reason.
- Comment on Amazon will remove the option to download/transfer Kindle e-books via USB by February 2025 1 month ago:
You should definitely not try to find info on how to take your Kindle on a WinterBreak ;)
- Comment on Portable drone jammer uses a Raspberry Pi tactical Software Defined Radio 1 month ago:
They are also frequency-hopping, meaning they constantly switch what part of the band they use, and there are a few rc radio protocols use a dual frequency system for redundancy. FRsky has one that does 2.4Ghz and 900Mhz at the same time.
So to make sure you are jamming all (commercial) drones, you need to deafen everything from ~850Mhz up to 5.9Ghz.
- Comment on The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back 1 month ago:
Also Android has an option to allow contacts that call you twice in 15 minutes to get through as well, which they would do anyway in case there is an actual emergency, and someone is really trying to reach you asap.
- Comment on Is it time to ring the alarm on internet door cameras? 1 month ago:
- Comment on How Nissan and Honda's $60 billion merger talks collapsed. 1 month ago:
Sources say.
- Comment on In light of recent events, here's OpenStreetMap editors discussing naming of the Gulf of Mexico 1 month ago:
Because the United States Board on Geographic Names now says so, as demanded by the Trump by Order No. 3423. They are the government body that defines what places are officially called.
But unless you are a US federal employee, as Nick Fury once said, “I recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.”
