Yaky @ Yaky @slrpnk.net

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8 mo. ago

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)

FYI Annihilation novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, but is quite different plot-wise. It's more emotional, introspective, and has very vivid imagery. Much different from what I usually read, but I loved it.

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.

I think many chat clients at that time were XMPP based. We used Lotus Sametime at work, and now I am pretty certain it was XMPP (remembering some UX details and specifics), and it worked incredibly well.

IIRC Google Hangouts was XMPP, too.

Why not both? There are bridges that automatically convert and serve Gemtext to simple HTML for "regular" browsers.

In a similar manner, I wrote a set of scripts that takes gemtext source and creates both Gemini pages (by adding headers and footers) and static HTML pages (same but with some web-specific niceties - CSS, even JS snippets)

(And yes, I really enjoy gemtext markup for its simplicity)

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)

Upgraded pick will save you time and energy, so absolutely.

You can get desert totems from the trader (in the desert), but I don't remember what she wants for it. Not as much material as building one yourself.

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.