Canadian police seem pretty level-headed here.

“There was not a ding on the bus. He did a great job,” said McKenna said. “It’s comical but at the same time it’s serious. We’re thankful nobody was hurt.”

“We didn’t want to spook him,” he said. “We didn’t want to make this a tragedy.”

The problem here is education.

And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.

AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.

It makes sense to me IF it actually works.

Having extra capacity when a device is brand-new isn’t a huge boon, but having stable capacity over the long term would be. At least for me.

Of course this will depend on your habits. If you replace your phone every year, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re a light user and only go through a couple charge cycles per week, it’ll matter less than if you go through 1-2 cycles per day.

Personally I’m at around 1 cycle per day on my current phone, and after nearly 3 years (over 1000 charge cycles now) the battery life is shit — much worse than just 80% of its original battery life. Performance also suffers. With my last phone, I replaced the battery after 3 years and I was amazed at how much faster it was. I didn’t realize throttling was such a big problem.

I might replace my current battery, but it’s such a pain, and it costs more than my phone is realistically worth.

WTF is up with that title. Jesus.

The majority of people will trail behind by 5-10 years, same as always. As long as a small minority at the cutting edge continue to use and develop better things, everyone will have access to them eventually.

They announced that they’re working with an OEM to support new non-pixel phones (perhaps even shipped with GOS).

The Pixel 9 series will be supported for another 6 years, and GOS support for the Pixel 10 is probably coming after Google releases QPR1 source. Hopefully there will be viable replacements by then.

Google is obviously going to keep making this more difficult but the rest of the world isn’t going to just sit still.

Other terms that made the shortlist of finalists for this year’s Word of the Year included “agnetic,”

Surely they mean “agentic”, right? Right???

I searched for “agnetic” to see if I was out of the loop and it’s kind of funny, kind of sad. I found a lot of what I guess is AI slop that took a typo and just ran with it. Like this one: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clash-intelligences-agnetic-ai-vs-agent-explained-robin-biwre

Agnetic AI is a newer conceptual framework that extends beyond the traditional agent-based model. The term “Agnetic” is derived from the word “magnetic,” signifying its dynamic, adaptive nature.

https://www.agnetic.ai/ also looks like slop, but it’s realllllly hard to distinguish between AI bullshit and traditional tech marketing bullshit.

The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

The only thing I would use such a thing for is installing an ad blocker for the real world.

Well, telling time is one more feature than most jewelry has, and that’s what mechanical watches really are. That’s not even very expensive as far as watches go.

I sure wouldn’t buy one myself, but I won’t judge anyone for their taste in fashion accessories. In this case I will absolutely judge them, but for entirely different reasons.

Robots commuting to the moon.

Robots.

Commuting.

To the moon.

This is the most extreme case of affluenza I’ve ever seen. Let’s pray that it’s terminal.

Representation…in AI image generation?

The idea that this is something anyone should want is hard to wrap my head around.

If I could opt out of being deepfake-able, I would.

This always sparks debate, and I can see why.

There are a million reasons you might need to stop. That’s why highways are designed with specific speed limits, so you have enough time to see hazards and come to a full stop if necessary. If you’re not prepared to stop unexpectedly, then you are a menace to society.

But it’s also dangerous to stop. That’s why most places have laws against stopping (or even going too far below the speed limit) unnecessarily. It’s a hazard.

Neither is an excuse for the other.

If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.

Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

I very much enjoyed the start but steadily lost interest.

There’s some good stuff in Discovery all the way through, don’t get me wrong. But they kind of flipped the script in a way I did not appreciate.

Most of classic Trek showed us a future with a largely functional society, mostly full of good people who were ready and willing to deal with occasional corruption.

Lots of newer Trek, and especially Discovery, showed us a future where society is largely dysfunctional and corruption is the norm. Almost everyone in the series who isn’t a main character (plus a couple who are) is a piece of shit. Even the “good guys” frequently encourage or at least tolerate clearly evil behavior as long as it serves their ends. But it’s okay because…friendship I guess?!?

Their heart is in the right place but the writing is generally bad. I think this generation of writers is incapable of imagining a better world, which, sure, is understandable, given how thoroughly corrupt our current society is. But it’s deeply depressing. It lacks soul.

SNW is better in this regard. But you’ll probably want to watch season 1 of Discovery first since there’s some crossover.

Still good if you want ROM support or are willing to wait a few months to pick one up for dirt cheap.

GrapheneOS only supports pixels, and LineageOS only officially supports a few more models. If you filter the official LineageOS devices list to 2024/2025 models, you’ll see Pixels, Moto G 5G, and OnePlus 12R. That’s it. Options are similarly limited for Calyx, e/OS, and others. So with most other recent phones, you’re stuck with all the stock bloat and spyware, or unofficial community builds.

Also, they’re dirt cheap in practice in the US. MSRP is a joke. For most of the year, you could get an unlocked, brand new Pixel 9 for less than the MSRP of the low-end 9a. If memory serves, it dropped under $400 at times.

Aside from that, they kind of suck. I wouldn’t even compare them to high-end phones. They are mid-range phones masquerading as high-end. Credit to Google’s marketing department, I guess.

Yeah, I’d rather come at it from the opposite direction. “Everyone censors, so this exactly the kind of shit your government is going to try to force on you in the future.” Everyone should care about this, if only out of self-interest.

China’s writing the playbook. Other countries will follow it sooner than you might think. This is everybody’s problem.

I have a bookmarklet to enable text selection on any web page that tries to block it that way.

Here it is for your convenience. Bookmark it and give a try on the linked blog post:

javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);

Can’t remember where I swiped that from. Probably some ancient StackOverflow thread.