I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.

As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.

I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.

I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.

The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.

Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).

In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.

It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.

It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.

I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.

It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.

Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.

I’ve been impressed by my Ulefone 27T. It’s an armoured brick with a 10,000mAh battery. Waterproof, with IR and headphone jack. It also has a thermal camera.

The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.

Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?

There are already plans for metadata signing. I think some high end Canon cameras might do it already. It basically allows proof (via public private key of the hash) that a particular camera took that photo.

The idea is that you can create a chain of custody with an image. Each edit requires a new signature, with each party responsible for verifying the previous chain, to protect their own reputation.

It’s far from perfect, but will help a lot with things like legal cases.

For many places, your signal isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the back haul from the tower to the main internet. 5G won’t help if there’s a straw connected to the fire hose of 5G.

I’m not going to knock her putting them to good use! It’s done well by her so far. 👍

Some places do electricity costs in 30 minute periods. If you know cost will spike when everyone gets home, and the sun sets, then running early makes sense. Other times, holding off for an hour might be more useful.

Just most sources of power. Photovoltaic, wind and hydro aren’t steam based.

As much as I would love Linux native builds of games, this also makes a lot of sense. I consider it a completely acceptable solution to the problem.

Animals are very rarely completely still. Even the motion of breathing or their heartbeat is enough to create very slight motions. This causes their fur to subtly move and shimmer. Our brain evolved to spot things like that (spotting prey, or predators). It’s piped into the conscious mind without context however. We just get a visual “something is missing/it’s fake” message.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

I suspect paradox are just taking a fuck you attitude here, but that’s a separate point.

Like it or not, Linux is a very small part of the gaming ecosystem. We also now have proton, that makes it far less of an issue.

Give all this, I would rather a reliable windows version, with an eye towards not fucking over the proton translation. Any Linux version would likely lack a lot of bug testing etc.

The goal is a stable fast game that runs on Linux. How that is achieved is almost irrelevant. At this point, asking them to play nice with our translation layer is the best option.

If someone is attempting to drop turds on you, from 20 floors up, you’ve REALLY pissed someone off. That takes dedication and ingenious planning to pull off.

Congratulations on your arch nemesis!

You joke, but it’s partially true.

I heard about a tall building that had its basement flooded with sewage. It turned out that the plumbers had simplified the drains. Rather than install the random turns every couple of floors, they just used a straight pipe. In effect, turds were falling 20+ floors, to smash into an inspection/access hatch. Eventually the screws sheered off, and everything emptied into the basement instead of the sewer.

It also has thermal imaging capability. 😜

It’s IP67 rated. In theory I could, and still have a functional phone.