I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.

I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.

What if the only enabling factor to getting to Kardashev Type I is adoption of UTC for everything?

Yep, we’re doomed by the Great Filter.

How about two batteries that can be ejected and swapped without powering off the device? We don’t need to wait for super-capacitors today.

iPhones… someday. :)

Oh that’s awesome. The drop-down arrow “disapeared” with my mental blinders-- I was thinking it was only a toggle for PDFs.

This is a useful take: I too will use LLMs for search-- but not for search for journal articles with data and evidence. LLMs too easily confabulate these.

LLM-as-search is fantastic when you want a no-bullshit statistical result for what you’re looking for when you’re wanting an overview or interactive tutorial.

I have the big SearXNG portal bookmarked ( https://searx.space/ ) but I don’t find that I ever reach for it that often. Not being able to cull lower quality sites is just a little bit of extra toil I’m happy to pay to go away.

Ok, you piqued me: Got a link to a guide on using Kagi for the fediverse?

One of my best monthly expenses. I also appreciate being able to block low-quality domains from my search results.

StackOverflow initially had an interesting idea of putting metrics on things, and unfortunately humanity’s penchant for “what gets measured is gamed” was amplified and devolved into a hive of HOA Karens looking for infractions of the rules.

I’ll bet that if you “relaunched” a SO-like system and removed all human-visible “points” or “scores” you could achieve a less toxic environment. The only “ranking” is implicit based on your topical subscriptions.

Then again, you could “relaunch” the “relaunch” and “AlphaGo-ify” a bunch of AI agents to compose the dialogs and threads without any human interaction at all. I guess we’re on our way already to building Culture minds.

Absolutely doable.

I’ve switched to paid search with Kagi. Best standard feature is I can tell Kagi to block w3schools, mediumDOTcom and stackoverflow from my search results.

I don’t expect that from a month-old USB drive however. A month old USB drive that write-locks itself is a lemon.

SanDisk sells very pretty expensive plastic bricks that excel at disappointment and confusion (like when a USB flash drive decides to become permanently read-only).

Wow. Now we’re getting close to being attended to by Omm in THX1138.

Regularly Use

• bash
• python
• golang
• rust
• elm

Favorite

• rust because it provides a pretty good expressive type system for letting the compiler keep you honest.
• elm helps me avoid client-side programming hell with JavaScript.

Interested

• zig because of its promise of “compile it for anything” and small language philosophy.

I’ll bet it just ends up being the limitations of memory bandwidth to stuff things into registers for the optimized algorithm. Or, something like Mojo’s autotuning finds the best way to partition the work for the hardware.

I wonder if their paper has a plot of the speedups against number of elements. Did they just stop measuring at 250k? What was the shape of the curve?

Fun fact: Aaron Swartz who helped create RSS, was involved early in the development of Reddit.

I switched to iPhone because the OnePlus brand-enhancements was the “last straw” of my experience with devices in the Android ecosystem. Other problems:

• Updates. Major operating system updates maybe only lasted about a year. With OnePlus I think they even tell you that you’ll get two major updates and after that, the “device” is practically “end of life” if you wanted to avoid security issues.
• UX jank. Even if you had infinite major Android updates, Android itself was perpetually moving goal posts with how applications “looked.” This was most prominent when you tried to assist someone with a different (older or newer) version of Android. “Where things were supposed to be” for settings etc was always different between versions. If you asked them which application they were using for a function, you invariably got a “blank stare” because they did not in fact know because they were using the default…
• Shovelware. Every phone came with uninstallable applications which were nearly always crap, but somehow essential and were configured to be the default for messages, calling, contacts, etc.

I’m not going to say that iPhone does not also have these kinds of issues, but combinatorially iPhone has less of them because you are not multiplying configurations with different screen resolutions, microprocessors, Android versions, manufacturers, carriers and promotional rate plans. I won’t buy locked devices, because for me, it is better to consider the mobile phone as a tool you buy, and not a flavor-of-the-season vessel for a carrier’s service plan. The prices of unlocked devices are closer to the true value of the device.