Khrux

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it’s from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.

“Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal”.

Either way, it’s a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they’re reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.

As an entirely different tangent, I’m someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I’m always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I’m talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it’s that they know how to learn from a background where it’s necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it’s even just a coincidence and just random correlation I’ve seen. Either way, I’d worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

That’s the real thing I wasn’t ready to admit until you said it. I don’t want a screwdriver because it’s less impressive to see. People will look at me and make the mistake of thinking they couldn’t do it, but when it felt like LEGO, people were more likely to be interested.

I’d really really like a phone with cameras that are flush with the back of the case, and don’t care whatsoever how thin my phone is once it’s under 1cm.

It feels like the entire ethos of smartphone design (led by apple) had sleek minimal design as it’s guiding light, but keeps adding exceptions. As much as I enjoy a versatile, bulky laptop and photography camera, I really enjoy the style of a smartphone being a piece of glass in my pocket.

I’d have preferred a click lock of sorts, because in the cases I’m wanting to swap my battery, I’m probably on the move with no access to power / charging, such as hiking, coach rides, camping etc.

Currently I’m pretty happy with a portable charger but I’d much rather have one or two fully charged batteries, both for the speed of getting back to full charge and reducing the speed of battery degradation.

I’m already a big fan of having a minimalist daily carry, I have my phones with my bank cards on it, my house keys and maybe my camera or water bottle, and that’s all. If be happy to shove a few spare batteries in a little case when I know I’ll be out the house for some time, but a screwdriver is something I’d prefer to not have to carry every day.

I’m actually quite fond of a large screen, but it’s not enough of a selling point for me to not go for this as my next phone. I have large enough hands that I don’t struggle with reach on a large phone, so the main drawback is the additional battery power. But the fairphone has a swappable battery anyway, so that issue is more or less nullified.

My pet peeve is the front camera, I cannot wrap my head around the lunacy of having a large dead spot on the front of the phone, to the point I’d rather have a phone with no front facing camera than a big dead spot. People throw out screens for less.

Fairphone is almost the ideal phone for me, except this, and although I can probably remove the camera module, I can’t swap the screen for one without the dead patch.

The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.

Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.

This guy pops up everywhere online with screenshots of his silly tweets, and every time I think it’s Edward Snowden.

It takes me to the end of tweet to realise that’s a crazy post for him, and go back and read his name properly.

I’m the opposite, I want romance, character death, low magic, a later era (1700s theming more than 800s), safety tools out the wazoo and in-game bigotry that my party can rebel against.

In my own opinion, it’s Disney good.

Early Simpsons was slightly edgy, not in a shock factor way, but in a way where it could explore mature themes without any tonal whiplash, while still being entertaining for kids and adults.

As Fox deteriorated, so did the Simpsons, presumably from bad producing and low funding. Pretty much as soon as the Disney acquisition happened, quality began to climb again, and people have been saying it’s good for a few years.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the real feeling isn’t that it’s good, just that it isn’t bad anymore. It’s as inoffensive and bland as many Disney IPs, but doesn’t carry the true badness of Fox. I don’t trust that Disney is able to give it the ingredients for it to be great again.

Their success came from it being specifically longer. It’s much harder to visualise a bigger surface area, like how a 10 inch pizza is bigger than two 7 inch pizzas. Subway on the other hand only stretches it in one axis, so the number goes up faster.

I don’t want long burgers, although I don’t know why. Big fan of the circle.

Oops, you’re right. It is copying something of its time because it’s all my dad would tell me when watching it growing up, but I can’t remember which film.

In time is absolutely an idea that I wish would get revisited for a TV show.

When I was a kid, for some reason, I loved the original West World movie, which is about 20% high concept and 80% “how do we copy terminator when all we have are a bunch of random Wild West, medieval and classical back lots?”

Obviously a few years ago HBO picked it up for a show, and that first season explores some of the richest philosophy I’ve seen on TV, in the way only Sci-Fi can; by building characters and technology directly around their philosophical takes and stress testing them. Also simultaneously it created an incredibly compelling story and characters. All of this stemmed from the idea “what if there was a wild west theme park manned by perfectly realistic animatronics?”

In Time may not have the cult classic reputation of the first Westworld but it’s got appeal and charm, while being basically only interesting in it’s high concept, and therefore perfect to pull apart and explore an HBO style branching plot. I bet you could get Justin Timberlake to appear in it again too, for added audience appeal. A show like this can also explore multiple characters in different classes, and those who interact with both. It’s just wasn’t that suited to a movie.

Just to ask, nobody understood the full picture of what they were making? Or was there someone who created the concept but intentional obfuscated it from everyone else via bureaucracy?

Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.

There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.

I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.

People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).

Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.

AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.