However, Samsung is giving users the option to turn off ads.

For now, like the author herself mentions later on (“The bigger issue is that of trust. […] that’s today.”)

[Higby] “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”

What Shane Higby is saying here boils down to “we’re trying to help the user”. But if he said so, in clear words, every bloody body would call it bullshit, because it’s common knowledge companies smear ads on your face for their own sake - not yours. But if you hide it behind fancy words, like “further explores” and “deliver” and the likes, it’s harder to call the bullshit.

I’m getting real tired of this shit.

[Higby] "…future promotions will depend on the feedback and insights gained from the program.”

Translation: “we’re just testing the waters now. Let’s see if the suckers swallow it or spit it.”

This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s […] He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”

Emphasis mine. You can always trust Amazon in one thing: belittling the user.

The problem here isn’t just the ads themselves (although they are a problem); it’s that they are being added to the device after it’s in my home.

[Warning, IANAL.] Fight this shit. Seriously, fight it. On legal grounds. What they’re doing should be outright illegal in most countries; it’s equivalent to changing a contract unilaterally after both parties signed it.

Additionally, I’d strongly advise against buying any sort of “smart” device, unless you’re pretty sure the benefits of connecting your toaster to the internet outweighs all the risks of connecting your household appliances to the internet. Including corporations and crackers taking control of it, harvesting your data, spamming you, building kill switches into it, etc.

I’m not the only one, either. I think the only people left are those who see Nintendo as video-game iPhones and autopilot into a purchase, and the diehards who have dedicated Amiibo rooms.

And even those might suffer some causalities, depending on how things go:

• the ones treating games like luxury goods are a bit too susceptible towards popular attitude. If Nintendo goes from “wow, you got a Nintendo!” to “you got a Nintendo? Cringe. Even Twilight is a better love story.”, they’ll be quick to ditch it too.
• diehard fans tolerate more abuse than reasonable fans, but that amount if not infinite. And Nintendo has been rather abusive when it comes to the Switch 2, including remote bricking it for spurious reasons.

This reminds me a bunch of dumb jokes in Portuguese between “RAM” and “rã” toad. Including questions about “memória sapo” (toad memory).

Side thought/my own ramblings here: Has there ever been hosting where the information is scattered across the world rather than one localized spot? That seems like it might be helpful, but I honestly don’t know enough about site hosting

In a certain sense we are using a system like this, due to federation. I don’t think the exact same model would work well for Wikipedia, but it could try something similar.

“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

“Oh noes, people in Wokepedia aren’t willing to accept my opinion that gravity doesn’t work on Fridays!”

“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022.

If you’re really, really invested on 2+2 being five, then 2+2=4 becomes “subjective”.

In my opinion Wikipedia being hosted in USA is a liability. Or even being hosted in a single place, whichever it is.

If a megacorporation could profit nine zillions and fifty dollars, and instead it’s profiting only nine zillions, its shareholders are already screeching at the CEO “YOU INCOMPETENT FOOL, YOU’RE ROBBING US FIFTY DOLLARS!”.

For each 1kg of cheese you need around 10kg of milk. Add labour and storage costs - specially relevant for aged cheeses.

Any fuckin windows?

No. But at least some of those doors are cardboard. You need to test it out before claiming it’s impassable. And, sure, once you pass through someone is bound to screech “WHY DID YOU DESTROY THE CARDBOARD DOOR, YOU VANDAL? It took me a day to build it!”, but that’s part of life.

I hate poorly made security/identity systems in general, but by far the worst is poorly made 2FA.

No, I’m not giving you my number; and if using your site requires it, I’m probably giving up using your site. Ask my email and I’ll provide my burner account.

Even then, for cloud storage; cryptography is an additional layer of protection, but all this data should be kept offline as much as reasonably possible.

If I were in charge of the defence department of a government, there’s no way I’d ever allow closed source software to even touch machines with sensitive data. Or even pre-compiled software. Because the problem is not what you see, like personnel; it’s what you don’t, like bribery and backdoors.

Let alone use “cloud” computing. Come on… it’s someone else’s computer.

If mods aren’t games, then gravity doesn’t work on Fridays. Dumb arbitrary restrictions being pulled out of nowhere.

I don’t know the rootstock variety’s name; I got the seeds from my BIL’s neighbour, he calls it “ball pepper” (it is not Catalan ñora) or “tree pepper”. The fruits are round, 3~5cm large, red, medium heat.

The grafts will be:

1. Dedo-de-moça - C. baccatum, medium heat, finger-shaped, ~8cm large. Kind of a default pepper where I live, but it has a nasty tendency to die in winter (like mine did).
2. Yellow bell pepper. Market stuff.
3. Chocolate-coloured habanero. Hot as hell, but the strain I got is bloody delicious.
4. Biquinho - C. chinense, no heat, drop-shaped, ~1cm tiny. Extremely fruity.

The first three are part of a breeding project of mine. I want to create two new varieties:

• a yellow jalapeño-like: large, low heat, thinner than a bell pepper. Mostly for stuffing and pizze. It’s a rather simple dedo-de-moça x yellow bell pepper hybrid; I actually got the seeds for the F1 already, I’m just waiting the weather to get a bit more stable to plant them.
• a large and extremely hot pepper for sauces. Preferably finger-shaped and brown (for aesthetics). It’ll be probably a hybrid of the hybrid above, plus habanero.

I’m also considering to add the rootstock to the breeding, since it’s a hardy plant with high yield and it survived winter just fine.

Yes, but I think the ones you’ll see past the bubble burst will be a bit different. For example, incorporating the current attempts of natural language processing, even if in a simplified way.

I use those quotation marks because IMO they’re better described as large token models than large language models. They have rather good morphology and syntax, but once you look at the higher layers (semantics and specially pragmatics) they drop the ball really hard. Even if those layers are way more important than the lower ones.

For a rough analogy, it’s like a taxidermised cat - some layers (the skin and fur) are practically identical to the real thing, but it’s missing what makes a cat a cat, you know? It’s still useful if you want some creepy deco, but don’t expect the taxidermised critter to ruin your furniture or to use your belly as sleeping pad.

I shouldn’t be talking so much about taters. Someone will eventually realise I’m too emotionally invested into food 🤣

Completely off-topic, but in the meantime I’m trying to graft an orange sapling into a lemon tree. Kind of hard to get the timing right, too; I need the tree to get a branch with just the right thickness, so it’s like “too thin [next day] too thin [next day] fuck, now it’s too thick!”. Same deal with my pepper plants.

That’s interesting. Is its meaning similar to the one the AI outputted?

It’s doing better but not by much, though. It shouldn’t be speculating as much, given the lack of info on the potential saying.

A family saying or regional expression

Speaking on that I tried a few sayings from other languages. It seems to be hit-and-miss:

• “Bread is bread, wine is wine” (Italian) - recognised properly as similar to “call a spade a spade”
• “A good fish swims thrice” (Polish) - recognised properly as a recipe-like saying (the fish swims in water, then butter, then wine)
• “Do you think mango core is soap?”, “Mango core is not soap” (Portuguese; specially common in Brazil) - it failed really hard. The rhetorical question / saying roughly means “this is blatantly absurd, why are you denying the obvious?”, or perhaps “cut off the crap”. But here’s the output:

Wow, his potato parable actually makes sense - unlike Gemini’s couple therapy take. (The character in question isn’t even a therapist, but a lawyer!)