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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

    It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

    Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

    A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.




  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksAnon uses a phone book
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    8 days ago

    In the UK at least, mobile phone ownership per household was only 16% in 1996 and didn’t reach 50% until the year 2000.

    To have a phone in '92 you’d need to either be wealthy or have it through a company for business.

    My dad had a phone in 95 for work and it was an absolute brick.

    As for mobile internet, that wasn’t really a thing until smartphones happened with the iPhone. Yes we had WAP and other precursors to the full internet but it was awful and nobody used it, ever. In 2007 I was a geeky nerd at uni doing Comp Sci and had a Windows Mobile PDA in a belt holster, with full internet! But most people didn’t have Internet until about 2009-10




  • AI is absolutely going to be transformative but a lot of the hate right now isn’t the technology itself but the way companies are jumping on it and forcing it down the throats of people who don’t want it, in a way that worsens their customer experience. Yes, let’s force AI into every software product. Yes let’s take away the humans you used to talk to and make them all bots instead.

    Even from within tech itself there is huge resentment because you’ve got corps pumping billions into AI while at the same time slashing their workforce to afford those billions, with no clear return in sight.

    Tech is treating AI as the next dotcom boom and pumping everything into it, but just like it did then the bubble of investment will burst, and there will be losers as well as winners.

    I’m running self-hosted LLMs at home and I’m having huge fun experimenting with their capabilities. I just wish LLMs could have been implemented in the real world with space for ethics and the human factor, not the pure profit chasing bullshit we actually got.




  • Of course. The definition of what is ugly and what isn’t is subjective and nostalgia obviously plays a part in that.

    But I think it’s quite fair to say that almost nobody would consider a postbox to be an eyesore. It’s a functional design but it also has aesthetic elements to it which exist purely to make it look nice, and it’s doing an okay job at that.

    Contrast to a telecom utility box which is purely functional, a rectangular box coloured in a drab gray or green in the hopes that our eyes might just wander over without noticing it is even there. Intentionally avoidant because nobody wants to see it.

    So I very much stand by my opinion on which “needs” painting and which does not.


  • This might be alright if it wasn’t such a bad job.But even so, don’t paint postboxes. They’re iconic as they are.

    There’s a street artist in my area who paints all the utility and electrical boxes with interesting designs that celebrate the local community. And that’s great, because they were just boring ugly boxes.

    If you’re going to paint something, paint something that needs it.






  • For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.

    I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.

    One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.

    Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.

    Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.