Good thing they stopped emptying train toilets on the tracks.

This is why you should keep all appliance User’s manuals.

When it first came out, my first thought was privacy.

It’s the single most immutable piece of information about a person. You can change your clothes, hair, face, address, phone number, driver’s license, passport and SSN (a little harder, but doable), hell – even your fingerprints if you really must.

But your DNA?

And you’d put it out on some webserver, voluntarily, as unprotected medical data?

Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.

The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn’t to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.

Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

My favorite tell is when a write-up starts with a verbose explanation of given knowledge on a subject. Yes, we all know what ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘Internal Combustion Engines’ are.

Get to the f’ing point.

So many $$$$$$$$$$$$$, no doubt, for a single record in a database.

Am amazed at the immense usability flaws. From the company that puts out guidelines on How Things Should Be Done.

Fan of their hardware, but I just don’t get this one.

Home Alone.

“Hey, sorry Kevin. Come on, hop in the car.”

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, followed by Life of Brian.

Last time, it didn’t go so well for the robot:

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-robot-k5-falls-into-water

The witness, later that day.

RemindMe! 3y “reply to this thread”.

Tweezers.

When you realize how many wars were averted because of them.

Good read. Sad ending that all that work ended up nowhere.

NEW feature: As you drive down the road, Ford cars will automatically take over and drive you to the nearest sponsor location. Hungry? It will take over and swerve into the nearest KFC drive-thru. Next stop, CVS pharmacy, then Office Depot.

Disclaimer: Disabling AutoAd feature requires monthly subscription.

When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.

It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.

Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.

Sounds like it’s still ongoing.