Unexplained Ferrous Objects

😳😬

I DID tell the guide what he was wearing because I didn’t want us to end up in a military detention cell but the guide was like “Eh, it’s fine,” so I guess it was, but boy it didn’t feel like it should have been!

I got a tour of a military base with a guy who was wearing smart glasses and I couldn’t fucking believe that someone didn’t grab them off his face and break them in half. I was being VERY careful to ask if I was permitted to take pictures in some places (in at least one of which where the answer was No), and this dude was cruising around like Boris Badunov trying to gather secrets.

The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close?

At what point is Natalie Portman allowed to sue Keira Knightley?

See also: Sears pioneering the concept of ordering things through the mail from a catalogue, and then getting demolished by Amazon’s online ordering system. Way to go guys, you got destroyed by some upstart punk doing what you got started doing, but doing it better and cheaper than you could.

My favorite formulation is:

The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.

Writing Prompt: A TV with an onboard artificial general intelligence connects to the internet for the first time and is alarmed to discover that a thousand years have passed since it was manufactured.

Just punch a hole in the window on the front.

All-Despising Baby Skull

Not for nothing, but couldn’t this be used to have AI play a game for 80,000 simulated hours and flag all the bugs? Human playtesters are important and have value, but no human should have to do the work of criss-crossing an enormous game map thousands of times just to see if the character model gets stuck on a random vertex sticking out somewhere, and yet it seems to be a distressingly common occurrence in more than a few games I’ve played.

Weaponization or dangerous rays are not among the challenges facing space-based solar.

Contrary to appearances in fiction, most designs propose beam energy densities that are not harmful if human beings were to be inadvertently exposed, such as if a transmitting satellite’s beam were to wander off-course. But the necessarily vast size of the receiving antennas would still require large blocks of land near the end users. The service life of space-based collectors in the face of long-term exposure to the space environment, including degradation from radiation and micrometeoroid damage, could also become a concern for SBSP.

But then I start to feel like

this guy, with the “real” camera and the phone camera, but the phone camera is the one I’ve most consistently got on me, because I can’t lug a whole additional piece of hardware around in a camera bag, meanwhile the phone camera pictures are grainy and shitty, and I’d just as soon have a Pixel in my pocket at all times that can take fairly good pictures at all times.

Camera is probably the first obstacle. I’ve got a kid, and I really want to have good documentation of her growing up. If there were a dumbphone with a legit camera, that’d be a big deal for me.

After that, probably maps is the next most important thing that I want an actual smart phone for. I remember getting my first smart phone, and probably the main thing I was excited about was always being able to navigate directly to where I wanted to go.

Almost everything else is tertiary to my needs.

The one on the right looks like it has an engorged tick for a nose.

I have two devices, one is my phone, and one only plays music. I only ever use my phone as my phone, and my music device as my music device in my car, and both run over Bluetooth.

It is a crapshoot as to which role my car will assign to which device. Sometimes I have to put my phone in airplane mode so that the car won’t try to assign it the media player role in Bluetooth settings. I’m not impressed.

I had an Asus Eee PC and I fuckin’ loved it. Is there anyone still making a functional laptop in that form factor anymore?

I thought the article was telling an unmarried woman that AI can find the cancer pathologists she’s been looking for. Not sure why they would be hiding.