What’s interesting to me is the lack of crossover between the two. As far as I’m aware, no popular Youtube creator has ever successfully transitioned to doing Hollywood movies or TV shows. Sure there’s been the occasional cameo, short-lived series, or direct to streaming movie, but none of them had any staying power. Why isn’t Hollywood treating youtube as a farm league for new talent and IP that they can snatch up and exploit after the market for it is proven?

To be clear, I’m not saying I want that to happen. The good content creators deserve better as far as I’m concerned. But the opportunity seems so obvious that I’m truly baffled at the apparent lack of interest.

Maxim 43: If it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid and you’re lucky.

Scales now

He’s losing his tail now

Legs will grow

Kinda sorta Ian Hubert. He does “lazy tutorials” which are like 1 to 5 minute speed runs of different VFX tricks. There’s not really enough detail to recreate what he’s doing unless you’re already pretty proficient, but it’s cool to watch and get the creative juices flowing.

I thought the Tiffany video was pretty meh, but the followup video about how the Tiffany video got made was one of his best. He’s clearly a thorough and passionate researcher. The way he refuses to settle for anything less than the primary source is both entertaining and vitally important in our modern information landscape.

Ceci n’est pas une rock

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I’m just gonna leave this right here: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smart-rotary-knob-w-1-28-round-touch-screen

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

If you were actually hoping to buy one but the rounded corners are a dealbreaker, then you may be interested to know that the DIY edition lets you mix and match the older display with the newer motherboards. Looks like opting for the older display even saves you $130 on the purchase price.

I read something a while ago that really put all these “ancient mysteries” into perspective: Modern humans with modern brains have existed in our current form for at least tens of thousands of years. During that time we’ve seen huge advancement as a society thanks to the accumulation and sharing of scientific knowledge, but any individual human today has no more brainpower than one living 10,000 years ago.

In other words, if we can sit around today and brainstorm a dozen different ways to build a pyramid with nothing but ramps and levers, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the smartest builders in ancient egypt couldn’t have come up withl the same ideas or better.

Attributing these achievements to aliens, or divine intervention, or anything other than raw human ingenuity is a disservice to our ancestors.