Dave.

There is an empirical way of doing it - best one I’ve seen online so far is this:

AN186 - Brushless DC (BLDC) Motor Connections

They aim to actively deorbit starlink sats.

(Edit: they keep a small amount of propellant in reserve for the initial deorbit burn, and then position the solar array to give maximum drag which hastens things considerably)

As far as I know, apart from the first few batches, the “production run” of sats has a pretty low failure rate and are proactively sent to their demise.

Yeah it’s steadily getting enshittified.

I used to have a mythtv box that I’d built , like, 15 years ago and it was pretty good. For a while there TV UIs were adequate enough that I didn’t need it, but it seems that maybe it’s time to build another one.

TVs that do anything more than displaying a signal exactly as it’s input shouldn’t exist.

Some of that input could do with a bit of tweaking though.

I wouldn’t mind if the TV was able to do things with the audio track, like remove background music, or lift the volume of people speaking, or erase laugh tracks/live audience hooting& hollering.

There’s probably similar manipulation that you could do on the video side (eventually, once TVs stop getting the worst processors ever, not here and now). Imagine a prompt that says “Airbrush every recognisable brand name on-screen so that it blends with the background”.

I seriously doubt if any major manufacturer would do that kind of thing though, so better get working on jailbreaking those TVs.

Six levels deep in a teams group file storage and open a file to view? Clicking the big obvious “close” button on the top right of the opened document now takes you back to the top level. Enjoy digging back in again!

Oh, you really just want to close that document and remain in the folder you were just in? Well that’s easy. Just ignore that big tempting close button and click the tiny “<” button on the left, no problem. You’ll probably remember that after reflexively clicking that close button at least once, so enjoy all that!

What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott on that early?

The distinction is “through which users”.

Merely putting something online does not make it social media. The key is the ability for users/passers-by to add their own content and/or comments, which then allows for interaction between users.

Not only driver issues, UI issues. A workmate deleted an image that was being used as a background on the desktop on an office PC, oops presentation manager crashed and it wouldn’t boot to a GUI. That was in Warp 3.

Well you see, engagement is down, and the whole “sponsored content” thing is in a death spiral due to AI slop. So Meta has decided to cut out the middleman and generate their own AI slop, because surely their version of personalised AI slop will solve the whole engagement problem and keep line always going up, because if it’s one thing users love, it’s an endless torrent of AI slop.

You’re being sarcastic but for the average person it’s simply: “Garage small, atmosphere big”.

They look down their street and can see a dozen cars in their field of view and then they see the all-encompassing sky with an endless amount of fresh air available. Conclusion: not a problem.

And holy shit does their algorithm latch onto any minor interest in their content.

Accidentally tapped on a floor tiling video the other day, three days of tiling and handyman videos jammed into my feed and me pressing the “not interested” button on every single one.

Facebook, I am there for the rare post from my 150 or so friends and family. That’s it. Nothing else.

The reason we don’t use it anymore is because actual posts from real humans we know are buried under a torrent of shit. Sometimes their posts take days to surface leading to all sorts of chain-mail posts on how to “get your feed back”. None of which work because the whole business model is about jamming sponsored shit down your throat.

Trying to, because there is no more money to continue development.

Hopefully they can pull it off and do the same as Pebble did when they released a last firmware update for their watches that allowed third party servers to be used.

You know what else sometimes flies low over residential areas?

737s coming in to land that are full of everyday slobs relying on two now-blinded pilots up front to get them on the ground during a critical phase of flight.

It’s designed and implemented for copy protection. Otherwise you can design a esp32 device that includes software you’ve written and 15 minutes later a clone device with exactly the same software will appear on <insert Chinese electronics website here>

I search for complicated things on google, because that’s when I need to search for stuff.

I take about three seconds to look at the LLM-generated summaries/answers, disregard them as tedious monotonic bullshit, and then scroll down to links where real people are discussing the real problems and the real solutions they have.

The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…

Most solutions to this issue usually involve some variant of a universal basic income. However, that gets politically boiled down to “MOAR TAXES GOVERNMENT IS STIFLING THIS COUNTRY!1!1”, so in countries like the US that want to keep the freedom of being able to be homeless and starving, it’s not going to be possible.

You’ve got the motive back to front.

yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.

Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.

Is there any sort of way to get the best of both worlds? to have the PC be able to go from power button to jellyfin server started and still have some measure of security?

Windows with auto login? Not really. That is, anyone with a mouse + keyboard locally can get in there.

You can set up jellyfin to run as a windows service and then it should auto start and run as a particular user without you having to log in. Have a look in the “advanced” section in the jellyfin docs.

Train your LLM better.

You didn’t go to the library in the '80s and watch a DVD of a documentary to get the information you wanted.

So this is the concern I have with letting LLMs do all the heavy lifting. You’ve put in a nice summary of how we should be using LLMs and then here’s a glaring anachronism. So now that I’ve spotted that, should I take any credence in whatever else you’ve said?