I had the 7 pro for a while and then the 10 now. The cameras on those are not good. Not sure if hardware or firmware tuning is the issue, but yeah, I haven’t been happy with the quality regardless of whether I use the google camera app or others like OpenCamera. And yeah, especially concert photos which end up washed out and blurry way more that the 6 pro. And that’s with and without GrapheneOS since I used each device for a short while before the GrapheneOS was stable enough for my tastes for a daily driver. So I don’t think software or OS was the issue.

I miss my Pixel 6 Pro. Best camera I’ve ever had on a phone, especially for low light applications. Best concert photos I ever took were on that phone. It ran GrapheneOS pretty well, too.

Wow, 2 weeks stay. In the US insurance only allows 2 nights. I had to pay for an AirBnB for the other 3 weeks before I could head back to my home city. And the hospital charged about $20,000 for that stay alone, the total charges for surgery and stay were about $200,000. Though insurance only paid a fraction of that and I was responsible for a few thousand plus about $4000 for the AirBnB. It’s always disheartening to see how poor our medical system is, especially since the politicians constantly insist that socialized medicine would mean less access to care. How can there be less care than allowing corporations to save money by cutting care.

Anyway, congrats. I’m still on the recovery road after a year and revision surgery coming up next month, but I’m so much happier even with all of that.

I’m enjoying it so much. Started my first relationship post-bottom-surgery and it’s been amazing. Also helped that she’s been bi but never really dated women before me, so there weren’t a lot of expectations with sex stuff and a cis vulva/vagina, so we’re learning at the same time. Not that it’s too different, but I had some surgery complications that make it a little different.

Yeah, need to find a way to go after the government to stop using the tech rather than going after a single company. Eventually, Flock will just go bankrupt, the pieces will get bought up and either sold to a competitor or the VC that buys them will change the name and start a new company that’s basically the same and the executives from Flock will join that or go to competitors. There’s not much use attacking a single company these days. But it is good that attention is being brought to the technology in use and how the government is using it.

It takes a while. My facial hair is pretty deeply rooted, so laser wasn’t especially effective. I did electrolysis for about 6 months, but even that only gets what is currently growing. Your hair goes through cycles. I have been using at-home IPL to continue to clear the thicker stuff for a while, but there’s still that blue skin shade. I do plan to eventually do another round or two of electrolysis.

But I use a color corrector under concealer and foundation to cover it when I put on makeup.

I know generally what alistral is, but I’ve never uses it. What does the "sex’ command do or what’s the joke about it? The description is blank in the documentation and I’m too exhausted from work to dig into the code repo, lol.

I mean all of their products are subscription based and this is only a 1 year subscription. They’re just giving away a free trial to open up a new market is all. Not really big news. If they were making it free for the life of the product, that might be a bigger deal.

But yeah, also F*** the SA government.

Hot!!!

I’m not familiar enough with TPMS specifically, but with the general technology as I have some experience with older security card technologies that use the same techniques. There are a few issues with trying to do this at long range (even a few yards).

First you’d need extremely sensitive transceivers that would be difficult to protect from interference.

Second, it would require enough power to get the transmitter to send the signal far enough to be read. This has multiple problems. One is that, depending on the frequencies involved, you may end up creating a noticeable amount of heat or causing cancer if exposed to it for a significant amount of time. This might be more problematic for pedestrians and animals who stand between the transceiver and the cars for too long.

Next is time, again not too familiar with the specifics of TPMS, but in similar tech, it would require power to be supplied by the transceiver for sometimes as much as a half a second or so. A moving car might not be in the target zone long enough to power up the TPMS, especially on faster moving roads and highways.

What they might be able to do to mitigate this is to convince cities to embed the transceivers in the road itself or in curbs or something closer to the car. And if done at stop signs and traffic lights it would mitigate any time based issues. Though they might need to keep then far enough from any of the coils they install for traffic monitoring and triggering traffic lights. Not sure how much interference those would cause for this approach.

Again, I could be totally off and TPMS might not have these issues. But if we’re talking cars from the 80s, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some of these issues.

Not an isolated incident, but I suppose it’s good it got some attention. Better if they had moved too another platform.

Like many others, all of my Meta accounts were locked out years ago after I spoke out in several private groups against the removal of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks from the hate speech policies. No chance of appeal since it wasn’t an official suspension. Just lost access to Facebook and Instagram. It caused me to lose contact with several people probably permanently, but I have no intention of ever using their platforms again. I fortunately was able to convince several people to stop using it for event planning and use Signal or other platforms for that and chat groups instead. Since there’s no chance of them eavesdropping on conversations and picking out those kinds of things for bans, at least for now. But still it’s been really difficult to convince many people how horrible it is since they don’t understand how much it hurts them to use it. But maybe some day…

First, genetics are only a blueprint for the structure of the body. It’s not the final structuee. It’s like asking why a building collapses when the blueprints look sound. The blueprints might have physically impossible information for the location it’s being built on, or something could have interfered with the building process, or there might not be good quality materials to do the construction properly, etc. Identical twins often are not identical right out of the womb.

But let’s assume you could accurately create the exact structure out of the womb. The initial physical body might have some effect on your ability to develop intelligence or not (e.g. blood flow to the brain, etc.), ability to generate and use certain hormones that affect mood, etc. This might make the two copies have the same disorders like ADHD, propensity towards violence, or other things, but is every person with ADHD exactly the same? So, no even that isnt enough to create the same personality.

Then there are environmental factors, nutrition, radiation, pollution, etc., all of which could alter the brain in different ways over the person’s lifetime.

But personality has a lot to do with the neural connections and memories you create throughout your lifetime than just the brain you were born with and the physical environment you grew up in. Just look at twins raised in the same home. They can have significantly different personalities based on different experiences, different memories that were impactful, etc.

And personalities change over time because of all of this. So someone at age 30 and the same person at age 50 is often going to have somewhat different personalities based on all of this.

What might be possible, though it would take technology we may never have, would be to individually copy every single atom in a person’s brain with something like a star trek style replicator, and implant that in a cloned body that was as close as possible to their body at the age you copied the brain. This would include every single neuron and neural pathway, every single drop of hormones, etc. And somehow do this instantly or at absolute zero temperatures and then instantly bring them to normal temperature to prevent any damage to the cells. Of course that would be absurdly difficult and is only science fiction, of likely to ever be reality. Too many variables, too many ridiculous technological dependencies, etc.

Most important to humans?

Humans.

Really if all protections were removed, the soil, water, and air would be so badly polluted with heavy metals, radiation, etc., from large corporations dumping that we wouldn’t have the ability to grow enough food, probably within a generation or so. Long before climate change dealt its deadly blow. And the wealthy who survive that won’t have enough servants to keep them alive for too long.

Most important to the Earth?

That would be more interesting and it would be really difficult to pick just one. Probably something like Prochlorococcus which is one of a few ocean plankton that produce the most oxygen on Earth. That will die off much sooner than Humans from climate change as the ocean temperatures and acidity are rising more quickly than the air.

As a side note, one thing I think a lot of people miss from the movie Soylent Green,…

Congrats. I love mine. I wish they had grown a little more so clothing fit my body better. But I appreciate what I do have. And I definitely wouldn’t want overly large ones that would cause health problems. Just a B cup maybe?

Inconsistency of meds is definitely an issue with me. I used to do that, especially with the unending national shortage in the US, and insurance requirement to use a single pharmacy so I can’t shop around for stock making it hard to get it consistently.

But I changed tactics. I got a scale that can measure milligrams (not that accurately, but well enough) and got a weekly pill case to help me remember or at least know when I skipped. I take 3/4 doses consistently rather than taking full doses and then rationing and eventually cutting off between prescriptions. I also had some surgery and was off for a couple of months, so I stopped taking it then. I got absolutely nothing done like I wanted to during that time, but it gave me a small stockpile to help with this plan to stay consistent. I wish I could take a full dose and be as productive and lower anxiety as I am at that proper dosage.

I probably could find an unethical psychiatrist who didn’t care and would prescribe me higher doses so I could cut them and still have enough daily. But my intense Autism-driven ethical values hasn’t let me do that yet. Plus it’s really hard to find psychiatrists with openings that take insurance these days, so the ADHD keeps me from looking. LOL

I also get the desire to protect the cardiovascular system. I’m getting to that age where it’s becoming even more of a concern. But, and this is just for me of course, I think if my choice is a few years less life but also with less anxiety, that’s worth it. Maybe some day a better treatment will be available. Like Adderall is slightly better and slightly less harmful than Ritalin. But I think that won’t be in my lifetime with the way drug companies work now. They only make long term treatment drugs and only for life threatening things so people will pay exorbitant amounts until they die. They don’t research things that people can live with or try to cure anything anymore. Not that ADHD needs a cure, just a crutch to survive in culture that’s hostile to neurodivergence, but that’s also not a priority as it’s not emergent enough for people to spend their life savings on, and not wide spread enough, like obesity, for enough people not spending their life savings on to make a profit.

Well they did lay off a ton of developers in exchange for LLMs. I bet the LLMs are capable of writing secure code anyway. So it’s not even on my radar. But now knowing they also cut implementation of MTE means it’s even less secure. So either they are refusing to admit their mistakes, or they are bowing to the governments wanting a more hackable device, or both.

Google was being hostile towards open source anyway. So probably good that GrapheneOS skips this one. Maybe even more to a different line of devices that’s is not moving in such a proprietary direction. The last few Pixels aren’t even much of an upgrade and progressively keep falling behind on a lot of hardware, but the price keeps going up. They just aren’t what they used to be, a tech showcase for other companies to be inspired by. So, I’d actually be happy if GrapheneOS moved to another line, though I don’t know which would be ideal that actually allows unlocking and locking the boot loader without voiding warranty or actively killing the hardware out of spite but still has high end hardware.

Wish my company held off. So few with any experience left and “AI” not only isn’t going to replace an experienced engineer, only junior ones really, but the things I work on are proprietary and so “AI” has no way to understand them much less interact with them or deal with the proprietary devops, upgrades, migrations, etc. There’s basically 4 people left doing the jobs that used to belong to 20. Sure “AI” is a useful timesaver oncenin a while, but it can’t replace thinking, actually intelligent people, much less all of their experience that’s not documented anywhere for “AI” to even learn it.

Yeah and when teachers or employers use it to reject things outright, it’s really dumb. But if it’s presented as a probability to the user rather than a binary like most LLM results are presented to users, then it is useful. If something has a high probability of being LLM generated then it can cast suspicion and investigation can happen. Unlike how things like facial recognition are used to prove guilt without any investigation when the probability of a match is low, but no better matches were found and the police aren’t told it’s low probability because then the product would look useless in solving crimes for them which is what they want in a product, not an investigation tool. That’s not what they were sold.

Point being. It’s a tool. It’s a metric. And used as such it can be helpful if all of a developer’s contributions get flagged as high probability, then looking more closely at the code can be warranted. Though if LLMs themselves were configured to tell the user how probable that their answer is correct, it might not even be an issue needing investigation. It’s not the malicious ones that they’re looking to stop with these policies. It’s those unwittingly submitting bad LLM generated code with serious consequences. Like all those destructive things that happened at Amazon (and others I’m sure, just Amazon was in the news) when they started replacing senior developers with cheap contractors armed with LLMs and no experience. Even my company has been doing it. It sucks all that we’ve lost and how bad things have gotten.

There are “signatures” that can be detected in code just like universities detect it in student work, online stores detect it in reviews they compensate people for, and some employers detect it in resumes and cover letters. It’s bland, just like when it tells you to remove colorful phrases or adjectives that add emphasis from your text in an email. Things like that.

That said it doesn’t detect it all, and it does rely on the developer to be honest. But it’s also a good indicator when reviewers post questions to the developer and they can’t answer them because they don’t understand the code and things like that. Also, if the developer did not follow coding standards, which LLMs can sometimes have trouble with. And there’s always been malicious code submissions in open source software, so there are other ways.

Anyway, it’s more of a policy discussion at this point, and why LLM generated code is bad. I use them for manipulating data, figuring out syntax, and getting examples, but there are always problems with anything they generate, so I never would allow one to write any production bound code. I see use in the technology, but it’s not creative and it doesn’t understand what it’s writing so it can’t write code with consequences in mind. So it can write Jr level code, but not solid code, at least not without being properly trained on only well written code, and that proper training would be too expensive for an LLM company to actually do it.

Yeah, gotta keep your employees poor so they can’t afford to leave no matter how badly they’re treated.