What about the news article about the AI-generated comments about AI-generated images? Surely we can’t stop there.

Here’s what changed my handwriting: turning it into a hobby

At school, writing stuff all the time was more like a job, so naturally I wasn’t really that interested in it. However when you don’t have to write a ton of stuff every day, you can approach it form a different angle. Go to the library and find a book about calligraphy. Pick a style you find interesting, and start practicing.

Motivation is key. Don’t write stuff you hate in a style you despise. That’s just basically a long way to say: school. Let’s say you fall in love with textura quadrata, so you start practicing that style instead of cursive. Eventually you’ll try italic, humanist, uncial and other styles too. Then you’ll start writing longer things; not just shopping lists, but journaling too. After a while, you start to notice that your handwriting has improved.

BTW don’t go with a dip pen at first. Instead, get a Pilot Parallel Pen, because it’s good for for most styles. Once you’re familiar with a specific writing style, you can start learning how to manage the ink flow of a dip pen, because that’s a completely different ball game.

Here’s another quick tip to get anyone started: Find some code written by someone else, and modify it.

Depending on the language, you might be able to just read what it says and experiment with what happens when you change some details here and there. If the code does something that you’re interested in, you’ll also have the motivation to spend a few hours tweaking the code, or even reading the documentation.

Also, nowadays you can ask GPT what different parts of the code does. You can drill down with follow up questions until you understand how a specific detail works in the language you’re working with.

Being able to detect logical fallacies will help a lot, but it’s not a perfect solution either. If an argument follows a flawed logic, it might also have factual issues as well. The thing is, there are exceptions.

Some people actually have something factual to say, but they mess up the wording and end up saying something paradoxical. Someone trained in detecting logical fallacies might dismiss the argument as complete nonsense, even though the core of the argument was true.

Also, the reverse is true. If you know what you’re doing, you can craft a beautiful and logical argument that isn’t actually grounded in reality. Someone not trained to wield this sword, may be defenseless against it.

These kinds of arguing tools are definitely useful, but they don’t always lead to the right answer. Mistakes happen on both sides of the debate.

If the manufacturer can stop your trains, then obviously anyone with the necessary hacking skills can do it too. Certain governments might be very interested in tampering with the logistics of another country.

Trump and the whole Brexit circus have set a very high bar, but somehow someone still manages to produce quality comedy.

Yeah, me too. I was like: “dude, you just listen to the sounds, convert them to letters and you’re done. Why is everyone so excited about someone having learned the alphabet. That’s literally first grader stuff.”

Then I realized how bad it really is in English.

English is such as mess that you actually have spelling contests to prove it. Try that with most other languages, and it’s going to be exciting for all the first graders who just learned the alphabet. Anyone older than that will be bored to death in the contest.

Title suggestion: Minnie and the Invasive Kraken

If those numbers are real, that means that going with the cheap paper ends up being 50% more expensive in the long run.

This is the raw material real toilet paper is made of. Similarly, you could also buy sewing thread to make your own rope. Not the most practical idea really, but it is possible.

The thing is, we don’t know is the speed limit is a hard problem.

Maybe will struggle with it for centuries or maybe we’ll find a way to avoid the problem within the next 130 years. Maybe we’ll find a way to bend space so that you don’t really need to travel very fast. Maybe wormholes become a viable option. Maybe we’ll build hyperspace gates or something like that.

Or maybe none of that is viable and a thousand years later we’re still struggling with the speed of light wishing there was a way around it.

At some point, microbes and immunology were a complete mystery. People dying after surgery was a hard problem and nobody knew how to fix that. Turns it, all you need is ethanol and penicillin, but we couldn’t even imagine it at the time.

This is the way.

Or maybe configure the firewall to block/allow only very specific things. It’s a bit more technical than just plugging in an Ethernet cable though…

Pull one of your old routers from the back of closet, and use it to make a completely new network just for your TV. If you don’t connect the router to the rest of the internet, your TV is happy to connect to something, and you get to keep your privacy a little bit longer.

We use ions for a bunch of stuff like Li-ion batteries and various other chemical engineering marvels on a daily basis. I wonder how new is the idea of ions anyway?

Wikipedia has this to say: “Svante Arrhenius put forth, in his 1884 dissertation, the explanation of the fact that solid crystalline salts dissociate into paired charged particles when dissolved, for which he would win the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arrhenius’ explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into Faraday’s ions, he proposed that ions formed even in the absence of an electric current.”

We’ve built so much on top an idea that’s only about 139 years old. Before that, it must have been pretty difficult or even impossible to explain large parts of chemistry we use every day.

I wonder how would you imagine the future of chemistry in the early 1800s? Could you imagine that nowadays we leach gold from a mineral that doesn’t even look golden at all? Could you imagine that we can pull aluminium from rocks that don’t even look metallic in any way? Could you imagine that we use it to build all sorts of things like cans, door frames and airplanes? What about surface coating of materials to give them corrosion resistance, different colors or scratch resistance. In the past 139 years we’ve done all sorts of absolutely wild things with ions.

If you start studying chemistry in 2023 you’ll probably hear about ions during the first lecture and later you’ll build all sorts of wonderful things on that bit of information.

More people should let the service provider know that their contract sucks and that they refuse to pay for the service under the proposed conditions. Most people don’t even read the contract, so I don’t think the situation is going to improve any time soon.

The world is full of bad contracts. It’s truly sad that we decided to accept them without making numerous alterations here and there.

A bit like Lemmy, but worse in every way.

I agree that the analogy isn’t perfect. As you pointed out, people sneaking in are taking space from people who would be willing pay for the service.

If you could somehow sneak into Netflix and take some of their bandwidth or their ability to provide the service to paying customers, then the analogy would work. In reality though, people pirate Netflix shows and movies by torrenting, and that has no impact on Netflix’s bandwidth.

The way I see it, circus and digital videos are a service. You are supposed to pay for both, but you can easily see both of them for free. Comparing these two with stealing just doesn’t work IMO.

You could also compare it with watching a football match from the other side of the fence. Although, in reality, you wouldn’t get a very good view of the game, whereas torrenting movies gives you a great view. Interestingly, the football example doesn’t involve trespassing, but you still get to enjoy a part of the service. All analogies break at some point.