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Electronics

DELL S3221QS Review

The DELL S3221QS is a Curved 32″ UHD Monitor. At a price of around $400, it sounds almost too good to be true and, after trying one, I got two more for my home office. With the curvature they’re perfect for an L-shaped desk and creating a multi-tasking workplace. From the back, they form a […]

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The Deepfake Defense

With deepfakes, it will be difficult to claim that anyone has ever said anything, since any evidence of it might be fake.

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Thoughts on AI

Now that we have language models… great! I can just write this post as bullet points and you may simply copy/paste into the AI of your choice and turn it into a text that I’m sure is better than what I could conjure in an hour.

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Native Display Controls on macOS

MacOS supports controlling the brightness of attached displays via they keyboard. The user can even control monitors separately, simply selecting the controlled monitor via the mouse. I use that all the time.

Unfortunately, macOS and Mac monitors communicate through an arcane, apple-specific protocol instead of the standard DDC/CI protocol. This means that only some monitors that are explicitly made with macOS in mind work with the native macOS brightness controls.

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WordPress again…

I’ve been using PageKit for years, but is unfortunately no longer updated for PHP 8. So here we go again, WordPress!

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The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Product Lifespans

If the only metric for how long products should be used is how long they’re commonly used, we won’t be able to make longer-lasting products.

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Bait-And-Switch Loopholes

Bait-and-switch refers to the illegal practice of advertising a product or service, tempting customers to invest resources (time or money) based on the advertisement, and then changing the product once the customer has already invested, presumably to squeeze more money out of the transaction.

The problem that many products that rely on software to function, according to terms of service, come with components that are licensed, not sold, which essentially enables a loophole to legally apply bait-and-switch tactics to consumer products.

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Why can’t calls on iOS just be muted?

So many zoom calls

Simultaneous speaking

Why no speaker mute?

Tiffany McBride

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We need to find a way to reduce tire emissions already!

Electric cars with standard tires trade a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for an increase in fine particulate matter. We need a solution.

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Why do people sell their data for digital, but not physical products and services?

Thought experiment: What if you go to a bakery and buy a bread roll for $2.99 and the baker says “you can have it for free if you give me all your family photos and the rights to analyze them using robots and sell your data.”