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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • within three to five years

    That’s tech speak for “never”

    The technology, developed by Borui Kang Medical Technology (Shanghai), is designed to restore hand-movement capabilities in individuals suffering from paralysis.

    Specifically, the system targets patients with quadriplegia resulting from cervical spinal cord injuries, enabling them to regain hand-grasping ability through the use of a specialised glove.

    Incredible technology, nonetheless.

    But crazy to think this would be a commercial public service any time soon









  • Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.

    Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.

    And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.






  • We’ve deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.

    But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I’ve got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.

    So there’s at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.


  • But the user wants a gui.

    Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we’ve had smooth GUI experiences since Apple’s 1980s OS. This isn’t the primary load on the system.

    Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn’t ask for.

    It’s a black hole of bloatware.


  • Found out about this while watching “Halt and Catch Fire” (AMC’s effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).

    Doherty Threshold

    In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.