I dont know if this is fixeable outside of massive automation

Why would that be a problem? Japan is one of the leaders in robotics. If they can build thousands of semi-autonomous drones on both sides of Ukraine war weekly, then shouldn't be a problem to create caretaker bots.

I basically keep listing of stuff I want to watch and what service it is on. For the obvious ones (Stranger Things S5, Andor's new season, Wednesday etc), it's of course obvious, but if I suddenly decide to check something out (recently: Star Trek Strange New Worlds), I just use justwatch.com to find what platform it is on.

Once there's enough stuff on one service and too little on the one I'm currently subscribed to, I just switch. Kid has also grown up enough that she doesn't demand Disney+.

I still hope they'd at some point get the equivalent of Spotify or Apple music or Tidal. Apart from very few exclusives, everyone is on all services, and musicians get their due depending on the number of plays. Why couldn't the streaming services just provide access to everything and pass the fees to producers depending on views? ...like, you know, Netflix used to!

I have sort of the same deal. I hate "exercise" without any real purpose than busy-work, but I still started swimming around 5 years go. I typically swim about 1 km three times a week. I chose swimming because at least you don't sweat while doing that (or rather, it goes directly to the pool) and you get to do different styles to alleviate some of the boredom.

Result: Weight has been exactly the same as before I started, around 100 kg. Bloodwork shows that cholesterol levels and other indicators are much better than 5 years ago, but absolutely zero effect on weight. Also tried changing my diet - several times. However, all "lighter" diets just results in hunger. I don't mind feeling hungry during the day, but can't go to sleep if stomach is growling for food - so also have tried the 16/8 variant where I only grab water for most of the day and maybe one cookie just to keep blood sugar up, and then eat just before bedtime - no dice. My supposedly ideal weight would be -20kg, and I've never been able to go below 95 for the past 30 years or so.

I *guess* some of that earlier fat has turned into muscle, but frankly, my dad belly still looks the same as ever before.

If a single book is 30 plus hours to read it'll never be a successful series.

To be fair, at least around 1/5 or even 1/3 of each book is
  - Recaps of stuff that happened as the storytelling pans towards PoV character.
  - Descriptions of scenery.
  - Slow as hell travel scenes

On TV, you can skip the recaps, scenery is implicit, and the travel montages can be made much faster.

I mean, story summaries are pretty much:

    - Book 1, works as an independent story, the three country boys and two gals are yanked onto the adventure, during which they learn a bunch of lore and at the end they have a bossfight
    - Book 2&3, the boss was just a sub-boss of the real Big Bad, need to grab a bunch of gear. Gals go to level up in wizard school, boys start hunting for that extra gear. Add a couple of prophecies into the mix.
    - Book 4-7: The main character does a bunch of level ups with Fremen (oh wait, Aiel) and defeats a few more bosses. A new group (Seachan) show up in force, while they have so far been only hinted at.
  - Book 8-11: Folks bounce around and nothing much happens, but getting a bunch of setup for the final battle.
  - Books 12-14: Payoff to the previous four books set-up. Plotlines finally getting tied up with massive battles everywhere.

(Yeah, personally at around book 9 I stopped for several years, but then when news got around that the series had finally finished, I got around to reading them. It was ok-ish in the end, but I'll probably not even try reading them again).

    Anyway, there's so much filler in the books that condensing those to around Book 1 = Season 1 and then 1 season for every 2-3 books is not *that* difficult if you just cull a bit of the plot kudzu.

What's the new test that AI is supposed to pass to be considered generally intelligent? Given that humans are defined as generally intelligent, it has to be a test that a below-average human would pass.

That's a rather philosophical question. Check out Chinese Room argument (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FChinese_room). LLMs are essentially filling that role. So the big question is indeed do the LLMs actually "understand" Chinese.

The big thing as it comes to AGI is probably emergence. At some point we just note that yeah, it is now impossible to even try to understand what exactly went down when the AI agent did $THING, even if you have full visibility to all the internal states. Yeah, that's an "if you build it, they will come"-type argument, but seems to be the way things are going.

I'm happily driving a 30 year old truck and a newer passenger car that does not have any outside connections or built in cellular modem. I'm afraid it'll be harder to find something like that as time goes on.

Actually, it might not be so bad. The telematics units are shipped with the cellular network technology of the date. In Europe at least, 2G/3G networks are being turned off (in my country, 2G is going away in 2029, in Sweden in 2027). Well, lots of cars have only 2G/3G cellular radios in them, with no way to upgrade.

=> You can buy an used car that only has cellular module for technology that is not deployed anymore. So no need to be stuck with 90's cars.

The problem stems from supposed "realism". It used to be that acting in movies and TV had roots in theater - where actors are used to projecting their stage voice. Also, I sort of have thought that they are using less ADR these days.

Anyway, you can see this at work even in later productions - watch Picard, for example. Patrick Stewart still brings his Voice - you do not need subtitles to understand what Picard is saying. Compare to the younger actors in the same production - yes, they talk more "realistically", but the voices sound like they are coming from your random home video recorded on a phone or something.

The other issue is technical. It used to be that all the voice acting was placed via the front-center channel. That's why I have set up my amplifier so that in my 5.1 setup the center speaker has +3dB more than the others - it brings out the actor's lines out much more clearly - in OLDER movies ("Older" in this case meaning anything before about 2005 or so).

With the newfangled Dolby Atmos, however, you get "spatial audio" instead of discrete channels, so you can apparently no longer get that nice and easy way to isolate the speaking parts. Yes, the characters voices are coming from the "correct" location in relation to the screen, but they are mixed in with all the background sound effects. I can no longer explicitly bring out the lines by fiddling with my mixer settings.

And I have a 5.1 setup. If all of this is shunted via a soundbar, or TV speakers, or even (shudder) an iPad or a phone, it gets much worse.

So, these days I'm watching spoken English movies with English subtitles, despite understanding the language.

Give me a technical means to say to my mixer "Increase ADR tracks by +6dB", and I do not need subtitles anymore.

The article does not really say (or I'm missing it), but I can imagine an AI host just spouting random crap between your typical playlist songs or adding minor commentary to news or something (that's what LLMs are for!). But did she answer calls, e.g. random callers just commenting on songs, or competitions "our nth caller gets the prize!"?

Obi-Wan was okay (not good enough for rewatch, but enjoyable), mostly because, well 1) Couple of references to Andor (like Mon Mothma), and actually *good* series and 2) Ewan McGregor carried the protagonist.

The others, hard agree.

I hate Google because whenever I travel. My browser clearly sends Accept-Language header. Why do they proudly ignore it and assume I want their page - and search results! - in whatever language the local majority uses?

Oh, right. They want me to log in to an account.

Naah, the "modern movies/books/games are crap" is really just your typical generational thing. What you are watching/reading/listening/playing when you are in your teens are the Best Thing Ever for the rest of your life. This has been true forever.

I remember when the Star Wars prequels first came out 25 years ago. All of us old SW fans hated Jar Jar. But what do you know, the kids who saw them then thing they are the best things ever.

Same applies everywhere. I played Elite on my 8-bit and was hooked for 2-3 years or so. My daughter is now playing Minecraft.

I have older (near 60) friends who find Monty Python's flying circus from 70's funny enough to get a laugh just my mentioning a quote ("It's pining for fjords!"). Doesn't work for me, I ask if that's supposed to be funny. But if I show them Secret of Monkey Island's (from 1990) sword fights with insults, they just stare "Is that supposed to be a joke".

So yeah, everything gets shittier as you get older.

Indeed. I'm not sure what exactly is the problem with the current boarding passes. Most people these days seem to be using their phones for it already, showing the blob of pixels to a card reader. For long-haul trips, I prefer a hard, printed copy myself in case I happen to drop/break my phone or it runs out of battery just at the wrong moment. But what's the supposed advantage here? Skipping ID check at the gate by agents? When boarding planes, especially for long haul, the ID checks have *never* been the bottleneck, it's literally been the folks boarding and getting their carry-on into place and crowding the aisles.

Coming from Europe, I travelled quite a lot to the US between 2006 to 2012 or so, when I was visiting conferences and the like. Loved every trip *once I got in*. I mean, in general friendly people, lots of wonderful sights you have seen in movies, great outdoors (still would like to visit Grand Canyon and Yellowstone), but until you get to that point it's a pain.

Even coming from a visa waiver country, the whole ordeal at border was just painful. I don't particularly have a problem with them taking fingerprints and whatnot as such, but always the 2-4 hour lines, in general hostile attitude from the agents and the overall paranoia just gives the first impression where the whole country says go away. Lessons learned after very first trip where after landing at JFK I was to change planes bound for San Diego: Always transit at European side of the pond so you are on your way to your final destination directly, because there's no telling how much time you'll be spending waiting to even get processed.

Anyway, that was traveling for "work". I was getting paid and reimbursed for my time. As a tourist, especially with family, I have just been back for the two solar eclipses in 2017 and 2024. It takes literally a celestial event to go through that ordeal which is getting into the US when you are paying for your own trip.

Frankly, on every trip, I have always been worried that some clerical error or just nastiness from an agent who needs to fill out some quota suddenly results in ENTRY REJECTED stamp and spending a day or two at the airport before getting departed.

But.. until now the general expectation has been that at worst case they'll just put you on the next flight back home. Now you might apparently be stuck on some detention center in the middle of nowhere for a month and just disappear if they have a bad day. And yeah, I'm a white guy so even the Family Guy meme with the color chart doesn't isn't part of it. I'm sure people with darker skins have even more to worry about.

I hope that by the time I'm retiring and have lots of free time, things are looking up again. A long-time dream has been to just visit every state in the lower 48 - just fly in to Boston or Miami, buy a car, drive through east coast and then start heading west in some funny zigzag pattern until departing from somewhere in the west coast several month later. There's just so much to see and experience, and having a common language and connected highway system to make transportation easy is a huge perk. Here's to hoping.

get cast iron

- Doesn't really tolerate dishwasher
- Even when handwashing, need to be extra careful, first scrub and then put in a protective coating of oil
- Non-sticky only if you absolutely flood it in cooking oil or grease, and even then it's borderline. Unless you have really exact temperature controls (gas/induction), you cannot even fry an egg without leaving bits behind

I use cast iron *only* when cooking on open fire, but for anything else, there are PFAS-free non-sticky options. See e.g. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fheirol.fi%2Fen%2Fcollectio... - just have to know what to look for.

Check out Open Shell, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2FOpen-Shell%2F...

It makes Windows 10 (and especially 11) tolerable to use.

Also Windows Powertoys - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flearn.microsoft.com%2Fen... - the most important bit is that I can assign that stupid Copilot key to whatever.