My favorite Devo song has always been Freedom of Choice. It complements the Alvin Toffler book, Future Shock, quite well. One of the premises of the book is that mass production has overwhelmed consumers with choices. He illustrates this by describing the number of permutations of Ford Mustang that could be custom-ordered due to the combinations of exterior & interior color, trim packages, etc. while people don't actually care to expend the mental energy to navigate those selections. Instead, they would prefer to buy the car with these choices made for them.

Freedom of choice is what you got, Freedom from choice is what you want.

Devo even emphasized the inane choices confronting consumers with the physical single for the song. The record did not have an "A" or "B" side labelled. Instead, the owner of the record would need to decide for themselves which song was on side A or B and fill out a checkbox denoting their choice on the cover and record label.

Really looking forward to seeing this documentary.

I copy-pasted the URL into an existing YouTube tab I had open. Appropriately, the video I had previously been watching was detailing a new feature in Minecraft called an "Autocrafter". It's a new block that can be created that will take material inputs and output objects that would normally require a human player to create using a crafting table.

Your video is insightful, David. Thank you for posting it here.

I didn't say anything about whether Reiser was rehabilitated or capable of such. He's still in prison, so the system believes him not to be.

He currently has a significant interest in convincing people that he is rehabilitated due to the benefit of assisting with his release. This increases the probability that his messaging may be carefully architected to portray him in a favorable light and is certainly a one-sided narrative due to his wife not being alive to comment. I was commenting to criticize Slashdot for enabling Reiser to potentially whitewash himself to try to get released from prison.

If he does get out, I hope that he will dedicate his remaining life to supporting victims of domestic violence. I'll be happy to read his letter to Slashdot at that time documenting his work going forward.

Dude killed his wife and his legacy, thinks he's going to rescue the latter by writing an open letter to a website that has catastrophically diminished during his incarceration. I suppose that's fitting.

Since his wife doesn't have the opportunity to have a letter printed, I would've preferred that Slashdot not give him this attention, regardless of how limited that attention is nowadays. Weirdly, the letter was transmitted to Slashdot, but this summary references an Ars Techica story about the letter...

Twitter laid off 80% of its workforce and there was never a story on Slashdot. Discord lays off far fewer staff and it gets one. Weird.

The food chain in our neighborhood would solve that nightly. Possums and raccoons will gladly finish the meal left for them outside the cat door. We hardly even compost food waste anymore through the city program- just throw bread crusts, leftovers, etc. in the backyard and it's gone by next morning.

I don't have first-hand experience with the Pixel 8 photo quality, but if it's at all competitive with equivalent iPhone photography, it takes dang good pictures. The crappiest DSLRs with three lenses are going to be nowhere near $200, new or even used. That's a reasonable price.

Regarding the price for repair parts... manufacturers price repair parts partly based on the anticipated frequency of their failure. It costs them a lot to warehouse the parts until the product is officially EOL and they're off the hook for providing the parts. I remember when Apple used to sell re-badged HP inkjet printers and stored all the repair parts. Things that would NEVER likely break, like the internal printer frame had to be available as a repair part, but it was extremely expensive. Far more than just buying another printer. I anticipate some of these Pixel 8 parts are priced the same way. Camera likely will need to be replaced a lot because of impacts to the lenses, so they've priced it reasonably at $200, I think.

Would be nice if Nikon and Canon released firmware for previous generations of camera to add this functionality. I know mirrorless is what many people are migrating to, but there are some of us sweeping up the legacy equipment out there for cheap. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Nikon to release firmware for the higher-end models with shutters that feature this signature functionality? I'd appreciate that.

The director who capitalized on Winnie the Pooh falling into public domain seems not to be able to get funding to go forward with a similar bastardization of Mickey Mouse. Too intimidated by Disney at this point.

Let's walk back from the national GOP leadership being unable to reign in rogue representatives like Matt Gaetz. Normally, party leadership would be able to exert control through campaign contributions to protect other party members like Kevin McCarthy. Matt Gaetz is immune to this because he doesn't need national party campaign finance assistance. Why? His wife of two years is the sister of Palmer Luckey-the billionaire who made his fortune by selling a VR head-mounted-display company to FaceBook.

Nice daydream to have while sitting in your own walled garden which is still walled.

Consider it an iterative improvement over the canned sentiments like "Seasons Greetings!" or just "Merry Christmas" that goes out on most peoples' cards. None of those are particularly 'personal'.

I totally agree. People who dismiss ChatGPT and equivalent LLMs have simply not spent the time to use it.

Faulting LLM output as being unreliable or hallucination-prone ignores the human operating the tool as an editor. The tool replaces the writer(s), not the editor, who ensures proper output per the intended context.

All kinds of businesses are going to have to ramp up to incorporate LLM output or be at a disadvantage with their competitors in the marketplace. Take Christmas cards, for example. Families are prepping to send out their mass-printed cards that all have a simple greeting on the front and perhaps a paragraph of printed text on the back. Next year, Shutterfly better have an option to generate a custom Christmas poem on the back about your family, because their competitors' card designer UI will have that.

I think that's par for the course in the music industry.

If you watch the Beastie Boys doc on AppleTV with objectivity, you'll see they persuaded Capitol Records to fund them living in a Hollywood mansion while they partied instead of creating the follow-up to Licensed to Ill. This was a big gamble on Capitol's part because the Beastie Boys were forging their own way without Rick Rubin to produce the music. Eventually, Adam Yauch found the Dust Brothers and they had an album ready-to-go on their own and Yauch bought it from them and collaborated with the DBs to remix it with their own vocals, etc. to be released as Paul's Boutique.

Phone and prototype left unattended at a Chinese factory? Sounds like zero operational security being practiced by that firm. No doubt there was theft of IP due to carelessness at any stage of that company's production process.