It seems to be built with the idea that you’re going to carry around a phone, and then have keyboards, monitors, mice (though you can use the phone’s touch screen as a trackpad) etc. set up at work stations to do more serious tasks, but the app ecosystem for Android just isn’t there. About the only thing that works half decent is Google Docs.

Yes; using a USB dock with HDMI out you can use a Samsung phone as basically a desktop PC. For some reason. Having tried it, the experience isn’t great, none of the apps are really designed for it so I guess if you want to type an email on your phone, knock yoruself out.

I’m gonna eat a lot of brains until the protagonist blows my head off with an unrealistic shotgun.

it’ll happen to you.

I’m in this comment and I begrudgingly like it. Carry on.

I still hate “leverage” used as a synonym for “use.” “We leverage technologies” yeah sure, when was the last time you had your asshole leveraged?

I’ve long thought that phones needed a taze button. Every telephone in the world should have the power to deliver a high power electric shock to the user, and the phone network should only allow the callee to taze the caller. So if you call someone, the person you have called can taze you.

I don’t see any problem with the telephone network that can’t be solved by putting a 30,000 volt potential across the caller’s jaw. Make it work on call bots too, if a computer automatically calls you and you don’t want it to, put Shearon Harris on the line. Modern problems require 2nd Amendment solutions, and if you elect me as your president in 2028 it is these policies that I shall energetically enact.

I bet those tablets had their slicer software on them.

A 3D printer is a CNC machine, it doesn’t understand 3D model files, you have to give it a series of gantry movement instructions, usually in G-code format. G-code has to be written for the individual printer it’s being run on, because some of them consider the bottom left edge of the bed to be the origin, some the bottom right, some the center, you need to know the nozzle size, things like that. So you typically slice your model right before printing. And yeah I’m not really aware of any tablet friendly slicer software.

Courtesy Flush

I’ve got this little tablet…you know how so many people turn an iPad into a crappy laptop by adding a keyboard cover to it? Well Lenovo turned a laptop into a crappy iPad by making the hinge a floppy skin flap with a magnetic pogo pin connector. I intended it as a little computer I can use in the wood shop, I wanted something fanless and preferably with a removable keyboard so it wouldn’t be destroyed by sawdust that can run FreeCAD natively.

I’m not sure Linux is ready for tablets. FreeCAD is not ready for tablets or laptops, holy fuck it’s unusable without a 5 button mouse and a spaceball. I may have to distro hop a little on the thing because it likes to wake up with the keyboard attached, not recognize the keyboard, and stay permanently in portrait mode. So wake up the computer, rip the keyboard off, wait a second, reattach.

It’s kind of fuckpuke, tbh.

10 inch screen size isn’t a problem though. For a general laptop I’d want to go 13 inches but for something I’m mostly going to use as a tablet and then occasionally as a laptop 10 will do.

We don’t. You’re just more squeamish about seeing them run over with the cold unfeeling tires of capitalism than other groups.

Oh are you one of those people that stubbornly refuses to accept analogies?

How about this: Imagine being a photosensitive epileptic in the year 950 AD. How many sources of intense rapidly flashing light are there in your environment? How many people had epilepsy in ancient times and never noticed because they were never subjected to strobe lights?

Jump forward a thousand years. We now have cars that can drive past a forest causing the passengers to be subjected to rapid cycles of sunlight and shadow. Airplane propellers, movie projectors, we can suddenly blink intense lights at people. The invention of the flash lamp and strobing effects in video games aren’t far in the future. In the early 80’s there were some video games programmed with fairly intense flashing graphics, which ended up sending some teenagers to the hospital with seizures. Atari didn’t invent epilepsy, they invented a new way to trigger it.

I don’t think we’re seeing schizophrenia here, they’re not seeing messages in random strings or hearing voices from inanimate objects. Terry Davis did; he was schizophrenic and he saw messages from god in /dev/urandom. That’s not what we’re seeing here. I think we’re seeing the psychology of cult leaders. Megalomania isn’t new either, but OpenAI has apparently developed a new way to trigger it in susceptible individuals. How many people in history had some of the ingredients of a cult leader, but not enough to start a following? How many people have the god complex but not the charisma of Sun Myung Moon or Keith Raniere? Charisma is not a factor with ChatGPT, it will enthusiastically agree with everything said by the biggest fuckup loser in the world. This will disarm and flatter most people and send some over the edge.

I mean, I think ChatGPT can “induce” such schizoid behavior in the same way a strobe light can “induce” seizures. Neither machine is twisting its mustache while hatching its dastardly plan, they’re dead machines that produce stimuli that aren’t healthy for certain people.

Thinking back to college psychology class and reading about horrendously unethical studies that definitely wouldn’t fly today. Well here’s one. Let’s issue every anglophone a sniveling yes man and see what happens.

“How shall we fuck off O lord?”

I think I read somewhere that that was apocryphal, but it strikes me as 100% plausible. It doesn’t even have to be a matter of “write a system that detects pregnant women via their purchase history and send them coupons for maternity stuff” I think Amazon’s Frequently Bought Together feature could get it done. The same algorithm that suggests a tacklebox and some lures when you have a fishing pole in your shopping cart might recommend diapers and formula to those who buy maternity pants.

(I think this is a reference to the recent “a grad student was grabbed off the street in my town last month” entry into the series and the “ooh XKCD gone political” response to same)

If you’re new to Linux, I suggest at the very least starting to learn now. If you have a spare device you can install it on, an old laptop or something, dual boot on your existing machine or use Virtualbox…Start learning now, while you still consider Windows an option.

My own journey to the Linux platform included several instances of the following scenario:

I need to get something done. It’s simple, in Windows 7 I know how to do it in seconds. It’s so simple that I don’t know the words for it, just the thing to click to do it. But it doesn’t work that way in Linux, even the vocabulary is different, and you need this done right now because you’re working on something and you don’t have time to stop and learn this right now.

Boot into Windows, get your job done and turned in. Then look up how to do it in Linux later. Eventually you stop hitting that wall.

You’ve decided you have seven months. I’d get to it.

How far apart were those two episodes? Like, production date? Futurama is a long-running show with a big gap in the middle, they did topical episodes about Napster and the iPhone.

Read the owner’s manual.

While the nation was functioning, meat and dairy would have been regulated by the USDA, not the FDA.