The Juicero was seriously a major point in my personal ideological journey. Around 2013, I was still very convinced that Silicon Valley (and VC-backed startups in general) were a source of innovation that could do a lot of good in the world. I was starting to question that a little bit because I had noticed that every new startup was described as “like Uber for <other thing>,” but I still largely believed that most SV startups were innovative and improving people’s lives, or at least had the potential to do so.

And then the freaking Juicero came along, and I was like, “What the fuck? Do these people actually have no idea what they’re doing? Oh my god, they don’t.”

Look, I’m not saying that if the Juicero didn’t exist, that I would be some Elon Musk fanboy right now. Something else probably would have woken me up instead.

But in this timeline, in this current universe we are in, the Juicero made me see things differently. No one wants to believe that they were changed by the Juicero… but I was. And I… I… I don’t know how I feel about that…

Man, AnandTech came from the earlier type of Internet, where independent media outlets were fully in control of their own presence on the web. (E.g. they were not a YouTube channel.) Even though they weren’t still independent for a while now (purchased by a publishing company in 2014), I’m sad to see one of the originals go.

I love when anti-progressive people “take a stand” against California by moving to Texas, and then they move to the most famously progressive city in Texas.

Austin: For those who are stupid enough to relocate based on culture war bullshit, but not stupid enough to think that you’re hiring software developers and creatives out in the boonies.

This may not work out the way I want it to, but I’m actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it’s going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It’s already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can’t wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).

I’m only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?

That is very cool, I hadn’t heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I’m thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.

Wow, thanks! That’s fantastic. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works – I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it’s just a static HTML site.

That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.

Every time I hear about this problem, I get that one part from the song Love Shack stuck in my head.

🎵 Your what?!?!
TEEEEEEEEEEES-LAAA!
…rusted

Love shack,
Baby love shack 🎵

I don’t think I’ve ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there’s a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there’s a “Donate” link in their footer.

Seems like they’re always kind of subtle about asking for donations – I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

The article mentions they’re “decreasing their investment” in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It’s honestly the best spam-prevention method I’ve ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

23andMe was always a product with a very small upside and absolutely massive downside. Best case scenario, it’s a neat little thing to learn about yourself. Worst case scenario, it’s a massive opportunity for discrimination and blackmail.

Completely unrelated: for some reason, on kbin, the thumbnail for this article is the thumbnail for this youtube video, and that is a cooler thing than 23andMe by far.

Microsoft’s initial departure from Microsoft-brand peripherals meant it would only focus on more expensive, higher-end designs worthy of Surface branding.

They’re saying this like we didn’t all just read an article about the official Xbox toaster yesterday…

I’m sorry I have nothing helpful to add, other than congratulating you on the achievement of filling up a Gmail account. That is impressive.

Google should send out awards for that. Like, if you get a Youtube play button for having 1 million subscribers, they should give you some kind of “I’ll get to it later” button for having 1 million unread emails in your inbox.

Yeah, this is perfectly consistent with the idea that people don’t want to read AI generated news at all.

The title of the paper they are referencing is Or they could just not use it?: The paradox of AI disclosure for audience trust in news. So the source material definitely acknowledges that. And that is a great title, haha.

Yeah, I actually haven’t seen the nag screen in a couple days, whereas I was seeing it often last week. Whatever updated circumvention uBlock has figured out, it’s working just about perfectly.

Then I guess it’s just down to cookies?

I assume so. But I don’t see why they would need your main session’s cookies to tell if you’re using an ad blocker. I’m guessing this is still something left over from when they were giving you one nag-free video per day, so private tabs will probably see the nag screen too eventually.

I just checked and I do have uBO enabled for private windows, so I’m not sure why it isn’t getting caught. I started doing it because I noticed that YouTube was giving one “free” view per day, and then your second view would get the nag screen. So I figured the private window might make you show up as a new person each time, so you always get the initial nag-free video.

But it seems like the nag screen shows up even on the first view now, so I’m not sure why this private tab trick is still working.

I’ve noticed that the nag screen never shows up in a private tab. In the last week I’ve gotten in the habit of right-clicking a video and choosing Open Link in New Private Window. It’s not very convenient, but it has been working.