I was wondering if this was a pre-Thagomizer comic, or just a missed chance at self-reference.

The latter.

There have always been despicable people like Trump, and I’m certain that, as horrible people go, he’s not even in the top thousand of horrible people alive today.

It’s far more sad that so many people in the US are willing to overlook his faults; even if you discount his rabid base, it’s especially sad that close to another 20% of Americans who are more or less centrists (for Americans) are willing to overlook the fact that he admits that he’s working toward a dictatorship. This is the most depressing thing, for me.

🕸️🕷️

But that’s not a very friendly spider emoji. I sense an unfair bias.

/╲/\ºo;88;oº/\╱\

He likes the creamy filling the most.

The power to choose, just before dying, to come back to life as a healthy 30 y/o.

But you probably meant only selfless acts allowed, hence the “sacrifice” verbiage. In that case, instantaneous worldwide post-scarcity society. That’d address most of the world’s ills, eventually. Being ultra-rich means nothing in post-scarcity; not needing Middle-East oil and African mineral resources would eliminate most international meddling in those locations. While it wouldn’t immediately address climate change or cure all diseases, it’d mean enough food and energy for everyone, and it’d give us the means to accomplish these.

If so many of us weren’t spending all our time working just to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, we could accomplish much as a species.

Scotchguard would like you to believe it’s all smooth and luxurious, but it doesn’t protect against rug burns at all!

The assassination attempt on Reagan also failed, and was bigger news, for far longer. Not JF Kennedy level, but it was more enduring than the attempt on Trump.

The news cycle on the Trump attempt was astonishingly brief.

In Living Color; 1988.

Search for “Kennedy.” Long before Trump was a “thing” in the American zeitgeist.

Except he’s never accepted responsibility for bad picks before. He’s known for taking pride in a willingness to hire random people and fire and replace them.

How many people did he fire, or who quit very probably under duress, during his Presidency?

Actually, that’s thee thing. The only legal way for him to get rid of Vance now is if Vance withdraws. That would make it look like Vance’s decision, not his, which takes power away from him; males him look like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. Trump has no problem firing people; he’s less keen when they quit on him. And if Vance withdraws and Trump goes on record saying that what really happened is that he fired him, that could be more legal trouble for him, I guess. He’s probably sick of sitting in court rooms by now.

F-Droid

Most of the apps I have and use are installed via Droidify. The ones that aren’t are company apps, like banking or airline. I could just used the web sites for those; they’re only conveniences.

My phone isn’t rooted, and I didn’t read the article so I don’t know how this will affect me. If push comes to shove, I’ll simply bite the bullet and get a phone I can install Linux on next time, regardless of how polished for daily driving it is.

I think John F. Kennedy qualified; he’s been practically deified since his assassination, and his supporters were MAGA-level enthusiasts. Just the sheer level of conspiracy theory around his assassination, missing from all other assassinations - successful or attempted - is a good indicator. Even the attempted Trump assassination, which generated considerable tin-hat response, is now almost completely forgotten; certainly, nobody’s talking about it in mainstream forums.

In my opinion, Kennedy was an incredible president and great statesman, but yeah, I think you could reasonably claim there was a cult of personality around him.

I may have misrepresented it: they may have been able to be parked, but that required a controlled shutdown - not a sudden hardware failure. And these were supercomputers, before cheap commodity hardware took over server rooms. It was common that these would be turned on and almost never be shut off except when being replaced.

Lots of hard drives required parking and would risk running the drive if the heads weren’t parked before being spun down. The design required the later of air from the spinning disks to float the heads over the disks - if you didn’t park the heads before spinning them down, the heads would touch down on the disks, sometimes while there were still spinning, and scratch the surface and ruin the disk.

I’m designing off the top of my head, but I think you could do it with a DHT, or even just steal some distributed ledger algorithm from a blockchain. Or, you develop a distributed skip tree – but you’re right, any sort of distributed query is going to have a possibly unacceptable latency. So you might – like Bitcoin – distributed the index itself to participants (which could be large), but federate the indexing operation s.t. rather than a dozen different search engine crawlers hitting each web site, you’d have one or two crawlers per site feeding the shared index.

Distributed search engines have existed for over a decade. Several solutions for distributed Lucene clusters exist (SOLR, katta, ElasticSearch, O2) and while they’re mostly designed to be run in a LAN where the latencies between nodes is small, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine a fairly low-latency distributed, replicated index where the nodes have a small subset of peer nodes which, together, encompass the entire index. No instance has the same set of peer nodes, but the combined index is eventually consistent.

Again, I’m thinking more about federating and distributing the index-building, to reduce web sites being hammered by search engines which constitute 80% of their traffic. Federating and distributing the query mechanism is a harder problem, but there’s a lot of existing R&D in this area, and technologies that could be borrowed from other domains (the aforementioned DHT and distributed ledger algorithms).

let me know if you have questions.

I have all the questions. I’m peripherally aware of ESP32; my experience with it, and its capabilities, is severely limited, and IME interface changes require recompiling and re-flashing things. Many of my questions stem from that ignorance.

1. Integration support. I assume GadgetBridge on Android is how you’d do it? Or is there another app?
2. How is the battery life IRL?
3. What does the watch face & app space look like? The FAQ mentions a “gallery”, and instructions for contributions describe the github PR process. Is the gallery just the list of watch faces on the sqfmi website?
4. What’s the process for changing faces, and installing additional functionality? From the docs, it looks as if this must be done over a serial cable, despite the device having WiFi capability. I assume that’s because adding faces is basically re-flashing the firmware, which is not supported over wireless? So, to get a new face, you clone the repo, compile a new firmware, and flash the device over a serial cable?
5. The FAQ verbiage is confusing regarding the display technology, but I think it’s saying the display isn’t reflective LCD like the Pebble.
6. Can you have multiple faces on the device, or do you have to re-flash it to change the face? The FAQ says the face is the entire firmware, implying only one face on the device at a time.
7. If you’re part of the community: have there been any discussions about future development to add, e.g. health monitor hardware?
8. Is there any integration with a phone, such as notifications? This is sort of the GadgetBridge question, but more about what integrations - if any - are supported. Vibrate on phone ringing? Quick responses to texts? Phone calls over the watch - yeah, I know it’s not that advanced, but for example.
9. What’s your opinion of the device? Do you use it as a daily driver?

At under $70, I’m not expecting much, but it’d be nice to know what you expect. The sqfmi site is pretty sparse on details. If there’s an additional, deeper FAQ or Wiki, a link to that would be great.

Thanks!

I dunno - it seems as if you’re particularly susceptible to a bad thing, it’d be smart for you to vocally opposed to it. Like, women are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement, and it makes sense because it impacts them the most.

Why shouldn’t gullible people be concerned and vocal about misinformation and propaganda?

I’d love a successor to Pebble which doesn’t require an account. There are a number of options, but my issue is that most require creating an account with vendor, and app integration with - no doubt - copiuos data harvesting and reselling. Many are absurdly expensive.

There are several cheap options on Alibaba.

Goodreader.com lists a number of expensive e-ink watches, some of which look quite nice.

But I’ve got my eye on Watchy (github, old review); it was introduced a couple of years ago and is still being updated. It’s also available from a couple of vendors, including preassembled through Amazon.

This is a great question, in that it made me wonder why the Fediverse hasn’t come up with a distributed search engine yet. I can see the general shape of a system, and it’d require some novel solutions to keep it scalable while still allowing reasonably complex queries. The biggest problems with search engines is that they’re all scanning the entire internet and generating a huge percent of all internet traffic; they’re all creating their own indexes, which is computationally expensive; their indexes are huge, which is space-expensive; and quality query results require a fair amount of computing resources.

A distributed search engine, with something like a DHT for the index, with partitioning and replication, and a moderation system to control bad actors and trojan nodes. DDG and SearX are sort of front ends for a system like this, except that they just hand off the queries to one (or two) of the big monolithic engines.

Time for my funny story!

At my University, the CIS department had a bunch of really expensive SGI servers (Origin 2000’s) together in a server room that was kept at some chilly temp, 50° or 60° or something (nothing crazy). One weekend the power went out, and while the CIS department had battery backup for the machines, facilities didn’t have battery backup for the A/C. They said, afterward, that the temperature in the room climbed by 200°F within a dozen minutes, and all of the SGIs crashed. The hard drives in those were designed to be spun up exactly once - the machines, once powered up, were never powered down - and the abrupt shut down ruined all the disks. I don’t know what it cost to replace them, but it was a minor financial scandal.

I loved SGI at the time. SGI shipped that model in these giant, 8’x4’x4’ crates, on which they printed “TERMINATOR - THIS SIDE UP ⬆️”, which in the 90’s was hilarious.

A bonus, related power outage story: once a friend of our’s was working on her graduate thesis; she was a graphics artist, so it was a CGI animation she’d build on a NeXTSTEP desktop. A few days before submission, some drunk ran his pickup truck into a power line pole in the middle of the night and killed the power in the off-campus housing where she lived and was currently working on her almost-complete program. The surge wiped her project - again, mid-90’s, disk was expensive, tape was even more expensive, and few people did backups regularly. She was set back several months and had to submit a really early version of the film. That wasn’t a funny story; it was a traumatic experience for her, and we all felt terrible about it.

Those really were some wild-west days, though, and there was some seriously sexy, entirely unaffordable, hardware out there, before everything went beige. NeXTSTEP and SGI workstations were the pinnacle of style, but even Sun offerings had some pizzaz. It wasn’t until Jobs came back to Apple that computers started getting style again.

I didn’t want to spoil their fun, but I’m glad you did. That kid’s going to experience an embarassing moment of parental disillusionment the first time they try to be clever with a halfway competent math teacher.