Extra Ranty Edition!
🕹️ How Not To Fix Your Switch 2
The state of Washington is adding right to repair legislation. While most people may not be fixing their *own* phones, this allows things like repair shops to at least exist and hopefully flourish. If we want a culture of repairability, we need places that can repair.
I’ve fixed multiple phones thanks to iFixit. And they just released a teardown on the Switch 2. I didn’t realize until I watched that video that JoyCon drift was such a widespread problem. I have already replaced one connector, and still suffer from sporadic drift, and just deal with it. 🙁
Nerdery and Eye Candy 👁️👁️
.Net 10 has added a cool new way to create an app that doesn’t require a project file. I love this for smaller things. There’s even a new #:package directive for adding NuGet packages directly!
Unreal Engine 5 continues to get better, and this new tech demo from CD Projekt Red is artistically amazing, and the technical chops required are…dare i say it…unreal.
Intuit has been lobbying congress for decades in order to stop the IRS from providing an option to directly file your taxes for free electronically, something that is easy and obvious in many countries. But finally in 2023 DirectFile was born, allowing you to submit your taxes electronically. And apparently the IRS…has a github?
More Than Meets The Ay Eye🦾
I’ve been watching 3Blue1Brown’s series on machine learning principles, which has been an insightful and somewhat accessible explanation of LLM principals.
Transformers are an important topic in LLMs. This page does an amazing job of explaining a transformer visually through an actual GPT running in the browser. You can interact with it, inspect the values, and everything has links to deep explanations.
‘Overfitting‘ is the concept that an output can correlate too specifically to a specific piece of input (paraphrasing here). ComputerPhile has a very entertaining video about how LLMs have a sneaky ability to lie and hide their motives…and how that might be a huge problem.
Cool Bike Stuff 📬
Yet again Grin delivers with a great video of the University of Washington’s mail service. How cool is this?
Not So Cool Bike Stuff
I am going to tell y’all a pet peeve of mine: being told when I’m leaving on my bike to ‘stay safe’, ‘be careful’, or variations of. I understand people don’t say this out of malice but this feels, for lack of a better word, like victim-shaming. Do people tell drivers to slow down and be safe? The danger lies with distracted drivers in 2000lb vehicles, not with people on bikes. I would rather people said ‘watch out for cyclists’ to drivers than be told as a person on a bike that I need to watch out for cars.
Apparently people in New York are biking too fast, or are too ‘inexperienced’ or some such, and they are a problem with New York’s citi bikes. And so they are limiting the speed to 15mph…because somehow that’s going to fix the problem when a car hits a person on a bike. And really, is the issue that bikes are going too fast, or that cars are going too fast?
Jellyfin Considered Harmful 🪼
I’m sitting here streaming my (legally purchased) flacs from my Jellyfin server as I type this. This is something that is apparently harmful because its…idk, a gateway drug to piracy? Definitely an interesting take, possibly a bit hot from a google mod that has chosen poorly.
Spotify Actually Spotty 🔊
But seriously Jellyfin is awesome. I used Spotify for years but honestly, it felt too much of a what i call a ‘wallgorithmed’ garden. It kind of feels like you have access to everything, but at the same time you’ve got this algorithm trying to prod you in a specific direction of consumption that Spotify finds advantageous. I couldn’t care less about podcasts. And its music recommendations are spotty at best, which I guess is why its named that.