I don’t think it’s that surprising. Here’s two true statements:
I don’t trust my phone on a fundamental level. I also have mentioned things out loud and gotten ads afterward about them.
On the one hand, those two statements absolutely don’t prove that my phone is listening. Just because I don’t trust my phone doesn’t mean that it’s being used maliciously, and the ads I’ve seen might just be a coincidence.
On the other hand, those two statements together are definitely suggestive. They feel suspicious. It would be so easy for Apple/Google/Samsung to secretly listen and make a boatload of money by telling me a lie. Lord knows they’ve lied about other things.
So yeah, balance of evidence is that phones probably don’t do that. But don’t be surprised when people suspect that they do.
This is an interesting mechanism, but is it really that difficult to boil rice for 20 minutes? I'm not exactly Gordon Ramsay, but I don't think I've ever failed to make decent rice.
It depends on how much rice you are making, how often you make it, and if you'd like it to be setup overnight and started on a schedule for you for certain types of rice and other grains.
Rice cookers can generally make a pretty large volume and they're still rather efficient at doing so. If you get the water and rice ratio to your liking it will make nearly perfect rice every time at the press of a button. The best ones have multiple markings for white and brown rice on the bowl so you don't even need a measuring cup to do this.
It has a little countdown timer so you can get your sides ready on time. It plays a little song when it's done. It covers and seals up well and can keep rice warm and good to eat for a few hours.
There are only two parts that you have to wash, the bowl itself and the detachable lid seal, and one you have to wipe down, the steam vent cap.
I generally don't like special purpose tools in my kitchen. The rice cooker has been a part of it for 20 years anyways. It's simply too useful without any additional hassle that it has easily earned it's place.
In many Asian households, rice is a part of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Boiling rice and washing the pot for every meal is a lot of work. Instead with a rice cooker, you set it the evening before with a timer. Rice is automatically ready in the morning for breakfast, you take out the breakfast portion and close the cooker again. It now goes into warm mode and keeps the remaining rice fresh and warm for the remaining meals of the day where you can just take out a portion here or there.
If you're eating a more western diet with rice only a handful of times a week, it's probably overkill as a single-tasker.
It's very difficult when you only have a wood or charcoal stove that needs to be fanned for 20 minutes at a constant rate or else the rice will burn. Which is why the electric rice cooker was such an amazing creation. It's in the article about the inventor of it.
As for today? Well, too hot on the stove or a phone call comes in, and poof, there goes all the water and the rice burns. If you're making rice 3 times a day, it's easier and safer to cook in a machine that guarantees perfection every time.
You don't simmer for twenty minutes. You simmer for ten and remove it from the heat for the remaining ten. The rice never burns because it is still quite wet when you remove it from the heat. Start with twice as much water as rice (by volume) and it comes out perfectly. I've been cooking rice like this for thirty years and it's always great.
That's synchronous cooking. Think of a rice cooker as asynchronous cooking. You turn it on, walk away, come back whenever you're ready and you've got rice waiting for you. It is extremely convenient.
The article is very thin on details. For example, why not use a mechanical timer like many other appliances did and still do? That's the kind of detail an IEEE reader might appreciate.
A timer doesn't work because it takes longer to boil three cups of water compared to one. The bimetallic mechanism is agnostic of the amount of rice being cooked.
In the design being described there is an outer water reservoir where the water is being boiled away specifically as a timer. An alternative would be to have a bimetallic strip detect when the rice pot comes to temperature, lower the temp, and start a mechanical timer that could be set by the user. The advantage would be a significant energy savings vs. boiling water away as a kind of crude timer.
The 20 minutes is for ideal conditions. The article explained the goal was to boil away the water and then reduce the heat. The time needed may change with different ambient temperature or humidity.
I think nobody has to prevent abuse because listeners will either turn off traffic alerts or switch to a different channel.
Besides that, FM broadcasting isn't a lawless place and is regulated by the government. Abuse will most likely lead to some kind of penalty, but I can't be bothered to read through the laws to confirm it :P
It is a rule in Germany, I know about it because we did some distributed cooperation stuff with community radio stations and some hacking events during the pandemic, and making sure that no matter what happens with the network between the speakers, the coordinating host, and server of the radio station, we never send out silence, was quite an important concern. I can't quote you the exact line of the law,though.
Not sure about TA, but definitely saw radio station in Indianapolis using RDS to broadcast advertisements. In between the artist/song info, ads for an injury lawyer appeared. Thought it was super lame use of RDS.
The guy got sick with a mystery illness didn't he? This was about 20 years ago. He blogged about the saga of having doctors try to figure out what was wrong with him, and I think was self-administering various treatments. Must look up how he's doing.
> In some ways, the decision over “white” has been more ticklish. The National Association of Black Journalists and some Black scholars have said white should be capitalized, too.
> CNN, Fox News and The San Diego Union-Tribune said they will give white the uppercase, noting it was consistent with Black, Asian, Latino and other ethnic groups. Fox cited NABJ’s advice.
> CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white privilege.
What's the reason for capitalising either of them introducing any debate in the first place?
I doubt this will pass the test of time, makes it seem like a noun ('a White'; it must be a noun to be a proper noun after all) rather than an adjective ('a black person') which (capitalisation aside) is way out of favour. (At least it is/would be in the UK, where 'PoC' isn't really used either, so ymmv.)
> CBS News said it would capitalize white, although not when referring to white supremacists, white nationalists or white privilege.
Oh, interesting - so would I be correct in saying that "white supremacists" are people thinking that White people are superior to others, whereas a "White supremacist" is a White person who is a supremacist of some group, e.g. "A White male supremacist"?
Assuming this is about ethnic groups in the context of America, saying "White" doesn't have a "shared culture and history in the way Black does" is arguably true, but "Asian" and "Latino" also both don't have a shared culture and history in the way "Black" does. Also "White" is the only ethnic group name that doesn't refer to a place, even though it's clearly a stand-in for "European", which kind of implies everyone else came from somewhere else.
> "White" doesn't have a "shared culture and history in the way Black does" is arguably true
I don't think this is even right. For example, many Australian aborigines or natives of the Caribbean are "black" but are only from Africa in the sense that all humans are including Europeans. Likewise, a recent immigrant from Zimbabwe will have a very different "culture and history" than a fifth generation resident of Brooklyn, even if they have similar genetics and skin color. For that matter, at this point a resident of New York and a resident of Mississippi will have about as much in common as someone from France and someone from Poland, regardless of the color of their skin.
It also seems like quite a presumption to even suggest the contrary. Are we really safe to claim that people from Ghana and people from Ethiopia have a uniform culture just because they're both on the same continent and we aren't that familiar with either of them?
> Also "White" is the only ethnic group name that doesn't refer to a place, even though it's clearly a stand-in for "European"
How is this standing in any different than "Latino" implying Central and South America or "Black" implying Africa?
It seems like the best solution is to just not capitalize any of them. Or, for that matter, to stop trying to categorize people in this way, since the entire premise was established by foolish racists and doesn't deserve the dignity of continued deference.
The problem is that we do need the categorization because no matter the subcategory, the interactions with foolish racists are common and need to be talked about and addressed.
Black is not just the shared culture of African Americans but also includes Africans who immigrated after the slavery era, Afro-Latinos, and Afro-Caribbean people, which have significantly less overlap.
It is why African-American has dropped out of usage as the general term.
I think it would make more sense in a hyperlinked / popup definition field / WikiLike proper noun (a page is a full thing).
E.G. White Privilege helps to denote that this is a title for something, and might link to an outside definition, footnote that describes the term (in case someone somehow doesn't know it yet) etc.
Tired of questions asking "what I am", both from people and on forms. I'm American, not Asian, not Latinx. I have so far traced 3 great-grandparents lines back to England and 1 from an eastern European country that no longer exist (so how am I suppose to classify myself with that?). 2 left for Virginia in the 1600's the other 2 left for the US in the early 1800's. I'm an 11th generation American, yet I don't have that option on forms and people still ask me where I am from - no, I mean before that, what country are your(my) parents from? confusion
Also, I don't speak Spanish, so am not Hispanic (why is this even grouped with things like Asian, Black, White? and why are Asian's Asian but the other two get colors?)
> It’s interesting that Matt Levine capitalises “white”, as well as capitalising “black”.
In this context, they're both proper nouns and this is the correct stylization, what's interesting about it?
> I haven’t seen this style choice before.
Do people imagine that they're going to have an impact on any social outcome by merely changing capitalization of certain words? It's incomprehensible that this would be a "style choice" and not simply "moral navel gazing."
Neither are proper nouns as I understand the term. They're not names for anything, they're just adjectives or broad categories at most. Treating them like proper nouns makes them sound like baseball team names.
I visited a website once that only capitalized "black" and not "white". It was a website geared towards black entrepreneurs iirc but I forget the name. It came across as creepy to me.
I remember somebody at TheRoot saying they didn’t want to capitalize either one because if they capitalized one they’d have to capitalize the other and capitalizing White meant centering white privilege.
Really I think it becomes clear when you know that Custer capitalized mule but not Indian.
Maybe you should reread the article? The introductory motivational paragraph talks about the difficulty of getting to the main board which is in the back of the fridge.
The article is saying that tech jobs are declining due to high interest rates. It's also saying that companies now expect you to perform tasks from multiple departments, leading to burnout and low job satisfaction when you do get a job.
Thanks for the summary, skimmed it and it's too long of a time commitment for what appears like little payoff.
Sure companies want the Full Stack -> Do-Everything hire - who wouldn't, I'd like a goose that lays golden eggs but there is no market to provide that. I see this change as merely a side effect of the state of the market where hirers of labor feel they can make such demands.
What I find interesting and did not find explored in the article is that the overhead for establishing a company is far lower than what it used to be so there is more potential for Do-Everything people to just do that little bit more to include all the other functions of the company. Many of the functions needed to run a company are not needed at such a small scale that necessitates a Do-Everything hire.
I know not everyone is cut out for that, but not everyone is not cut out for the Do-Everything level of responsibilities either, and those that can do the latter are more likely to be able to do the former. That's what I did, I built up my skill stack working as a Full-Stack / Do-Everything engineer then learned business and marketing on top and went solo. These days I have a good laugh when I read about some start-up that raised some money based on delivering X is also advertising for jobs that are basically build X from scratch by yourself.
The original reason I had an LLM summarize it was to see if the parent had themselves used an LLM to make their summary.
And then it turned out to include some extra info from the linked article that for me was sufficient to decide that I should read the whole linked article.
So that’s why I posted it in this sub thread.
(For the record I also think there is a difference between quoting LLM output in a comment, vs people who post LLM written slop and passing it off as something they themselves wrote.)
