We’re a family of six, and the kids don’t have phones. It’s tough to coordinate schedules already and it’s only going to get worse.

I recognize that I’m an edge case.

This is an amazing article. I’m serious. Very well written. This is my favorite part:

I asked Higby why they were bringing ads to the fridges. He said via email, “This pilot further explores how a connected appliance can deliver genuinely useful, contextual information. The refrigerator is already a daily hub, and we’re testing a responsible, user-controlled way to make that space more helpful.”

This is similar to the justification Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of Devices & Services, made to me last month when I asked him about advertising on its Echo devices. He said it was looking to be “elegantly elevating the information that a customer needs.”

Do these people actually believe this? Do they see advertisements in their own lives and think, “ah yes, that was useful and contextual. That was a helpful ad, elegantly elevating my information.” I’ve seen some delusional people in executive-level roles, but that would be a special new class of delusion. Nobody likes ads. I recognize that some people have higher and lower tolerances for them, but nobody is actually grateful for them. Right?! I need to believe this is true.

Both companies claim they want to offer “curated,” “relevant” ads that might “enhance the experience.” I can buy that to some extent when it’s ads for features that your smart fridge or smart display offers. This tech is complicated and capable, and most people only tap into a fraction of what their devices can do.

That’s generous. But ok, maybe I can grant the premise.

But there is no future where third-party advertisements will ever be welcome in people’s homes like this — even if they happen to show me a brand of pet food right when my dog is looking at me with hungry eyes.

Right. Exactly. No matter what, I can think of no situation in which an ad is serving the customer’s interests. Maybe in the case of a coupon? But even then, I think it’s dubious.

Not a “smart” fridge per se, but I can see the use of a screen on my fridge; something where we can see our family calendar, leave notes for each other, and maybe also be able to access the grocery shopping list. Weather would be nice too, though you can keep the news widget (yikes). Something in a visible location in our house, where we go every day.

I’m not sure what other features they advertise with a smart fridge, but those few would be nice; especially if I could just plug a raspberry pi into it and skip all of the Samsung nonsense entirely.

🎶 The answer is always capitalism 🎵

Study Boldly Claims 4K And 8K TVs Aren’t Much Better Than HD To Your Eyes, But Is It True?

The rare exception to Betteridge’s Law.

But yeah, this matches my experience. I can tell the difference between 1080 and 4k from my couch if I work at it, but not enough to impact my enjoyment of what I’m watching, and definitely not as much as the difference HDR makes.

Even at computer monitor distance, running a 4k monitor at 1440 with high pixel density is probably going to be a better experience than wrenching every single pixel you can get out of it. Framerate is better than resolution for gaming, for the most part.

When BioShock Infinite came out, I thought, “oh, I’m so glad the industry finally figured escort missions out and we won’t have problems with it anymore.”

And yet.

This is what I did. Haven’t felt the need to take it off of airplane mode yet.

This is probably a good methadone, though. It’s way easier to kick a watercolor addiction than an addiction to an app purpose-developed by a whole team of engineers to string people along with the minimum possible dopamine drip for as long as they can manage.

I’m sure it’s RAG at best. There’s no way I can conceive of that they’re actually training individual models for each user in a performant or economical fashion.

More likely, as you said, they’re just zero-shotting the relevant personal data into the context window. And honestly, I’d be a little surprised if they had a smaller model trying to evaluate relevance; a simple heuristic or basic frequency analysis algorithm would probably perform about as well and be a lot cheaper. The big final model can probably toss away the noise well enough.

I’ve never been so insulted!

I suppose.

“Rival” is definitely the wrong word here, right? That implies that they, like, steal each others’ mascots and compete in a big football game for some dubious prize once a year. If Alabama and Auburn literally shot anyone traveling between the two of them, that’d be one thing, but this is not a “rivalry.” It’s a cold war.

You have a super majority in all branches of government

Oh, even the SCOTUS? Cool, that means I don’t have to do step 1: immediately impeach and remove all members of the Supreme Court who did not dissent with the ruling that the President is immune from prosecution.

So I can move on to the rest of the list:

• Instruct my Attorney General to bring a case before the current SCOTUS which would allow them to overturn Citizens United. Encourage them to hear and deliberate on no other cases before that case is decided.

• Have respected lawmakers introduce several pieces of critical legislation which I insist upon seeing on my desk before I see any others:

  • first, a bill which would establish term limits for all members of the federal Judiciary not to exceed 19 years (preferably closer to 13 years), and which would further institute a binding code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court and the federal Judiciary that detail their requirement to maintain impartiality, qualifications for appointment and approval, transparency obligations, and circumstances under which they should be removed from office;

  • second, a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College (I’m really hoping that my supermajority in all branches of government extends to the state level, too). If such an amendment seems unlikely to be ratified, I will have this lawmaker instead introduce a bill that would require the members of the Electoral College to assign their votes in accordance with the outcome of the national popular vote, independent of the decision of their state. Both the amendment and the bill should include a clause requiring all elections with more than one valid candidate be conducted via ranked choice vote;

  • third, a bill which would increase the maximum number of constituents per member of the House of Representatives to 250,000 (this would effectively triple the size of the House), establish a minimum of three senators for each state with a fourth apportioned to the 25 largest states, and apportion full voting members of the House and Senate under these rules to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico;

  • fourth, a bill which would immediately re-establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and establish its budget as significantly higher than it has ever been before. This bill would also remove all news sources (television news, online news, newspapers, etc) from private ownership and establish them instead as independent nonprofit organizations funded by the CPB;

  • fifth, a bill which would penalize the President of the United States with expulsion from office if they withhold or otherwise interfere with funds, agencies, and directives duly passed by Congress, and which would further re-establish any such agencies which have been eliminated since the beginning of 2025;

  • sixth, a bill which would penalize the President of the United States with expulsion from office and immediate felony charges of federal election interference if, for more than six months of their term, there are not enough commissioners sitting on the Federal Election Commission (or nominated to the Senate for consideration) for the commission to have a quorum to operate;

  • seventh, a bill which would establish a statute stripping all unused funds from every political party at the conclusion of every election. Those funds would be treated as tax revenue and appropriated for to fund the Federal Election Commission.

Now that the Legislative Branch has enough to keep them busy, I have some executive work to do.

• Expand the FEC and increase their mandate to include nonpartisan reviews of electoral maps. This might seem less important after the abolition of the Electoral College, but actually I think it’s still critical for local representation.

• Re-appoint Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, if she’s interested. Expand and broaden its powers to seek injunctive, equitable, and punitive relief where appropriate in the pursuit of consumer protections.

• Instruct my Federal Communications Commission to institute Net Neutrality common carrier laws for broadband providers, and further extend those rules to cover social media platforms as well. Also instruct them to assist a member of the Legislature in drafting strong laws that would enshrine those protections into law, once the six critical bills have been passed.

• Instruct my Attorney General to investigate, build a case against, and if necessary prosecute all members and associates of both Trump administrations who participated in any illegal activity; and to take Trump himself into custody immediately, pending trial; as he is clearly a flight risk. I would further instruct them to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling of presidential immunity, as well as any pardons that he issued to himself, as necessarily invalid. Assuming he is convicted, I would further instruct my Attorney General to argue that pardons issued by Trump were in the pursuit of his criminal activity and are thus also nullified.

• Request that the House and Senate codify and harden their response to purveyors of armed insurrection under the 14th Amendment.

I think that’s everything I’d need to do to fix the problems that Trump and the GOP have created or exploited. There are probably other loopholes that need to be closed, and I’d want to take care of those as well. Basically, I want to eliminate a lot of executive power, and I want to codify norms and rules into actual laws wherever possible.

Now that the cleanup is done, I can actually get into some serious business, like…

• getting UBI passed;
• getting Medicare For All passed;
• getting us exploring space again;
• getting the FTC and FCC working together to regulate AI;
• getting the FBI to work classifying and investigating the NRA as a domestic terror group;
• establishing Congressional term limits not to exceed the average life expectancy in the United States minus ten years.

I’ve thought about this a lot.

The problem with banning weapons basically boils down to “weapons already exist.”

Bad actors have them and will not give them up voluntarily. It’s very simple to say “they should be banned,” but short of Star Trek-level scanner technology, it’s impossible to find all of them. If everyone else gives them up, then the bad actors essentially run the show.

If we were somehow able to ban and dispose of all existing weapons, another problem presents itself: namely, weapons can be created or improvised from other items. 3D printers can make guns (yes, really), knives are a standard and critical kitchen tool, baseball bats are recreational equipment, even pencils have been used as deadly weapons. “Banning weapons” requires banning essentially anything heavier or sharper than a balloon; and even then, you could suffocate someone with it.

Imagining that we were somehow able to do away with all things that could be weapons, as well, we are faced with a third problem: that during the time that we’re making this change, law-abiding countries and citizens will be disarmed, while criminal elements will retain their weapons.

Conservatives and gun nuts (particularly in the US) deploy this weapon on an individual level (“when guns are criminal, only criminals will have guns”), but it’s much more salient on a governmental level: to wit, when you are invaded by another country, you’re going to have to have your own weapons to counter theirs. And the promise of police (while debatably realized) is that they wield weapons to protect unarmed individuals from violence carried out by criminals with weapons.

Some people on Reddit were talking about how only dictators would want to disarm people.

They’re wrong that only dictators want to disarm people, but they are right that dictators have a vested interest in banning weapons. A resistance is a lot harder to put down when that resistance is armed.

The reality, though, is that this particular talking point was encouraged by the American NRA (National Rifle Association), which masquerades as an organization for firearm owners and users but is actually a professional organization of firearm manufacturers. It has spread to other countries from there.

I believe weapons should be banned

Should be? Yes. Can be, safely? Good question.

and that crime should not exist in the first place.

Everyone thinks that. That’s why we call it “crime.” It’s named that because it’s stuff we don’t want to happen, so we get together and assign a penalty to everything we don’t like and call them “laws.”

Okay, everything above is not my opinion, but reality. That’s the state of the world, and the logical outworking of the state of the world. What follows is my opinion. As you may be able to tell, I am a U.S. citizen, so my answer is based largely around that context.

We have to significantly ban and restrict and curtail weapons: sale, possession, and use. Dramatically. Especially firearms. Particularly especially military-grade weapons.

It should be essentially impossible for private citizens to own firearms, and those who are allowed to own them must provide a valid reason (“collecting” working, non-historical weapons is not a valid reason) and be subject to a background check, registration, psychological evaluation, extensive training, and mandatory safe storage requirements. They should be required to join and maintain good standing in their local National Guard or other defense organization. Individuals who currently own firearms and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new regulations must surrender their weapons or face imprisonment for the sake of public safety.

In line with that, ordinary police and private security firms should not be permitted to carry weapons more deadly than a nightstick and pepper spray; with more psychological evaluation and extensive training, perhaps a taser. Firearms should be exclusively allotted for specific use cases, such as animal deterrence in communities near wilderness areas, and perhaps SWAT teams. Qualified immunity should be abolished, and every person killed or injured by a police officer’s weapon should result in immediate suspension of the officer, pending an external audit and investigation.

All weapons and ammunition used by any private citizen, police officer, private security employee, or military personnel should be subject to strict check in/check out regulations, and should include a valid reason for checkout associated with specific training activities or a specific, single incident requiring their issue. Government employees (members of law enforcement and the military) and private security employees should be subject to mandatory bodycam activation (with the footage declassified) any time weapons are checked out.

That is what can be done now, safely, without unduly endangering individuals. We know that it can be done, now, safely, because many other countries have done it.

He also thinks he’s smart, attractive, beloved by all Americans, and good at golf. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just thinks that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s never occurred to him that he might not deserve anything he wants, from companies to political victories to sexual conquests to accolades.

Huh, that’s handy. Mine are both Pixels, and alas the Pixel watch has a magnetic but not wireless charger.

Earbuds.

I recently took up running, and when I did that I decided I was just going to wear my smartwatch and earbuds. I leave my phone in the house, I leave my keys in the garage (there’s a keypad on the garage door), I don’t even take the case for the earbuds.

When I go out for any reason other than running, I always take my phone, wallet, keys, earbuds, chapstick, a pen, and nail clippers. (I don’t know why on that last one, but I’ve had a pair for my whole adult life, except when traveling by plane, and they come in handy a lot). I usually also wear my watch, but sometimes I forget to charge it and it has to stay on the charger.

So the only common item in those two lists is the earbuds.

In the vein of your positive attitude, I also try to always take with me a realization that everyone else is fighting a battle, too.

“I don’t disagree that she’s been treated inhumanely after capture while on an errand of mercy, but she hasn’t been subjected to literally every war crime” isn’t the gotcha you think it is.

For me, with the Switch 1, I was worried about wanting to play a game but oh no it’s back at home. Happened a bunch of times with my 3DS.

But then I bought a case that had card slots in it, and that concern wasn’t much of a concern anymore. Then the pandemic happened, and I never really left home anyway, which meant it mattered even less. So now I have a few digital games that are super annoying to share.

It’s ok. The people would’ve certainly Mole of Moles’d themselves long before that happened.