If you have some sort of data or power cable that you tend to plug and unplug frequently, consider putting a sacrificial extender cable in between. The cost of replacing a jack on a motherboard or other fixed device is pretty high; the cost of replacing a plug on a device is often similar to the cost of the device in the first place.

For a headphone connection, for example, you can get a 6” extender for a cost less than the shipping. USB extensions are a little trickier - you need to match a bunch of different characteristics, but pretty reasonably priced when available. Power plug extensions are cheap, but it may take a little while to find one short enough to be reasonable.

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I will bet a shiny nickel that in 2028, you will be able to buy newly made spinning disks and that they will be economically justifiable for large media collections, backups and archives. Not sure I’d make that bet for 2033, though.

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My wife worked for the first public ISP for several years. My first job, still in college, was for a local ISP, eventually becoming the head of all technical operations. And my next job was at a major commercial ISP, one which leased POPs to AOL among other businesses.

Here’s how they worked, at a technical and business level:

It’s a nice title, but what this really is, is my personal preferences on interfaces for reading fiction. Everyone is allowed to have preferences. Mine are special because I read a lot – on average, a little over 200 books each year…

‘Due diligence’ is the business terminology for taking care of details when you enter into a contract. Those details include very basic things like:

• does the seller exist?
• do they have a history of fraud?
• are they on a list of terrorist supporters? (yes, really)…

It is essential to realize that these technologies [large language models, currently called AI] do not answer questions about a model of reality, but about a model of language.

The utterances that they produce are statistically good at being plausible conversation related to the input prompt. Any relationship to reality is basically coincidental. Our tendency to view it as meaningful is a product of anthropomorphism and the social conventions of our culture.

People who use tools are responsible for their actions.

(I first wrote a slightly altered version of the above on the XBBN mailing list on January 30, 2023, in response to a query from Candy Sidner.)

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The thirty year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product… which then spectacularly dies.

– Jason Scott @textfiles [twitter.com] June 28, 2022

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I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and in-screen.

Back is best.

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I switched from GNU screen to tmux when I discovered that the minor bug I had been experiencing for years had been reported several times and always dismissed with “can’t reproduce”.

It took about 20 minutes to properly switch over, and another day or two to discover my own biases and desires. What follows is a discussion of my own preferences in tmux config.

People use tools to get things done. Tools vary in capabilities. Using a perfect or great tool is more comfortable, takes less time, or does a better job than using a good-enough tool. Using a poor tool incurs penalties in time, comfort and/or quality.

Minimalism is, in the current parlance, a “flex”. Minimalism is a statement that you can afford to prefer a non-optimal set of tools in order to satisfy an aesthetic fad.

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Modern social media could have learned some useful things from Usenet. Mostly, they haven’t.

Here are some of those lessons:

Of interest to highly technical budget-quality optimizing folks, mostly.

I am aware that this trick never works (cf ‘Hacker’). Still, I need to try.

Please stop using the terms AI, Artificial Intelligence, and even ML and Machine Learning. In the same spirit as “the cloud is just someone else’s computer”, please regard all these systems as Statistical Correlation Networks, SCNs.

When you read, hear, or say AI you carry the baggage of a hundred years of science fiction stories. You will then make mistakes in reasoning about SCNs.

Yes, it is amazing what SCNs can do, but they aren’t people you can teach and reason with.

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Being a mini-review of the Asus Zenfone 9.

(It’s mini because the phone is the smallest current flagship.)

Previous phone: OnePlus 7Pro, a 6.7” screen with rounded edges and an enormous battery life. This one has a 5.9” flat screen. Flat is much better. The manufacturers decided that rounded edges were “premium”, so they put it on the highest end phones… making them less usable and more prone to weird glare and distortion.