That’s totally fair, and I’ll keep it in mind.

I hope my habit makes your life a little easier by normalizing they/them (or just avoiding gendered terms) as an un-interesting default.

I hope for a world where they/them becomes accepted as “I’m not trusted enough by this person to be told their pronouns yet, and that’s okay.”

I think asking people to identify their gender, early in a (non-intimate) relationship, is a particularly unhealthy cultural habit. I hope I’m helping push back on that, a bit.

In the meantime, I’m trying to learn speech habits that don’t force you to gender yourself, or to be noticed in not doing so. I hope to help make these kinds of situations easier for you.

You shouldn’t have to decide at a random moment whether to share your gender identity with me. I’m committed to keep trying to learn communication patterns that make it natural for you not to have to.

Yeah. Which I’m sure is what they’re officially selling. That’s fair. Long term, walking robots are likely only going to succeed thanks to learning algorithms.

I find it suspicious that this company is touting their AI enhancement while admitting their product can’t be trusted to navigate an apartment alone.

Personally, I would select homes with simple layouts, before conceding to constant monitoring, if I could. But I couldn’t do that if my mix of math and AI was outright bad, and it couldn’t handle it…

To me, this smells like over-promising and hoping new AI algorithms outpace their promises.

And having a remote operator just looks like a lot like a classic mechanical turk scam.

This is going to be a great time to be a lawyer… until the climate kills us all, of course.

When unsure of what the Captcha is trying to learn from me, I find “Kill all humans.” is a pretty good guess what the Captcha is really after.

While Neo Gamma uses AI to walk and balance, the robot is not fully capable of autonomous movements today. To make in-home tests possible, Børnich says 1X is “bootstrapping the process” by relying on teleoperators — humans in remote locations that can view Neo Gamma’s cameras and sensors in real time, and take control of its limbs.

So yhis is a non-functional product.

Being able to walk autonomously is normally done with a lot of difficult math, which it sounds like they don’t have the talent on staff to code.

Be sure to get your venture capital dollars in soon, because that’s all this is here for.

Also, it’s comforting to know that creepy robot face will initially be remote controlled by a rotating series of low paid total strangers. And by initially, we mean always (as in the case of Amazon checkout.)

“I’m sorry too, Dmitri. I’m very sorry. All right, you’re sorrier than I am. But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don’t say that you’re the more sorry than I am because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we’re both sorry, all right? All right.”

I also use “they/them” until someone shares their pronouns.

Officially, I do this to avoid misgendering people.

Really, I do it because some snowflakes are too fragile to share their pronouns, and I enjoy annoying them until they do.

My preferred pronouns are actually “none of your business/fuck off”, but I settle for “they/them” for professionalism reasons. (Until I retire. Then my pronouns change officially everywhere.)

Oh, gee. A Microsoft product that worked perfectly locally is about to require a subscription. Who could have possibly guessed that would happen, yet again? (This is sarcasm.)

I really like OneNote, but I decided to learn something else when I realized which way the wind was blowing.

Bosch has a lot of goodwill. Interesting how they decide to spend it. Also Consumer Reports needs to start considering Internet connectivity, because the risks from Internet connected dishwashers are real and scary.

Usually the asshole.

Yeah. And, in fairness, as a non-pirate, I read along here for tips and tricks to get a non-shit streaming experience out of my home hosted hardware.

If I could still pay for a non-shit streaming experience, I would just do that.

We’re all getting clones. You get a clone. And you get a clone. Every 23andMe customer gets a free* clone!

*Clones are provided at no cost, but are not free of their lifetime indentureship.

It’s you can modify the settings file you sure as hell can put the malware anywhere you want

True. (But in case it amuses you or others reading along:) But a code settings file still carries it’s own special risk, as an executable file, in a predictable place, that gets run regularly.

An executable settings file is particularly nice for the attacker, as it’s a great place to ensure that any injected code gets executed without much effort.

In particular, if an attacker can force a reboot, they know the settings file will get read reasonably early during the start-up process.

So a settings file that’s written in code can be useful for an attacker who can write to the disk (like through a poorly secured upload prompt), but doesn’t have full shell access yet.

They will typically upload a reverse shell, and use a line added to settings to ensure the reverse shell gets executed and starts listening for connections.

Edit (because it may also amuse anyone reading along): The same attack can be accomplished with a JSON or YAML settings file, but it relies on the JSON or YAML interpreter having a known critical security flaw. Thankfully most of them don’t usually have one, most of the time, if they’re kept up to date.

Yeah. Luanti following Minecraft is nothing new. Mineclonia was an early pilot game for the engine.

But there hasn’t been much effort on copying Minecraft lately. Mineclonia is done, and it’s great.

We’ve had more mobs, animals, plants, textures, and such than un-modded Minecraft for a long time. (Which is unfair, as Luanti is a mod-first design.) But my point is the core Launti dev team doesn’t have to work on any of that.

The most noticeable recent Luanti updates have been to make the configuration screens much nicer, and add I think to add native support for more graphics tricks?

I’m not paying attention to graphics in Luanti. As others have mentioned, that’s not why I play it. I actually had a conversation recently about the best way to downgrade Luanti default graphics to match un-modded Minecraft.

That said, the Minecraft team taking notice of Luanti would be new, as far as I know.

Yeah. I’m sympathetic to the whole “technology is hard” thing, and the idea that the SteamDeck is primarily meant to be for mobile gaming.

But switching from Nintendo Switch to SteamDeck really highlighted to me how good the Nintendo engineering team is, that I never had any of these display issues with a docked Switch.

Yeah. It’s really that bad. They’ve been releasing quality of life patches, but Valve made a portable device that happens to support docking, not a device meant to be docked.

Based on your experience, I assume you have the official Steam Dock, which I find worse to use with the SteamDeck than any random USB C dongle that I have tried.

Edit: Be sure to check for updates. I recall some of the issues you mention (like the blank screen) were mentioned in SteamOS release notes this year.

The ladder in the second picture is to let everyone know it’s being worked on.

The comfortable but rotting chair in the second picture is to enjoy a rest between hard work sessions with the ladder.

Yeah. The “this got dumped on us and we’re doing the minimum until we can replace it” is a genuinely solid use case for vibe coding.

And honestly, that’s all I usually did with those before AI came along anyway. So I welcome better tools for it.

That sounds like a good approach. If you can get the posts into WordPress, there’s so many scripts out there that will export the WordPress database into other formats.