Deliverer of ideas for a living. Believer in internet autonomy, dignity. I upkeep instances of FOSS platforms like this for the masses. Previously on Twitter under the same handle. I do software things, but also I don’t.
+1 For the Light Phone. Owned both their Kickstarter edition and their latest generation, and makes travel, camping, and more easy when I forward my calls/texts. Great battery life with still some creature comforts we have all gotten used to, smart phone wise.
+1 for Netdata
If there’s a TV repair / electronics repair shop in your area – someone who works with contemporary flatscreens – I wonder if you could reach out and make the ask? They probably have a sense of which generic controllers they would use.
Recommendations to purchase a smart TV but never connect it to a network are futile, as well. Just like Amazon devices, smart TVs will find an open SSID and then phone home for updates without your knowledge.
My recommendation, when these kind of topics come up, is: either exchange your smart TV for a dumb one, or go to an electronics repair shop to have a board or two exchanged (depending on the make and model, older dumb components may be direct-ish replacements for smart ones).
EDIT: Another option? Try a projector! I was looking for dumb TV options online after writing up this comment, and someone on an old Reddit post recommended it. Great idea.
2nd EDIT: Someone else also recommended buying digital signage, another solid dumb display option.
Beep boop, my dude.
Even though there’s a small monthly cost, the results have been consistent for Kagi. But consistency meets only half of my needs for search: I also want to make decisions quickly from what I find within the contents. If I were to to go to a link, wait for it to load, scroll the content, etc. – does that listed forum post have the answer I am looking for? Does this news article cover the nuances I have been tracking and would like to read more of? Kagi offers an AI-based summarize feature that helps. And that’s been meeting the other half of my needs, as well.
EDIT, an opinion: Search services may well be eventually replaced by small, niche LLMs trained to perform summerization tasks, such as Consensus, which I have used for work research, and Perplexity.ai. The AI summarize feature of Kagi is why I see the service as more useful than straight indexes, even when self-hosted. Kagi is a stepping stone toward this for me, and why I recommend it.
Think if we dried them off with a towel or something, they’d still be good? I have a towel somewhere. Hold on.
Even though you have been downvoted to hell, this post resonates with real efforts by the US gov’t to get ahead of foreign nations with semiconductor tech for AI. Anyone who is curious to read more, the US has the CHIPS initiative, which boasts a $52 billion ceiling for various efforts. This award amount is intended for a lot of different companies to leverage as they work to meet various requirements of the contract, not just Intel. Intel, however, is working to get a large set-aside of state funding, upwards of $90 million, through the vehicle of CHIPS. So there’s that.
Is this military funding, though? No, not DoD. But as a gov’t contracting effort to bring the US quickly to the forefront in this field, it could have implications for defense, for sure. No question.
Something super interesting all this reminds me of, DoD-wise, is the Space Force’s “softwar” concept, a paper put out by Major Jason P. Lowery – it’s a premise for a future where world militaries compete in raw compute power, such as mining a cryptocurrency, to determine who wins conflicts. A kind of ‘abstract’ power.
Were this ever to actualize in any way, it would be good for countries to begin developing a semiconductor overmatch. Let alone any other need to ensure compute superiority.
I have owned the Light Phone 1 and the Light Phone 2 – both were built with the intent to stay connected in a handful of ways without needing to have a full-spec’d, app-heavy, typically-sized smart phone.
If the intent and the vibe make sense to you, then it is a wonderful approach for a more ‘minimalist’ device: you can go outdoors, travel, hike, camp, etc., without having a smart phone to pick up and play with. I dig it.
If the intent and vibe don’t make sense to you, the Light Phone may not be a good fit.
I really like the device, and use it often enough as a daily driver on weekends. Always glad to see some public attention on it.
A chemical compound causes the cloth to turn blue when polishing an iPhone, green when polishing an Android. It’s only a subtle difference.
TL;DR use FF