“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

What are you talking about?

For a bit more context, this is the fan project “Bloodborn Kart” with its IP serial numbers filed off.

Haha, oh wow, I had somehow missed that. Brian’s done great work with Carrot.

CARROT’s big premium selling point is letting you pick which weather data provider the app references. Darksky/Weatherkit went through a perceived slump after their acquisition, so folks turned to sites like https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ to figure out who was providing the most accurate data in their region.

Other than that, it offers up a few more detailed views, push notifications, and other UI tweaks. They’re one of those companies that tries jumping onboard with things like Apple Watch apps or home screen widgets ASAP.

You probably don’t need CARROT, but if you don’t like the stock Weather app, CARROT probably has something for you.

You’re the quartermaster and a snarky engineer from 800 years ago is complaining that she likes to wear her jacket open. Do you get into a long drawn out fight you’re probably going to lose, or go, “Right Commander Reno, let me go ahead and replicate the J rank variant for you.”

Two of those concerns are software based, and Apple’s annual WWDC developer conference is less than a month away. The hardware-focused iPad event came off like a spec bump, but they were never going to announce any of the iPad’s much needed software changes last week.

Apple’s been cautious jumping on the AI train, but their last two hardware announcements were chocked full of, “And it’s great for AI too!” We should see some AI features coming out from them next month. They’ve been publishing some research papers over the last year, so it’s not like they haven’t been doing anything internally. iPhones have a large install base, so depending on what they roll out, it makes sense they’re talking to infrastructure providers with large AI/GPU deployments. I wouldn’t write them off in this space just yet.

The iPad ad was the same exact, “All your stuff in one device!” pitch they’ve been using for decades. I’d say the backlash was less about the ad’s content, and more just how standoffish creative folks are with the tech industry right now. They handled the backlash fine and it was probably a good wake up call to them that they’re not the scrappy underdog anymore.

The entire industry’s getting over a fully self driving hangover. Apple kept that money pit around for longer than they needed to, but they weren’t exactly the only folks chasing that dream.

The Vision Pro is the only big misstep. Apple’s been chasing AR for a while now, and they clearly didn’t want to do a $500 also-ran to the Quest. The Vision Pro proved out that if you put a good enough screen on a headset, people will keep it on and use it to putz around the internet rather than just running one VR game and immediately taking it off. The excessive cost makes it a borderline dev unit though, and you’re right, we haven’t seen it “pop off” in such a way that a compelling use case has made itself clear. Their approach of starting big and trying to scale down may not have been the right call here. It really could have used a, “get it in everyone’s hands and see how folks use it” moment like the Apple Watch. It’ll be interesting to see if and how Apple can pivot with the device. Everything compelling about it right now hinges on that overpriced screen, so this particular vision for VR/AR may be a dead end.

Overall Apple seems to be doing fine. The whole “next iPhone” thing has always been a bit of a weird rubric.

It’s still surreal to see OpenAI’s need for training data be so vast that they casually developed and open sourced a generational leap in transcription technology just so that they could scrape online videos better.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the book’s a police procedural / crime novel. 👍 It takes place about 25 years after the fictional pandemic. The story starts off with a robot-piloting protagonist’s first day on the job as part of the FBI’s robot-crimes division. It almost won a Hugo and is worth taking a look at if the premise sounds interesting.

Shout out to Steven Universe giving their main character a shield.

NuPhy’s got some interesting options as well. https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/halo75-v2-qmk-via-wireless-custom-mechanical-keyboard

The low profile space is a little tricky. It leans into column staggered ergonomic boards really quickly. Kailh’s Choc switch is as low as you can go, but those folks get really custom really quick. They’re not big on function rows or arrow clusters, so the next step after Keychron or NuPhy would be something along the lines of the Afternoon Breeze. https://www.afternoonlabs.com/breeze/

Have you taken a look at any of Keychron’s offerings? https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k3-max-qmk-via-wireless-custom-mechanical-keyboard Checks most of the boxes other than the knob.

It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.

It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.

Search for "wil wheaton amber benson audiobook verge" and their story on the book and its sequel should be the first thing that pops up.

Gah. Was struggling with Lemmy’a spoiler tags and just made a whole new comment. Hopefully things don’t get screwy with federation.

Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.

For a more subtitle version of this, check out the coverage of the 2014 sci-fi novel :::Lock-In by Jon Scalzi:::. The story is told first person from a paraplegic character who interacts with society via a very early generation generic robot body. The author gave the character an androgynous name that’s frequently used for men and women, and never elaborates further on the character’s sex within the story.

Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they had given the protagonist pronouns in their own head. The author stayed quiet in the pre-release of the book and only admitted what they’d done a good while after the release. (And when Tor wrote a piece spoiling it.) When Audible bought exclusive rights to the sequel novel, they got Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to record identical versions of the book.

The Hard Fork podcast had a pretty good episode recently where they interviewed one of the engineers on the project. They’d troubleshooted the spacecraft enough in the past that they weren’t starting from square one, but it still sounded pretty difficult.

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.