Bertrand Russell took to programming voice responses on phones, until he encountered the message "this menu has recently changed", and realised it could never be replaced.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/117087928681061161

"I will be certain to give this the attention it so richly deserves."

Recipe for brownies says to use a 9x9 pan. Also says it makes 16 2-inch squares... Maths isn't adding up.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@randahl/115513890753953838

We have a few vendors who send us calendar invites to Zoom meetings, and Google wraps those links, too, so that if your entire team isn't very careful, Google knows when you're having a meeting with that vendor.
Vendor is a bit shruggy when asked if they can send the meeting request in a way that doesn't include the Google surveillance.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@sophieschmieg/115375153181483337

This.
The software industry as a whole - particularly the larger companies - has forgotten that the value of a junior team member is that, as they grow in their field, they also grow in the knowledge of your company and its business.
This focus on "AI will replace junior developers" is so selfish and short-sighted, because it will result in an ever-reducing pool of senior developers, complaining about how awful the AI code is, and wishing that they'd been able to hire and nurture a junior developer two or three years ago, so they'd now be a senior with experience in the company's business.
The AI doesn't know your business, and will apply generic solutions where even a comparatively new junior would be aware that something subtly - or substantially - different should be done.
Everyone's starting to copy the Amazon style of "burn out the low level programmers, get them to quit, and then hire the seniors from other companies who've trained them up". At some point, there are _no_ other companies, and no supply of new seniors.

My mother's hearing is rather selectively disappearing. As a result, she says most music sounds discordant, and she can't recognise tunes. Even common ones like Big Ben and the national anthem.
I know that it must be possible to write a program that can take information from her audiologist and filter sounds so that the rest of us can actually hear how she hears it, and thereby get her a little more sympathy and understanding, but I can't find any such program.
Sort of like an AutoTune, not to fix the problem, but to demonstrate it for other people.
(I dunno, maybe even there's a way to filter music in the other direction and actually offer some assistance to her?)
Anyone out there have any ideas?

Intrigued to discover that the "Is Ringo the best drummer in the world?" joke dates back to the first series of Radio Active in 1981.

Are there any good docs on BLE security, especially over UART? A few months ago, I accidentally connected to a friend's juggling prop, and there's all kinds of stuff you can accidentally connect to and find yourself sending interesting signals to, if you know the tools to use, or can write suitably loose programs.
Would love to know if there's any commonly-accepted ways to secure this communication.

Gonna get AI to summarise the content of a bunch of made-up books, so I can pretend to have read everything on the AI-made-up Summer reading list.
https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Tired: Cybersecurity
Wired: Vibersecurity

The modern world.
My bedside alarm clock could not be relied on, because there was an outage at the central server. https://help.hatch.co/hc/en-us/articles/22345753328663-Current-Outages
Can't imagine how many clocks will be bricks if the company ever goes out of business.

Saw someone posting here that they got the collected works of Kurt Vonnegut for Christmas. That's quite an achievement - getting the original SlaughterHouse 1 and its three sequels is a huge challenge.

Some SMT components should probably NOT be soldered with solder paste and a heat gun. This first one seems to connect OK, but I'm not trying it again!

If a company has to explain to you that they are going to introduce AI into their product, it's because they know it's going to suck in some way. Either it's going to be wrong more, or lie a lot, or it's going to put people out of work for no customer benefit, and they know you're going to hate it.
So they explain.
If it was a solid business decision that improved customer experience, they'd just do it, and we wouldn't notice it in any way that they'd have to explain.

I guess it's a known problem that KiCad and JLCPCB disagree on what their output files are actually saying when it comes to component placement. It would be nice if they got it sorted out, because I have this feeling that if they could, I wouldn't feel like there's a 24-hour turnaround where I have to say "yes, put the parts, you know, on the board, rather than floating off in the middle of nowhere".

Certified Ethical Nexus Tormenter.

[Don't be a Certified Unethical Nexus Tormentor]

Every time the BBC does this, it just makes me want to go listen to Episode 3 and find out just what it was they thought made it unbroadcastable today.

My first rule of business: Never give your customers a reason to go investigating whether they'd be better off with your competition.
Corollary: Even if you don't currently have competition.

Nice to see that Evgenii Ptitsyn, the alleged administrator of the #Phobos ransomware, is being extradited and will presumably face some form of justice.
As a victim of Phobos, I'm happy to say that I had backups of the most important stuff.
But I miss some of that "less-important" stuff that wasn't backed up. Random jottings, TV & radio recordings, some old source code, old emails, so I can only hope that some of this investigation results in the release of some kind of deciphering tool.
I know that so many others were not as well-off for backups, and I'd love to see those victims restored.

Geeky ponder of today, for my electronics-capable friends: I wonder if I can use some PCB spring contacts to connect the Seeed XIAO nrf52840 battery charging pads to a PCB that I'm soldering it to using header pins. [Or maybe it can be done using an SMD soldering method?) The charging pins are under the board, which makes it inconvenient. I'm currently using thin wires. https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Seeed-Studio-XIAO-Series-Package-and-PCB-Design.pdf