I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

    The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

    The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

    So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

    However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.



  • Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

    Under Text Correction I have enabled:

    • Show suggestion strip
    • Auto correction
    • Auto capitalization
    • Double space period
    • Proofread

    Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

    I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.



  • 2024: Google Assistant formally deprecated in favor of Google Bard, now appearing on all new Android phones
    2026: Google Bard development ceases and is left to languish as Google promotes their new Google Mobile Co-Pilot
    2027: Bard finally ends service, Google Mobile Co-Pilot is rebranded to Messages Co-Pilot and is integrated into the Google Messages app for some reason so you have to basically text it for help
    2029: Google Assistant is relaunched with new technology and Messages Co-Pilot now only responds to tell you to use Google Assistant instead




  • Separately, to answer your question… It’s generally been assumed I suppose, if a product is invented and people use it, that means it’s providing some positive impact. Like asbestos did initially.

    What this research says is that there are products that make the users’ lives worse, and would be even worse than that if they didn’t because their peers are using the products and they would be left out.

    Like, the ideal scenario for happiness might be if Tiktok didn’t exist, but since it does it’s now a choice for school aged kids between “using Tiktok and absorbing harmful messages” and “not using Tiktok and feeling left out and possibly being ostracized by their peers”. The very existence of some products cause usage simply because it’s the least bad option of using/not using.


  • Asbestos is strong, cheap, has great fire insulation, sound insulation, heating insulation, fire protection, and resistant to water. What a wonderful building material! It wasn’t until later that we discovered the health hazards (or, maybe they were known but it only became widely and publicly known later, I’m not sure).


  • AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They’re integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

    AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won’t even see that the “Amazon tech support” you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won’t hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

    There were jokes about the whole Wendy’s drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I’ve seen this stuff used live. I’ve seen how flawlessly they’ve tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself (“I’m going to the Sacramento office – sorry, no, the Folsom office”) or bundles various requests together (“oh while you’re getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?”). I’ve even seen crazy stuff like “I’m supposed to meet with Mary while I’m there, can you give me her phone number?” and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller’s department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - “I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?”

    It’s already here and it’s as invisible as possible, and that’s the end goal.


  • Oh man, you’ve got me itching to get into the intricacies of JavaScript…

    One fun example of the difference: when doing arithmetic operations, null is indeed converted to 0, but undefined is converted to NaN. This has to do with null being an assigned value that represents empty, whereas undefined is not actually a value but a response indicating that there was no value assigned in the first place.



  • This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.

    It isn’t too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam’s cut.

    There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.

    I get Unity needs to make money. They’ve never been profitable. But they’ve seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.




  • So, I’ve been mulling this over. I know Microsoft Word web version is free and I suppose that’s their replacement, but it needs to be more accessible if that’s the case. Like, for my very Average Mom who buys a laptop, she actually was using Wordpad for years until I got her onto my M365 family plan because it was a built in program and she knows how to navigate the Start menu and open programs.

    Assuming a parallel universe where she didn’t have access to desktop Word, how does she know Microsoft Word Online is available to her? Is there a shortcut on the desktop, or directly from Edge? Should there be a start menu icon which opens it up directly? Has Microsoft considered this? I would hope they have.



  • Apologies if I sounded flippant. The first part of the article made it sound to me like companies weren’t developing this with any real urgency, hence why they had to do it themselves:

    They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough.

    And I suppose what I meant by “basic medical care” is more that, at least to the extent I am aware of, the medical community is well-versed in how to manage the issue, and with the amount of people who suffer from T1 diabetes and the rapid rate of technological progression in society in general, these solutions should not only already be available but should be available to everyone, and shouldn’t be as expensive to manage as it is. Near the end of the article is the comment:

    A team at the University of Otago in New Zealand has run a successful early-stage clinical trial of an open-source insulin pump. The goal is to provide free-of-charge design plans to qualified manufacturers to build pumps for a fraction of the cost of current commercial ones.

    I suppose it just upsets me in general that the goal of building low cost insulin pumps isn’t a globally shared one across manufacturers.