isaaclyman

Pronounced REE-poe-SOH-tuh-ree

Yes, I know I’m doing something illegal (stealing and reselling IP) but it’s in service of something legal (continuing to be rich). You can’t punish me for doing bad things while rich, it would undermine your entire legal system.

The article does not mention paraplegia.

I think we all know where this is going.

1. The Brainchip is trendy in Silicon Valley but doesn’t do much yet. The company says cyber-superintelligence will be available in a year, tops. Investors are pouring billions into it. Everyone says you need to hop on the trend now or you’ll be obsolete in six months.
2. It’s been two years. The Brainchip still struggles to control a mouse or search Google. Everyone’s lost interest in building apps for it. Many users are reporting severe migraines, but the company says there’s nothing to worry about.
3. The Brainchip pipes three unskippable ads directly to your optic nerve every time you go to the bathroom. Notifications ping your brain all day long. You can get it removed if you’ve got $80k to burn, but there’s a high risk of postoperative stroke.

Yeah, no, I’m not putting anything in my brain that isn’t open-source from end to end. And even then probably nah.

Yes, it’s possible (and common) for a boat to sail against the wind by the power of its sail alone. Sailors have known this for hundreds of years but if it sounds impossible, no worries, I thought so too at first.

Here’s how it works, simplified so I can get in trouble with pedants:

The boat, first of all, has a keel (the blade-like bottom of the hull) which “locks” it into movement along a single axis: forward and backward. The wind is not going to blow the boat sideways, at least not very effectively.

Second, sails are curved, not flat, and can rotate (when seen from above). The force created when the wind deflects off the sail matches the curve of the sail, more or less.

So if the wind is blowing directly south ⬇️ and you want to travel north ⬆️ you angle the boat northeast ↗️ so it can only move northeast or southwest. Then you point the sail east ➡️ so the wind gets deflected west ↩️. Newton’s third law does the rest. When the wind hits, the boat will move northeast ↗️ because the keel prevents it from going straight east.

Then after a while you turn the boat (“tack”) northwest ↖️, point the sail west ⬅️, and continue.

I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.

I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.

If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)

I’ve found that, with the proper attitude, almost anything can be dull.

My wife is the self-designated glass recycler for our neighborhood. Everyone leaves their glass jars and bottles on our porch and periodically she drives them up to the collection bin.

Picture quality is low, but that’s three or four glass jars all next to each other.

No, never.

I can’t take credit for it. It was the picture in the delivery notification email from UPS.

“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?