The Juicero was seriously a major point in my personal ideological journey. Around 2013, I was still very convinced that Silicon Valley (and VC-backed startups in general) were a source of innovation that could do a lot of good in the world. I was starting to question that a little bit because I had noticed that every new startup was described as “like Uber for <other thing>,” but I still largely believed that most SV startups were innovative and improving people’s lives, or at least had the potential to do so.

And then the freaking Juicero came along, and I was like, “What the fuck? Do these people actually have no idea what they’re doing? Oh my god, they don’t.”

Look, I’m not saying that if the Juicero didn’t exist, that I would be some Elon Musk fanboy right now. Something else probably would have woken me up instead.

But in this timeline, in this current universe we are in, the Juicero made me see things differently. No one wants to believe that they were changed by the Juicero… but I was. And I… I… I don’t know how I feel about that…

The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can’t ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.

It’s good that no one is actually criticizing Mongolia for this – they are not really in a position to handcuff Putin, much as we would all love to see it.

Man, AnandTech came from the earlier type of Internet, where independent media outlets were fully in control of their own presence on the web. (E.g. they were not a YouTube channel.) Even though they weren’t still independent for a while now (purchased by a publishing company in 2014), I’m sad to see one of the originals go.

They also fund the Epoch Times, a right-wing news outlet that is partially responsible for half of your relatives being absolutely insane these days. (That’s mentioned in OP’s link, and also in your wiki link, but I figured I should mention it for those who didn’t click through.)

Israel’s actions are appalling; that does not mean anyone should want a hard right theocracy like Iran to have nuclear weapons. I don’t even think it would serve as a deterrent; if anything, it could unite all of Israel behind Netanyahu. Scared people go further to the right. And remember: Iran’s government hates more countries than just Israel.

I love when anti-progressive people “take a stand” against California by moving to Texas, and then they move to the most famously progressive city in Texas.

Austin: For those who are stupid enough to relocate based on culture war bullshit, but not stupid enough to think that you’re hiring software developers and creatives out in the boonies.

This looks great. I was thinking about buying an Android ebook reader and a bluetooth keyboard in order to cobble together something like this for myself. But if this is less than the cost of an ebook reader by itself, that’s even better.

Wow, that name is familiar! I had no idea that the maintainer of Calibre is also the maintainer of kitty (a terminal emulator). Someone is busy!

This may not work out the way I want it to, but I’m actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it’s going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It’s already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can’t wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

This blog post is pretty buzzword-heavy, but Penpot is a legitimately great tool. It’s used for UI design and layouts. I’ve seen a couple of open source projects use a self-hosted Penpot instance for working on and discussing new designs.

Figma would be the most popular, proprietary example of this type of tool. I’m not aware of any open source competitors besides Penpot.

edit: It’s like Google docs for web page layouts or app layouts. The animation on their homepage is probably the best way of showing what it does.

Ground is almost 100% dirt. Drinking groundwater is just asking for trouble.

Every time I hear about this problem, I get that one part from the song Love Shack stuck in my head.

🎵 Your what?!?!
TEEEEEEEEEEES-LAAA!
…rusted

Love shack,
Baby love shack 🎵

It does look cool! I’m worried about that too, though. I would only be buying it for the “snap it shut” action, and it’s more expensive than any other phone I’ve owned. The original Razr was premium for it’s time, but that was when “premium phone” meant $300.

My last phone before getting a smart phone as a Motorola Razr, and man that one was so satisfying.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there’s a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there’s a “Donate” link in their footer.

Seems like they’re always kind of subtle about asking for donations – I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

The article mentions they’re “decreasing their investment” in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It’s honestly the best spam-prevention method I’ve ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

23andMe was always a product with a very small upside and absolutely massive downside. Best case scenario, it’s a neat little thing to learn about yourself. Worst case scenario, it’s a massive opportunity for discrimination and blackmail.

Completely unrelated: for some reason, on kbin, the thumbnail for this article is the thumbnail for this youtube video, and that is a cooler thing than 23andMe by far.

Microsoft’s initial departure from Microsoft-brand peripherals meant it would only focus on more expensive, higher-end designs worthy of Surface branding.

They’re saying this like we didn’t all just read an article about the official Xbox Toaster yesterday…