Since smartphones are already locked down by their vendors, the cops have a point.
It is trivial to get an older, unlocked cell phone that you can root. You then have a device equally or more powerful than a Raspberry Pi with built-in radios.
Readit Newsel_memorioso commented on NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives blog.adafruit.com/2025/12... · Posted by u/ptorrone
This is not really accurate though. Both a Raspberry Pi and a Flipper Zero can easily and readily be turned into a signal jammer or spammer with off the shelf parts and nearly no technical skill. Modern smartphones are generally both more locked down and also don't come with an external antenna option.
Any mobile computer can be easily and readily turned into a signal jammer/spammer with an off-the-shelf SDR. There is nothing particularly special about the Raspberry Pi. I didn't see laptops on the list.
el_memorioso commented on Being poor vs. being broke blog.ctms.me/posts/2025-1... · Posted by u/speckx
Why is it that the 50 year old Pakistani man who just moved here and doesn't speak English seems to be doing so much better than "poor" Americans who complain online all the time. Or the 23 year old dishwasher from Mexico who speaks no English and stopped going to school at age 13 with two kids he's supporting in a small apartment
Sure they struggle but they seem to do a lot better than a lot of the 25 year old college educated Americans I see constantly complaining about "living wages" and the like
The cases where I've spent time with people like this, I generally find that they spend a lot of money on alcohol/drugs and work very little or not at all
It's good you put "poor" in scare quotes. The truly poor are not complaining online all the time because they don't have the time and/or money to be bitching online. You seemed to have missed one of the primary points of the article.
el_memorioso commented on From VS Code to Helix ergaster.org/posts/2025/1... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> Being a lazy person, I never bothered looking up VS Code shortcuts. Because the learning curve for Helix is slightly steeper, you have to learn those shortcuts that make moving around feel so easy.
This doesn't make sense: if you were truly lazy, you wouldn't spend any effort learning a more complicated app, you'd simply not switch!
> with a few knobs for minor preferences. I am subject to choice paralysis, so making me configure an editor before I’ve even started editing is the best way to tank my productivity.
There are a couple of hundreds of options https://docs.helix-editor.com/editor.html and even more hundreds of keybinds https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html to reconfigure, so you can knob yourself to death with Helix just like with any other configurable app. And the way out is the same as with vim - just pick someone else who has done it and has published the results before dying and use those!
As a long time user of both Emacs (since 18.52) and Neovim and now Helix, I find your last assertion to be false. While it is true that there are many options (though not as many as either Emacs or Neovim), in Helix you cannot write code or install someone else's code to modify your editor. In the past I've spent a good amount of time trying out, integrating, and debugging various packages for Neovim and Emacs. In Helix I might try a new option setting, but the time involved is minuscule compared to what you might spend customizing other editors.
One important thing to note: demo didn't fail! (Or, at least not in the way people usually think of)
> You've already combined the base ingredients, so now grate a pear to add to the sauce.
This is actually the correct Korean recipe for bulgogi steak sauce. The only missing piece here is that the pear has to be Pyrus pyrifolia [1], not the usual pear. In fact every single Korean watching the demo was complaining about this...
Except that he hadn't already combined the base ingredients.
el_memorioso commented on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math apnews.com/article/naep-r... · Posted by u/bikenaga
> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.
I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.
Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!
So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.
el_memorioso commented on I want to be left alone (2024) blog.ctms.me/posts/2024-0... · Posted by u/car
> The internet was so much better before it got commercialized
I wonder if we can say the same about our streets (billboards, neon signs, etc etc) compared to, say, streets 200 years ago?
Yes, we can. A couple of years ago I drove through Maine and Vermont, and it was absolutely beautiful. Not only because of the natural beauty of those places, but because of the lack of billboards anywhere. It was nice to just enjoy the scenery without being constantly bombarded by ads. The city of São Paulo also banned ads a while back and it made the city a nicer environment to live in and revealed the beauty of some of the architecture that was previously hidden by masses of billboards.
el_memorioso commented on KiCad and Wayland Support kicad.org/blog/2025/06/Ki... · Posted by u/xvilka
Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland. If your app doesn't work under Wayland, then fine. Lots of apps don't because they're old and volatile to develop. But X11 apps work completely seamlessly under Wayland. Every major desktop right now is running many X11 apps under Wayland.
I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.
el_memorioso commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
There's a huge caveat i don't see often, which is that it depends on your language for programming. IE. AI is reallllly good at writing Next.js/Typescript apps, but not so much Ruby on Rails. YMMV
I agree with this. People who are writing Python, Javascript, or Typescript tell me that they get great results. I've had good results using LLMs to flesh out complex SQL queries, but when I write Elixir code, what I get out of the LLM often doesn't even compile even when given function and type specs in the prompt. As the writer says, maybe I should be using an agent, but I'd rather understand the limits of the lower-level tools before adding other layers that I may not have access to.
el_memorioso commented on What does the end of mathematics look like? awanderingmind.blog/posts... · Posted by u/awanderingmind
> the possible number of such relationships are infinite
I think you need to be careful taking about "infinite" in the context of math. If the number of quantities, relationships etc is finite, so are all their combinations. Even things like the infinit-ude of available numbers might have fixed patterns that render their relevant properties effecively finite, and lead to further distinctions e.g finite vs countable, etc.
Personally, I feel like math has a bit of a legacy problem. It holds on to the conventions of an art that is very old, with very different initial assumptions at its conception, and this is now holding it back somehow. I lack the background to effectivly demonstrate this other than "Things I know/understand seem less intutive in standard mathenatical terms" e.g. generating functions and/or integrals feel easier to understand (to me) when you understand the, to be software-like 'loops'.
In fact, the idea of "constructivist math" seems (again, to me) to beg for a more algorithmic/computational approach.
The standard explanation of integrals as summing the areas of rectangles of decreasing width seems extremely intuitive to me without requiring the baggage of having to know some computer language. Generating functions in code are basically a rote repetition of the mathematical definitions, requiring that you also understand variables and functions and other things unrelated to the core idea.