I've seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a "AI DJ" or "AI coffee machines".

I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there's a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of "AI". But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world's enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?

I feel like I'm encountering weird little tics and problems with my android devices, and those of family and friends. Just simple things where settings don't seem to be consistently applied, or the os switches something back repeatedly. For example, my apps are set to auto update, to use data as well as WiFi, etc, but every month or so I go into Play and see that some random app hasn't been updated in weeks.

Or my friend only gets Signal notifications when they open the app, despite giving full background data use, turning off adaptive battery, etc. My mother uses an alarm app that needs to display over the screen for a feature, but despite me setting that permission repeatedly Android keeps turning it off.

Is this just anecdotal bad luck? Or is all the work to preserve battery life, control background usage, etc led to an OS where the user can't control things reliably? It starting to feel a lot like MS Windows!

(I've got a pixel watch 2 and moto edge 40 neo, and some jlab earbuds.)

I usually listen to music on my phone, but recently linked my earbuds to my watch, and the same music played on Spotify sounds massively better on the same earbuds when played via the watch.

I assumed it was because I had installed the jlab app, and it was doing a bad job of meddling with the eq. But after uninstalling it there wasn't a noticeable difference. Is there some other setting I can adjust? Any thoughts on whether it's something my moto is doing wrong or something my pixel watch is doing right?

Its a substantial difference (although I'm not enough of an audiophile to describe it) enough that I'm now mostly playing music via my watch. But it's hitting the battery hard, so I'd rather go back to using my phone!

This is maybe a weird request, but I'm looking for a way to send myself some information at a specific time in the future. Basically, it's because I've got a few sites that are huge distractions for me at the moment, and I can't stop checking my accounts, responding to messages, etc. My willpower is so low, and I've got a lot of important work right now and it's starting to really mess up my life.

So my plan is to change the passwords to my accounts to a long random string, then save that string somewhere that I can't access for X days. I imagined a simple way would be to use a site that would send me an email on a date, and the content of that email would be my random passwords. But my web searches only seem to find pages telling me how to schedule my own emails, which isn't what I need.

Any advice / suggestions?

(also, in case anyone is thinking it, the sites I'm trying to block access to are all linked to the same email account, and I'm also going to change its password, so I won't easily be able to reset them).

Edit: FutureMe is exactly the site I was thinking of, thanks lemmings!

I hear people saying things like "chatgpt is basically just a fancy predictive text". I'm certainly not in the "it's sentient!" camp, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot more is going on than just predicting the most likely next word.

Even if it's predicting word by word within a bunch of constraints & structures inferred from the question / prompt, then that's pretty interesting. Tbh, I'm more impressed by chatgpt's ability to appearing to "understand" my prompts than I am by the quality of the output. Even though it's writing is generally a mix of bland, obvious and inaccurate, it mostly does provide a plausible response to whatever I've asked / said.

Anyone feel like providing an ELI5 explanation of how it works? Or any good links to articles / videos?

And if so, how do they label headphones, contact lenses etc?

https://thetoyzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/01_The-Boogeyman-Iteration-Worldwide.jpg

Link for slightly better quality image

And the article has zoomed in maps of some continents https://thetoyzone.com/nightmare-fuel-iterations-of-the-boogeyman

I feel like some usb cables are great, allow my devices to charge fast, connect to data reliably, etc. But it seems so difficult to find the ones that are good! I've tried buying expensive ones but it seems pretty hit and miss. Sometimes some cheapass aliexpress cable seems to beat the "good brands".

Are there standards or anything I should look out for? USB drives, sd cards, and the like have read/write speeds or different "classes" but usb cables seem to all claim to be brilliant.

Am I just being dumb?

One thing I loved about Holmes and Moldvay /Mentzer red boxes was having a set of rules that didn't overwhelm new players with lots of material that they won't need until later.

I know that most osr games are rules light enough that it isn't too much, but I was wondering if there are any systems out there that seperate out the 'basic' and 'expert / advanced' levels like that?

A particular peeve of mine is that spell descriptions seem so often to be presented alphabetical so that the 10 spells that might matter are lost in a bunch of pages. But even just class descriptions or saving throw tables that cover the whole range make level 1 look like a stepping stone, rather than a satisfying place to play many an adventure!

Any suggestions?

My nephews & nieces aren't currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won't have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn't require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.

Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational "games". But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.

Any suggestions?

I've use Twilight for years and love the red filter for using my phone at night. But since getting an AMOLED screen it's started to frustrate me. The way Twilight seems to work means that black also gets a red tint. Previously this was great, but on amoled black is completely dark with no back-light that needs masking with red. So by shifting it red, Twilight is actually making the screen much brighter.

Tldr: Any apps that leave black as black, but give a red tint to all the other colors?