This sounds like it would be great for !casualconversation@piefed.social

You can make a community for only casual science chat, but I don’t think there will be enough content to sustain it long term

I don’t use Brave, and don’t recommend it to people, but it seems like the $60 is intended as a donation/“vote-with-your-wallet on how we monetize” type product rather than something that is actually worth that much.

It doesn’t change all of the OTHER problems with Brave, but it might be a step in the right direction when it comes to monetization? Pay once vs. LLM/crypto/injected ads

https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=origin

Brave Origin is a paid version of the browser for users who don’t need all the features that support Brave as a business, but still want the privacy that only Brave offers. Origin users will continue to benefit from our industry-leading privacy, adblock, and speed (via Shields), as well as regular software updates, Chromium patches, and security and privacy improvements. Origin is available on desktop and mobile versions 1.91.x and above.

• Support our mission & open-source work
• Minimalist browser UI centered on Brave Shields
• Maintain core adblock, privacy, & speed
• One-time purchase can be activated multiple times across all your devices

From what I’ve heard, Vancouver is in a similar boat as Seattle and we’re seeing proposals for two datacenters in the middle of the city.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-ai-data-centre-plan-vancouver-kamloops-9.7195426

I want more infrastructure in Canada, but the location choice is still weird. It might be a good thing if this law will incentivize companies to take that into account.

The way BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) works is that each device has various registers (called GATT characteristics) that, if you’re connected to the device, you can write to, read, subscribe to notifications for, and so on. What’s important to note is that to connect to a device, you don’t need to (necessarily) pair with it. You can often just connect with a device and immediately start reading and writing data to characteristics. Pairing establishes encryption, but a connection can be made without it.

To my surprise, upon reading the characteristic 9e9daaeb-3a10-4fe8-b69f-7397aff77886, I was greeted with the full version string. This means anyone can just connect to any Katana V2X over Bluetooth and start sending CTP commands to it, reading information, changing settings, etc.

I thought of the implications for a bit. The speaker has a microphone. An attacker could, theoretically, upload a custom firmware that effectively turns the speaker into a covert monitoring device, listening in on conversations and forwarding them to a receiver over Bluetooth.

What was more interesting to me was the fact that the speaker is, in a standard setup, connected to a PC over USB. It’s by all means a trusted USB device.

What if we wrote custom firmware that forced the speaker into acting as a keyboard, sending keystrokes for opening up the terminal and executing arbitrary commands? We would turn the speaker into a Rubber Ducky, but remotely, without ever having to plug anything into either the speaker or the PC.

I opened up Fdroid to check, and I found this one. I think it might be my new favourite calculator. I’ve always wanted something like speedcrunch on mobile.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.vishaltelangre.nerdcalci

At a previous job, they used to send them fairly often, using various tricks to keep people on their toes. I found it fun

What would that be testing, whether the users are psychic? If the email sender is legitimate, then what else would users need to do?

It’s still FOSS, and you can either download it offline or selfhost the server if you want to use it without paying. Services cost money to run, I’m not going to ask for them to run that for free indefinitely 🤷

Assuming this is about duck.ai, I didn’t know they got shit for it. People I’ve talked to generally enjoy having that option available. It’s free and about as private as you can get with the current LLM chatbots, unless you self host one yourself.

At least until Confer gets off the ground. Once that happens, I’m hoping DDG switches to a similar model

https://confer.to/blog/2026/01/private-inference/

That’s a bit of a stretch?

People who pay for Kagi likely tried the trial and found the results to be far enough better than google/microslop that they are willing to pay for the ongoing service. Or they want to support a business model that isn’t based around the advertising industry, so that someday Kagi can realistically compete with the incumbents. I don’t need to search for things often enough to justify the cost, but I know people who use it for work and consider it to be worth the cost.

Meanwhile people who bought NFTs thought that they could sell a copy of a digital image for lots of money.

I think they’re talking about DDG, not google

I’m surprised it took this long. The skill argument makes no sense, since you could just as easily try to apply it to any form of traditional gambling.

My bad, I missed that 😄

The links are dead for me, maybe it’s set to private? The first one doesn’t open anything, and the second one takes me to a login page

That might actually work for a chaotic storyline with an antihero version of Two-Face. The dichotomous nature is baked into the character, maybe even too rigidly

Odd, its a pretty old website so maybe something broke. Looks like they have issues with their certificate or something

When I manually edit it to https, I needed to accept the risk to see it

Alternative source

https://www.army.mil/article/109852/drowning_doesnt_look_like_drowning

I remember this interactive game/video where you can try it out yourself

http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

When people hear the word “addiction” they often assume it implies catastrophe intoxication, loss of control, destruction. But addiction medicine describes a process long before those outcomes appear: the gradual shift from optional use to psychological reliance.

That might be interesting! If you build on this idea, it would be cool to see ping times with location data, so instance operators can see what the performance is like with real world data. That was something we were concerned about when trying out different alternatives when leaving CloudFlare.