I worked in the Bay Area during the dot-com boom and large swathes of time were effectively 996. I was generally irritable, gained a bunch of weight (up to 220; am now 170), and eventually burned out. What was old is now new. Perhaps AI encourages 996'ing, but people will still burn out just the same.
I WiFi enabled my fridge because the thermostat broke. So now an ESP32 with a dallas temperature sensor and a relay take care of that. The code on the ESP32 is smart enough to keep working if there is no internet (wasn't always like this, until it had to), but it still sends the temperature to the server for logging and the server can send it configuration commands or control the relay directly, as it was initially.
It was a great way to keep the fridge alive, the thermostat was already a replacement and it never worked properly, so that sometimes things were frozen, sometimes barely cold. ~24 years old. A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
This is awesome, great way to keep a fridge going! Temp sensor to ESP32, ESP32 monitors set point and calls for cool, output from ESP32 energizes relay coil which turns on the compressor?
> A new one would be more efficient, but then I woudln't be able to log when I opened the fridge anymore (only with something battery powered and long transmit intervals).
Also, how did you do this? Wiring to the door switch itself or a current switch around the fridge light conductor?
i also have questions. was the fridge "smart"-capable prior to the esp32 mods and you just replaced the factory controller with your esp32 stuff, or youre saying you wired in the appropriate circuitry to replace the pressure-controlling thermostat with your esp32 stuff?
it was not smart-capable. I was very lucky that the thermostat was in the fridge itself, above the compartments. There I removed the old analog control and had enough space to fit a USB power supply to the cables which were there connected to the now-removed analog control. I was lucky.
The sent data gets stored in InfluxDB. So with Grafana it allows me to see when I opened it, because the temperature rises immediately.
I took Spanish in high school and college, so had a rudimentary understanding of verb tenses and some vocabulary. Before I walked the Camino de Santiago el Norte (45+ days in Spain), I used Duolingo to brush up on my Spanish.
It helped my reading most, my speaking a fair amount and my listening/conversation the least. I was able to ask questions, but was often flummoxed at any reply that wasn't the most basic.
I grew to hate the gamification, but was addicted to my "streak' also ... using math lessons when I didn't feel like doing a Spanish lesson. The so-called "leagues" were kind of useless since the same people weren't in the league from week to week. Any friendly competitiveness to "learn more" was lost when randomly assigned to a different group each week.
I finally abandoned the app this spring.
I'm trying Babbel now since I'm going back to Spain for a month and Patagonia next year.
I don't understand people who say this. I completely ignore the gamification. If I don't feel like doing it one day, I don't do it. I don't even know what the leagues are, despite seeing people talk about them. I never look at any score or badge that they provide.
You have to click through a lot of it. If I open it and do a lesson, it will demand I commit to a streak (if I haven't done it in a while), show me the new 1-day streak, show me about streak freezes, see how much XP I got, see what quests I made progress on, see that I did not get promoted in the leagues, see my new league placement, and probably a dozen other things that aren't language learning. I don't care about this stuff, but I'm forced to interact with it to use their app.
Duolingo makes it hard to ignore - the whole app is gamified. It's like ignoring water while swimming in the ocean. Yes, you can turn off notifications, but sometimes they were helpful.
I think gamification triggers some innate feature of our brain, just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games, etc. It is designed to be hard to ignore.
This may be part of it. I refuse to use the app. I use the website only.
It sends me daily reminder emails, which I use as a reminder to do it if I have a chance, otherwise I ignore them. It flashes up a bunch of crap after I complete a lesson that I just mindlessly click through. Which could be the league stuff you mention but I ignore it.
> just like TikTok or Reels or mobile games
Fair, I have the same question about those. It boggles my mind that people fall for the gamification of those too. Or even back in the day stuff like badges in StackOverflow. If one doesn't care, one doesn't care.
Then you missed the point of my post. That money never did. It went back into the hands of the investors, the investors that are now putting money into genAI.
"Doomed from the start" for a 133 year old company seems a bit hyperbolic. They have lasted 13 decades and counting. How many other company started in the 1890s are still around today?
One can come up with plenty of criticisms of Kodak. But they did sell off their chemical business when the selling was reasonably good and they did do a fair number of things that anticipated digital.
But you can't just yank out the carpet from a massive consumables business that basically underpinned a company's revenue and profits almost overnight and reasonably expect them to deal with it.
I don't have confidence that systems built on top of a specific model will work the same on a higher version. Unlike, say, the Go programming language where backwards compatibility is something you can generally count on (with exceptions being well documented).
I wouldn't want to be in charge of regression testing an LLM-based enterprise software app when bumping the underlying model.
Merlin is a great app for identifying birds (via sound and photo). We've used it in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. The library of sounds is most thorough in North America.
