I use an animation from this live wallpaper app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.at2_software.terracollageapp&hl=en_US

I believe it was just a one-time purchase for the full version of the app. The animations don’t loop very well, but I’m not staring at my home screen long enough to see the loop that often, so it’s not a big concern to me. They’re pretty much all swirly, inky, starry sort of abstract animations, but there’s a lot of color options so it’s pretty easy to pick something that fits well with the rest of your phone’s theme.

The developer hasn’t updated it for over a year now, so if the previews don’t look like something you’d like, I wouldn’t bother buying the full version since it’s unlikely that any more will be added.

Your TV doesn’t need a screensaver. You can just… turn it off.

You’re trusting that a) they’re not malicious and b) they have their shit together and c) even though they do have their shit together someone doesn’t find a random exploit anyhow.

You could say this about literally any solution short of hand-delivering cash in person.

You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

You’re not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I’m not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.

It’s also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there’s very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can’t be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they’ll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you’re more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It’s basically a modernized version of Western Union.

That’s unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don’t have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don’t have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you’d need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it’s usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you’re actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

It’s similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it’s probably safe to enter your login details as long as you’re not getting any certificate errors on the page.

E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I’m not saying it’s a good system, just saying that it’s not inherently a scam.

The data used to configure it.

I don’t understand why it’s so hard to sandbox an LLM’s configuration data from it’s training data.

You should check out Rainbolt’s Geoguesser runs. He often narrates his thought process as he goes. He’s looking at things like the angle of the sun and shadows to determine what hemisphere of the planet he’s on, looks at the vegetation and soil types to further pinpoint his longitude, etc. He’ll even take photos sent directly to him from viewers, and he’ll find out exactly where the photo was taken, even if that image had never existed on the internet prior.

Some of these guys are insanely talented at this. Rainbolt is probably the most entertaining and educational, IMO. Definitely worth checking out some of his videos.

I feel like “I’m making a personal choice to pirate because my deliberately-crafted use-case scenario is not being specifically catered to” is a worse argument than “I can’t afford it”.

distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen

This is like an F1 racer getting angry at 7-Eleven for not offering fuel that works for his supercar. You’re not being treated as a second-class citizen; you’ve created a situation in which you are above first-class citizens, because you’re using what is, these days, niche and specialized hardware that is far outside of the norm, but for some reason you’re still shopping at the gas station the rest of us peons go to.

This article spent more time explaining the logistics on building pager-bombs than it did actually explaining why building pager-bombs is a bad idea.

I think generally, assistive devices like Hawking’s wheelchair/speech synth wouldn’t qualify one for the title of “cyborg”, since they’re replacing lost/damaged functionality, and didn’t grant him any abilities not already available to the average person. Whereas Harbisson’s modification is giving him additional abilities that he didn’t previously have and are outside of the typical human experience.

I’m gonna be honest with you, there’s probably some red flags that your doctor saw that perhaps you’re unaware of. You say living in your van is a choice; are you being honest with yourself about that? Are you actually taking care of your hygiene this way?

Because one red flag I’m seeing is a van-dweller making a doctor’s appointment in the first place. Usually nomadic/hermitic people (as in, those who choose to live off the grid and aren’t doing so as a matter of circumstance) generally don’t go to the doctor, unless something is really wrong. So for you to show up in a doctor’s office at all is already anomalous in the first place.

It shouldn’t be understated just how important basic things like access to clean running water can be. And you’re using the words “van” and “SUV”, and not “RV” or “motorhome”, which leads me to believe that you aren’t taking care of some basic needs.

If you’re truly taking care of yourself and being healthy, then more power to ya; I’m honestly a little jealous of those who can live that life. But if you’re actually struggling, you should probably consider taking a look at the paperwork they gave you. Don’t get pride get in the way of getting help.

Amazon will often just let you keep items, even if they refund it. It’s generally not worth the cost of shipping back, so they just eat the loss.

Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the for-profit) are two different entities under the Mozilla umbrella, so their staffing may be reported differently depending where you look and how they’re counting it.

Mozilla is a small company

I’m surprised that people consider a ~2000-person company that revenues about a half billion a year to be “small”. Mozilla is a profit-driven corporation, far separated from the vision of the hobbyist coders who founded it decades ago. The only reason they’re shutting down their Mastodon server is because it’s not making them money, not because they lack the resources to support it.

In the fine print, you’ll see it says “wheel is for illustrative purposes only, all users will receive the best prize”.

Ah, bummer! Yeah, having to do that manually is super annoying.

If it’s an Android Wear watch, they’ve recently added an option in the Watch app settings that makes it easier to transfer your watch to another device without having to go through the entire setup process. But it’s still locked to being paired to one phone at a time, as far as I can tell.

Perfect, just in time to stop Russia from meddling with the 2016 election!