Oh wow, Bandle is a really neat idea. I’m adding that one to my daily puzzle folder

His mistake was not incorporating AI into the sales pitch. Crypto is so passé

After 5ish years of semi-regular practice, I don’t completely suck at chess anymore. This year saw my most dramatic improvement since I started learning how to play in earnest.

Yesterday I hit a new personal best rating at chess puzzles: 2013 Elo. Pretty proud of that

people are so knee-jerk at anything that isn’t 100% human made that they will care and demand anything that uses any kind of artificial intelligence or non human composed and played music be burned at the stake.

Maybe let’s not presume how the community will behave given a new rule regarding generative AI. Music featuring digital instrumentation has certainly not been “burned at the stake” despite it not being “100% human made”.

Music composed and performed by generative AI (which was trained on the works of other artists) would understandably be met with criticism within the music community, and is a far cry from “100% human made” in that it is closer to “0% human made”.

Technically, you might need to ban the song “skullgrid” since it was composed using procedural generation software

Was the procedural generation software trained using other artists’ works? Or is it more like a drum machine with baked-in algorithms written by software developers? If the latter, that’s not “AI” in the sense that this thread is primarily discussing.

I’m stumped on this one.

Since some other comments requested them:

FEN: 8/8/8/4p2k/4Pp2/8/2N5/1K6 w - - 0 1

Lichess: https://lichess.org/editor/8/8/8/4p2k/4Pp2/8/2N5/1K6

Last time I donated to the FSF, they sent me an assortment of stickers. I dunno if they still do that. If not, you can also just buy stickers directly from them: https://shop.fsf.org/collection/stickers

If you (or your parents) like to cook, you could get some choice steaks (or other high-end ingredients) and make a nice meal that the whole family can enjoy.

Could also get a nice game controller if you’re into video games. Most first-party controllers seem to cost about $70-$80 these days.

I dunno what the “smart” thing to do with $75 would be; $75 isn’t a whole lot of money in the grand scheme of things so investing it wouldn’t exactly pay dividends any time soon. Maybe buy 1GB of DDR5 RAM and in a year it might be worth $75,000 if the market continues its current trend.

I’m not familiar with this app, but have you tried running it under Linux with WINE instead of in a Windows VM?

A quick search led me here, which looks like what OP is using based on the screenshots: https://controller.dl.playstation.net/controller/lang/en/2100004.html

Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.

I remember L’oreal Kids shampoo commercials (like 25 years ago) very specifically showed kids happily wiping suds out of their eyes when “NO TEARS!” showed up on the bottom of the screen, clearly to exploit this misunderstanding

Could build a wheelchair ramp on the side of the tub so you can just roll on in

Hit 'em with the Liu Kang Bicycle Kick

I watched Game Grumps play this game a while back and found it very funny. Certainly a labor of love

What kind of world do we live in where folks are disappointed that their next kid will be female? It’s dumb society has been crafted this way, stupid af.

I’m probably giving more credit than is due, but:

I don’t think it’s inherently bad for a parent to have a preference for their kid’s sex. If a mother already has a son, I can understand her wanting her next child to be a daughter. Similarly, if a father already has a daughter, I can understand him wanting a son next. All parent/child relationships are special, but I understand parents who are particularly interested in cultivating a mother/daughter or father/son relationship.

Obviously no parent should ever be disappointed in their child for simply being one sex or the other; that’s not okay. But I can understand a parent being disappointed that things didn’t turn out how they had hoped in that regard.

Disclaimer: My father was very transparent that I was a last-ditch-effort for him to finally have a son after having 3 daughters. Thanks dad.

A license obtained in the USA (issued by the FCC) only permits transmission on regulated frequencies within the USA. Other nations will have different regulatory bodies you’ll need to comply with instead. You can probably just do a web search for “<your country here> amateur radio license” and go from there.

Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions, assuming you’re in the U.S.) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

• https://in-the-sky.org/satmap_radar.php
• https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18
• https://www.heavens-above.com/

You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.

You could use PiVPN (you don’t need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi – this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).

I’ve used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.

Took me quite a while to find it. Frustrating considering White has such an overwhelming advantage in this position.