• 46 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
    1·
    5 days ago

    I have an analog radio-controlled solar powered watch from both Casio and Citizen. The Casio has stepper motors for the hands, which is so cool when you see the minute hand advance 1/6 tick each 20 seconds. When the second hand is used as an indicator, the minute hand doesn’t move. It does on the Citizen.

    That said, I’m keeping an eye out for a used or good deal on a GPS watch from Citizen. I appreciate the styling more.

    Edit I used to be a watch nerd and I still follow the news for entertainment, but for personal use a solar powered, externally synced quartz watch is ideal.

  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
    4·
    6 days ago

    I have an analog Casio G-Shock that’s the perfect beater watch - radio controlled, solar charging, I can discern the hands in the dark without glasses, and almost indestructible. It wasn’t terribly expensive either.

    I think Casio is threading the needle quite well with new technology. I’m sure they’re exploring pure smart watches, but the core ideal is “no maintenance” - you don’t have to change the battery or set the time[1]. This naturally leads to tough, energy-concious engineering, and as they make millions of watches, they have economies of scale.

    The newer models have BT low energy so you can use the admittedly fiddly controls with an app. But you don’t need to. It’s just a complement.

    [1] obviously this only applies to the more expensive models, and if your local time source supports DST

  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
    14·
    6 days ago

    Big Yud posts another “banger”[1], and for once the target audience isn’t impressed:

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect#comments

    I skimmed it. It’s terrible. It’s a long-winded parable about some middling chess player who’s convinced he’s actually good, and a Socratic strawman in the form of a young woman who needles him.

    Contains such Austean gems as this

    If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.

    In the end, both strawmen are killed by AI-controlled mosquito drones, leaving everyone else feeling relieved .

    Commenters seem miffed that Yud isn’t cleaning up his act and writing more coherently so as to warn the world of Big Bad AI, but apparently he just can’t help himself.

    [1] if by banger you mean a long, tedious turd. 42 minute read!

  • geriksontoTechTakes•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025English
    7·
    12 days ago

    Bungie made Marathon before Halo and it’s basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many “integrated” species. It’s a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.

    OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pfor’s leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and there’s an eldrich horror living in a star too.