Had a similar problem in 2013. Fitness tracker showed my partner and I woke up at exactly 4:00am every day. Barely audible TV from neighbor through a shared wall the source.
Literally 5 minutes of online search and a white noise app solved the problem.
I know this is a post on a blog designed to sell us on Martin, but it's sort of like a movie where a single text message would spoil the whole plot. AI didn't really need to help solve this problem. Martin didn't "let" AI build a tool, he just asked (Claude, probably) how to build something that is replicated by existing apps that record sound and are activated over certain decibel levels. Comments seem to confirm many of us have done the same. Just seems a a bit over-engineered for the sake of it. Sorry, Martin.
It goes much deeper than that. The John Deere ecosystem is designed to trap farmers using a combination of the closed ecosystem and financing. They've been at it for years, selling precision agriculture advances as the thing that will maximize all yields and turn profits, and then following up with economic manipulations to create what amounts to tech-enabled sharecropping.
If it has an HDMI port, and even better if it has a USB port for power, is you can buy an $40 Amazon Fire Stick and use and upgrade with your TV until it physically dies.
Truly, no one should ever connect their "Smart" TV to the internet when better hardware and control is available to you in perpetuity via the HDMI port.
Looking at the author's work for West Africa, when is it a travel guide and not just a diary in travel guide format?
Though it's a bit frustrating to read how close he gets to some genuine understanding of how things really work in West Africa, and misses it in preference of expecting everything from a Western perspective. Noting a lack of tourists then bemoaning the difficulty of accessing few and lackluster tourist sites? OK, well, supply and demand work both ways.
Tourist sites and national parks across West Africa, where wildlife is very, very rarely the draw, are typically organized as jobs programs for whoever happens to be stuck in the area forbidden to be used for normal farming and village-life purposes. You don't pay a guide to guide you on an easy hike, you pay a guide to legitimize your presence in the community, to keep other people from bothering you, and to make sure that if you get bit by a snake or something, that you're not alone. That guide might simply be the young guy that speaks the best English in the village nearby and 99.9% of their time is spent living normal life doing things that have nothing to do with tourism.
All the friction the author notes is specifically employed as personal income generation, and it's odd how rarely does the author recognize that. Then they pay the universal "expedited visa" bribe in every country because they have mighty plans that no nation shall change.
1 million% agree - I've lived in Ghana and a number of other countries in West and Southern Africa. I've sadly attended many funerals in each place. These photos that visually drive the sense of opulence are entirely of Ghanaian fantasy coffins. I've only ever attended Ghanaian funerals with regular square coffins, and makers of fantasy coffins are rare, as is their use. Primarily by Ga people, who because they are from around Accra, tourists and foreigners have easier access to them. Already off to a biased start.
Beyond the poor writing of making this an "Africa" practice, it's also limited to Christians, and affluent ones at that. The Muslim burials I've attended are modest to the point of being barely even ceremonial.
While families do pour resources into funerals in Zim and other neighboring countries, it's doing things like hiring professional wailers and church groups to sing - paying the living for a service. Totally without irony, this is called "economic development" in other contexts. Families are hiring caterers, hiring drivers, keeping textile makers booked, supporting churches, hiring choral groups, printing banners. These a jobs for the living that also cement the family as stalwart members of the community. Almost none of the money is being buried in the grave and thus wasted. Typical "Africa is bad and weird" article - ill-informed, out of context data, and a Western-focused "only what I say is right" perspective.
To be fair, I can imagine a pretty parallel article "Americans are spending a fortune on weddings" that does not include the case of a courthouse wedding or a backyard wedding and in fact mostly discusses a few idiots with more millions of dollars than IQ points in the Hamptons or equivalent.
It turns into a general rant about kinship societies - which again, are hardly unique to Africa, and aren’t hobbling economic development in other places, which means the author’s core thesis is likely untrue.
I mean, if we’re treating anecdotes as facts - my grandfather - British - used to send most of his pay packet from the navy back to support his mother and his grandmother - and one can hardly argue that the U.K. hasn’t seen economic development.
Shit, I was 19 years old, supporting my mother, my great aunt, and my sister. A few decades on, retired millionaire. It put me in such dire straits that I was forced to work several jobs and then start businesses in my spare time until one stuck. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Societies which have the Clan, the family as the biggest institution building unit, are crippling societies they are part of wherever they go.
Family units can not build nations. Only societies that can build meta-families can. You will never be part of the institution of Saud if you are not born into it.
I thought the same thing - hopefully by the time Artemis III launches they'll remember the gaps and blank screens from this launch. Even the live telemetry model at the core stage separation seemed to not match what the on-board cameras showed. Artemis I's camera work was better. Why???
A week after I started doing OSINT research, I realized how much very personal data I had online. Much more than I wanted. Years ago I went down the privacy rabbit hole and realized how bad all of this was. And that was before it took off around 2019 and really ramped up a year ago.
It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.
These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?
We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.
We're at a place where browser fingerprinting is what you have to defeat in order to not be tracked online, it goes a lot further than signing up for DeleteMe.
All DeleteMe does is save you the time of manually making takedown requests, which is not that onerous in the first place. I've done plenty of my own. But that doesn't prevent online advertising databases from profiling me or you. And it's been happening for years - this isn't new at all.
Literally 5 minutes of online search and a white noise app solved the problem.
I know this is a post on a blog designed to sell us on Martin, but it's sort of like a movie where a single text message would spoil the whole plot. AI didn't really need to help solve this problem. Martin didn't "let" AI build a tool, he just asked (Claude, probably) how to build something that is replicated by existing apps that record sound and are activated over certain decibel levels. Comments seem to confirm many of us have done the same. Just seems a a bit over-engineered for the sake of it. Sorry, Martin.
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