After reading this thread, my brain is now convinced that copilots are actually some sort of small South American mammals.
I think I'll stick to that definition; I don't want to lose my mental image of the daft-looking little copilots roaming around the Inter-Andean valleys that their more menacing-looking ancestors once inhabited. Yeah, cute little things.
Past experience with cat-wrangling over the years have taught me one thing (amongst many): It doesn't matter what the object is, if human cares about it, cat will use said object as a cat would, in order to communicate with human.
Communications from cat tend to be along the lines of: I'm hungry, or in most cases, I want attention (play/stimulation).
Past objects observed: Keyboards, houseplants, pens & pencils, kitchen area counter and anything on it, pet ants, rock and fossil collection.. the list goes on.
And related to cat areas, the secret that I've found was to never rely on buying fancy cat furniture but rather making a unique spot for cat every few days. Blanket for comfort, areas always in sight range of the work desk but not in it (to be distracting for work). Bonus points if you visit and pet cat when they're sleeping in those spots to reinforce that this is their spot and all is well with safety and comfort.
And same for toys, makeshift toys are cheaper and more effective than overpriced pet store shenanigans (Eg: elastics, pieces of string tied together, sandwich bag clips, small bouncy toys). The secret there is also reinforcing playtime with those toys by simply playing with cat!
Edit: written with cat at arm's length distance in makeshift bed in a chair~
They are incredibly communicative animals. Their problem seems to be that I am a very stupid creature that often does the wrong thing, like not feeding them every time they’re hungry, sitting at a desk instead of playing with them, carrying them out of the room when they were clearly trying to get on the kitchen counter, and so on.
Or, god forbid, stupid creature that I am, I buy _the wrong flavor food_. Then it's all "why are you trying to poison me, hooman? do you not love me anymore??"
My cats actually love their cat tree. I’ve had to replace it because they clawed through the scratching post legs (all the way through the cardboard underneath the sisal rope).
Knowing that they love rectangles explains a lot too. They love every Amazon box that arrives, the folded hand towel in the bathroom, the top of my pc mini tower (rectangular and warm). Though they get off the tower when I’m playing a game since the gpu heats up so much and the exhaust fans blow out the top—it just gets too hot for them. I made a “cat catcher for my bed—a single hand towel folded in half lying on the otherwise featureless comforter. There’s almost always a cat there when I wake up in the morning.
This desk might actually work for me since one of my cats loves to sleep right under my office chair, dangerously close to the wheels. He’s got real long hair and I find tufts of fur around the chair and feel absolutely horrible. Crazily I almost never notice when it happens, he doesn’t yelp! I finally ended up buying a small scratching post with a bed on top and set it under my desk. He instantly took to it, so no more running over the poor cat. As a bonus he’s now in petting reach so I can get my cat fix whenever I need (petting is a two way street).
From my direct multi-year study, the surest way to have a cat not lay in a specific place is to place a fluffy cat bed in that place. Also, no toy is more precious to a cat than a non-toy item stolen from the hooman with hair ties being one of the most precious items.
My cat yells at me a lot but my god I took a pastic bag from him a few days ago that he was licking (is there a more annoying noise on the planet?) and my god he sulked about it for a good 18 hours.
I cat sat once for a friend who had a plastic goblin. I spent the entire two weeks obsessively checking that I didn't leave any plastic out only to (occasionally) find the cat happily chewing on something that I didn't think they would find.
I learned my lesson about the depths of feline creativity lol and I was thankful they didn't get into anything that hurt them
I think variety is the key, and we've had really good outcomes by having a few pet shop toys (feather on wand, squeaky mouse, ball with bell) that we bring out for a few hours every few weeks and then put away, so it doesn't turn into something normal for them to ignore.
+1 after many failed attempts to buy useless cat toys, I’ve been really surprised that those are what we loves the most. He can play alone with it for hours and is absolutely crazy happy to play fetch with me. Maybe when I throw the elastic hair is kind of a bird like feature him.
I woke up early the other day. The house was perfectly silent until I got near the kitchen, when I heard a ping followed by an odd sound. As I got closer to see what was going on, an empty beer can casually rolled past my feet. The cats were nowhere to be seen.
I awoke this morning to newcat lapping from my bedside drinking glass (with a dash of tea/caffeine). She has two other waterbowls... but I guess is mad at me because the edible I ate last night caused me to sleep in too long for her breakfast likings.
Lil'shit knows this is not allowed, on a tabletop she's not allowed upon, no less!
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I'm not a cat person and somehow have inherited a black kitten from each parent.
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At least she didn't curl up napping upon my Apple Silicon (thankfully kess attractive than older Macbook AMD GPUs)... that's when I know I've actually fucked up #catWorld
When I was dying from COVID, it was an agony that lasted for two or three days. I don't remember the most of it, but I had no will or strength to get up. My cat was pissed off about me not feeding her. Obviously she was, though I didn't witness it with my own eyes, I was too deep into that COVID thing. At some point she decided that enough was enough, so she came to me and sat on my face. But the real devilry was the piece of shit that was stuck to her fur. I can tolerate my cat's ass on my face, but not her shit. I was fully awake in seconds. And she got her food.
I always thought of her as of the stupidest cat I knew, but that event convinced me otherwise. She was the smartest cat, she was smart enough to conceal her intelligence so as not to raise my expectations for her behavior.
I wouldn't say that's true or even likely. It's completely possible to be in a pit of vipers where every single snake is venomous, and that is pretty much what we are seeing: With technological advances, there is a certain subset of people that will use them primarily to solidify their power and control over others. There is no utopian society right now whose government doesn't look to spy through technology, which of course is best set up at time of manufacture.
Agreed. Unless you have full control over the production chain to fully produce a device, you are subject to the whims and desires of those who preside over such technological feats that we take for granted in our daily lives.
To the original point, it's safe to say that highlighting a nationality with regards to trust is baseless and without merit, as would be for any other topic (men/women from x are y, z food is better here, etc..). Real life is much more complicated and nuanced past nationalities. Some might call it FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but there's always a deeper rationale at the individual level as well.
Rather than people being wary of Chinese in general, it's more that there is a high degree of government control exercised in China and they are known to be very strategic with long-term planning in regards to technology control both for spying and actual remote control of devices. We are all just looking for the least bad option. It's not like devices from other countries are immune, but they are often less organized so there is a better chance of avoiding the Chinese level of planned access.
It does seem like pretty low risk in this specific case so I agree OP's comment was bit over the top, but I would have no way to make anything resembling even an educated guess as to how far their programs go.
Yes, this is really what I was referring to. And the fact that the original comment I was replying to mentioned "modded Chinese hardware" from some unspecified, unvetted 3rd party which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
Outsourcing intelligence at every level. What can go wrong in the long run without critical thinking skills being required in the chain of command? What happens when they turn off the magic answer-generating black box?
It's a matter of logic and capacity of the individual.
You argue online advertising but you've been exposed to offline advertising in your life a lot more. Now you are offered the choice to "turn most of it off" but you choose to spend your time replying to internet comments saying that you're stubborn and can't do it because it's hard and not 100% effective.
I'm sorry sir but your reasoning is flawed: you could have learned how to install ad block plus, noscript or whatever you want to experiment with, with all of these work out of the box, in the time needed to write your two comments.
I suppose it's worth reminding that the advertisement industry is one of the biggest economic areas of our society so the brightest of us will be coaxed into making advertising more effective, and the cat-and-mouse game between blockers and advertisers will continue forever.
You can spend the same time asking someone advice on where you're stuck, or even go ask an.. LLM.. for a simple step by step breakdown, with 1 step per line to set your pace. The options are all there at your disposal.
To complain with reason is all fine and dandy, but to not act to satiate those complaints is an area to improve on..
Then challenge yourself, for the sake of the conversation and spirit of hacker news, to try out the experience and accomplish something that you've only heard from others.
Off topic, Slashdot has devolved further and added AI banner ads to the bottom of their site that persists through noscript/ublock origin and require manual and repeated intervention. I've reluctantly had to say that it was a good boy, and that it was time to go..
Slashdot is a news article aggregator. Can a better link can be found? ..like from the source?
BASIC for 8-bit computers was an interesting language. It was limited in many aspects, but taught a whole generation about how computers actually worked. Apart from non-native data types (strings and floats), it was quite close to the machine - GOTO and GOSUB map very neatly to (in 6502) JMP and JSR.
(Fun fact: If you repeat a word sufficiently, it will lose its meaning..)
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