monotremata

Honestly, Google killing this will probably be the best outcome for it, because otherwise they'll try to monetize it, and that could be a nightmare. Just a straight-up conversation partner that tries to wheedle personal information out of you for their advertising profiles. Even their example question about what you like to do for fun is a little uncomfortable in that context.

Note that it also breaks our privacy if we view the link. Caution is advised.

I mean, I assume what happened was that the friend looked in their library, was surprised the game wasn't there after they bought it online, and since they were already chatting they just asked what to do rather than try to solve it alone. Opening a store is always a little slow just because it has to load ads and images and everything from online, so I can see why you wouldn't just rush to try that if your friends were waiting for you.

It's not FOSS, and it's been a few years since I used it, but I used to rely on Jota text editor. It was a very straightforward one, no bells and whistles, but that was kinda what I wanted from it. It didn't get unmanageable when using very large files, and if I recall correctly I think it also handled both Unix and Windows line endings, which mattered to me.

Not sure if it's still good, though. I don't do nearly as much weird stuff with my phone as I used to.

Thanks!

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...

I'm really curious how good the depth sensor is. In the iPhone there are apps that will let you use the depth sensor as a 3d scanner; I'd like to see something like that here. I'm particularly curious if it would be possible to use the scanner to get the contours of your face, then use that to 3d print a custom facial interface out of TPU, sort of similar to what the bigscreen beyond does.

I just use swipe typing, but my dad absolutely loves MessagEase, which is basically a 9-key keyboard. The gimmick is that every letter is a gesture; nine letters are just taps, and everything else (including some punctuation) you start on one of those nine keys and swipe in one of eight directions (up, left, upper left, etc.). I think there are a couple of other large keys, like a space bar at the bottom and delete and "switch to numbers and extra punctuation" on the right, but you mainly use the nine for words. It's not terrible, and he's gotten moderately fast at it. Might be worth a look.

Edit: Oh, I've just seen that MessagEase is now unmaintained, and the "thumbkey" mentioned in another comment is basically a replacement. So I guess this is just another recommendation for that keyboard! Oops.

Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.

Fun fact: there's a name for the phenomenon of instantly recognizing the number of objects when it's fewer than five. It's called "subitizing."

There's a pretty interesting overview of what we know about math on the brain (or at least knew as of its writing) in the book "Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nuñez.

Ugh, I'm typing on my phone and kbin just ate about three pages of text. I'll try to just summarize.

Assessments for land that's at a roughly average level of development for its area would likely be about the same as they currently are for the properry as a whole, because of how, as I say, the existing system conflates the building and the land. So, better estimates for the values of your example properties would be $200k for a single family home in East, several million for the five-story condo building, and hundreds of millions for big pink. If they were all taxed at 1%, that would be a couple thousand a year for the home, a few hundred thousand a year for the condo, and millions for big pink. Which is probably not far off what they pay now. (My numbers are just as made up as yours, so, y'know, take with salt.) You'd only really expect to see significant changes in valuation for properties that are either much more or much less developed than the land around them, which is why I mentioned parking lots and U-Store-It centers; these businesses are almost always structured around the idea that they'll bring in a nominal trickle of cash to offset the taxes while the owner holds them and waits for their value to go up. This would be a lot less attractive if they had to pay the same taxes as the businesses and apartments going in around them that were causing that value to rise.

George used to demonstrate this by buying empty lots in downtown areas and putting up signs in them that said "Everybody works but the empty lot." Below that it would explain that he had bought it for whatever price, would hold it until it hit some other price, and would have done absolutely nothing to earn that increase in price but was instead capturing some of the value of the work other people had put in to growing the neighborhood. It was a pretty good way of advertising his ideas.

Oh, and yes, you can always adjust the rates to incentivize particular kinds of development like an urban farm. It's a human system, so there's gonna be a need for flexibility. :)

It's related for sure. Our current property tax system kind of conflates the land value with the value of the buildings on the land--that's why a house will be assessed as going up in value even though it's physically deteriorating a bit as it ages, and even if it's likely to be torn down and replaced by a new buyer. The idea of land value tax is that you revamp the assessment system to reflect that most of the value is actually in the location of the property, and you tax the property based only on that value, but at a high rate. This significantly discourages leaving a lot vacant, because your income on that property will be low, but your taxes will be as high as if you had built it up. It basically does away with "land banking." This is why there are currently so many lots in most downtowns that are barely improved--parking lots, storage companies, that sort of thing: because of the lack of significant buildings, they'll have low property taxes, and the owner can just hold them while they wait for the value to inflate. Land Value Tax does away with that. It incentivizes the efficient use of land, and basically eliminates the use of land as simply a hoarding spot for wealth.