All posts tagged: dumb

Light Phone Is Making Its Dumb Phone More Useful With Third-Party ‘Tools’

Light Phone Is Making Its Dumb Phone More Useful With Third-Party ‘Tools’

Published by skeptic

Time and time again, owners of dumb phones—or minimalist phones—turn to their niche communities asking for extra features for their pared-down devices: an authenticator app, Uber, or a way to view hiking trails. They turned to these phones to reduce the time spent staring at a smartphone screen and cut the anxiety driven by the modern attention economy from their lives, but turns out we still need apps. “I cannot tell you how many people come back to us saying that, ‘Hey, if only you had this thing for QR code scanning; if only you had this localized app,’ that they’d be able to use the Light Phone more often,” Kaiwei Tang, CEO and cofounder of Light Phone, tells WIRED. “We’re a smaller team, we’re not Apple. We don’t have app stores with millions of apps.” But now the Brooklyn company is taking a step to close that gap. Light Phone is launching a developer program in May for LightOS, the operating system powering its new Light Phone III. Now anyone interested in the platform …

Texas Instruments’ newest calculator is intentionally dumb

Texas Instruments’ newest calculator is intentionally dumb

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In a world drowning in notifications and devices that want to be everything all at once, calculator giant Texas Instruments (TI) is going back to basics. This week, the company unveiled the TI-84 Evo, its most powerful graphing calculator ever. It explicitly can’t access social media apps or even connect to Wi-Fi. Instead, TI says its $160 “distraction free” device is designed to do only one thing exceptionally well: math.  That’s likely welcome news to educators around the country battling a growing attention crisis in classrooms some attribute to constantly nagging smart electronic devices.  The TI-84 Evo costs $160 and comes in a variety of colors. Image: Texas Instruments. “As schools nationwide ban cell phones, parents sue social platforms for addictive content, and researchers warn against student over-reliance on technology, educators are re-evaluating classroom technology use,” Texas Instruments writes.   But that limited ambition doesn’t mean the device itself is a slouch. TI claims a new processor makes it …

Is Your Dog Really Dumb, or Are You Dumb About Dogs?

Is Your Dog Really Dumb, or Are You Dumb About Dogs?

Published by Jenni Sidey

A recent essay by award-winning science writer Emily Anthes titled “In Defense of Dumb Dogs: Your pet is (probably) not a genius, and that’s OK” has generated countless emails, texts, and in-person comments and discussions so I decided it would be useful to: (1) clarify what Anthes is saying (or at least lay out what I think she is trying to communicate), (2) stress that some people seem not to have carefully read what she wrote, (3) revisit other myths about the behavior of dogs, and (4) explain why cross-species comparisons about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals are fraught with error, including those in which dogs and other animals are compared to humans of different ages. I found Anthes’s essay to be important and thought-provoking, and decided to write this post because just yesterday four people asked me questions along the line of, “Aren’t you going to write something about who dogs really are and why we must be very careful about labelling them as being ‘dumb’?” One asked, “Isn’t the real problem …

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men

Published by skeptic

Like many medical school students, Sam was broke. The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online. Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online? But when Sam started posting generic photos of a beautiful, scantily clad woman on Instagram, he was dismayed to find that none of the content was hitting. He turned to Gemini for advice. “If you create a generic ‘hot girl,’ you’re competing with a million …

Stop Being So Dependent on Your iPhone: Turn It Into a Dumb Phone Instead

Stop Being So Dependent on Your iPhone: Turn It Into a Dumb Phone Instead

Published by skeptic

The mindless pull of the infinite scroll has a way of turning every spare moment into a lost hour. It starts as a quick check for a notification or a brief distraction during a work break, but these apps are engineered to keep you trapped in a loop of “just one more.”  Before long, that reflex to reach for your phone becomes an automatic response to any second of boredom, leaving you stuck in a cycle of digital noise that is hard to break with willpower alone. I miss the feeling of calm that comes with being without a smartphone. And I’m not the only one. A Pew Research survey from 2024 found that 72% of US teens say they feel “peaceful” when they don’t have their smartphone, while 44% say it makes them anxious. Watch this: Ditching My iPhone for the Low-Tech Light Phone 3. Can I Survive? 04:57 But switching off is hard. Crucial personal and banking information is tied to my phone, and I’d still need it occasionally even if I tried …

Best Smart Smoke Detector (and Why You Still Need a Dumb One)

Best Smart Smoke Detector (and Why You Still Need a Dumb One)

Published by skeptic

Adding Wi-Fi doesn’t always turn out to be as smart as it sounds. A smart smoke detector turns out to be dumber than I thought, even with Wi-Fi added. Smart smoke detectors will let you know if a fire breaks out when you aren’t home, but other than that they don’t offer any extra benefits over a “dumb” model. And these devices introduce a problem: Most smart smoke detectors exclude one of two sensors to alert you about a fire. Every smart model I tested had only a photoelectric sensor, which picks up smoldering fires, while ionization sensors that pick up fast-burning fires were left behind. Ionization sensors are more likely to have nuisance alarms go off (while you’re cooking, for example), but it’s still a sensor you should have somewhere in your home, especially since modern building materials have shortened your window of time to escape a home fire. It’s not to say smart smoke detectors are useless, since what matters most is having a working smoke detector at all. A photoelectric-only smoke detector …

Bluey composer reveals why he refuses to ‘dumb down’ orchestral music for children

Bluey composer reveals why he refuses to ‘dumb down’ orchestral music for children

Published by Daniella Wilson

Add Bluey to your watchlist As beautiful as a Mahler symphony is, I wouldn’t expect a young child to sit through an 80-minute performance in a concert hall. The capacity of children to enjoy classical music, however, is so often underestimated. That’s why, when composing Bluey – the smash hit TV series that follows Bluey, a lovable, inexhaustible blue heeler dog alongside her mum, dad and her little sister Bingo – I weave elements of Vivaldi, Holst, Mozart, Bizet, Bach and Ravel into the soundtrack. I don’t dumb down and I hope that by taking this approach to enhance the wonderful and clever animation, we’ve helped create a new generation of classical music fans. Bluey has become a phenomenon since it first aired in 2018 and its success, with parents as well as children, has taken us by surprise. As well as being a hit in the UK, Australia (where Joe Brumm created the series) and around the world, it was the most‑streamed show in the US in 2024 and 2025. Its music has a …

Iran says it ‘would be dumb’ for US to let Netanyahu kill diplomacy | US-Israel war on Iran News

Iran says it ‘would be dumb’ for US to let Netanyahu kill diplomacy | US-Israel war on Iran News

Published by Sam Flores

In an implicit response to JD Vance, Iran’s Abbas Araghchi warns of the repercussions of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said that it would be “dumb” for the United States to allow Israel to jeopardise the regional ceasefire by continuing its intense attacks on Lebanon, which have killed hundreds of people since the truce came into effect. On Thursday, Araghchi noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial will resume on Sunday. He suggested that the Israeli leader has an ulterior motive for continuing the fighting. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list “A region-wide ceasefire, incl in Lebanon, would hasten his jailing,” Araghchi wrote on social media. He then added a message for the US, which has denied that Lebanon was included in the original ceasefire. “If the US wishes to crater its economy by letting Netanyahu kill diplomacy, that would ultimately be its choice. We think that would be dumb but are prepared for it,” Araghchi wrote. His comment mirrors language used by US Vice President …

The People Who Think Introspection Is Dumb

The People Who Think Introspection Is Dumb

Published by José Betancourt

William Shatner, the nonagenarian actor, stood beside Jeff Bezos in the desert, trying to explain his despair. It was 2021, and Shatner had returned moments earlier from a voyage on one of Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness,” Shatner would later write. “All I saw was death.” He concluded that reflecting on humanity’s relative insignificance could help us “rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.” Shatner was attempting to relay these impressions to a grinning Bezos. Then the billionaire turned from him, mid-sentence, and called for a champagne bottle, which he shook and sprayed on a group of celebrating women. The clip went viral in part, I imagine, because it seemed to confirm a widely held suspicion: America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective. From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power. From the …

BTS: Arirang review – the world’s biggest pop band return with dumb fun and downright weirdness | BTS

BTS: Arirang review – the world’s biggest pop band return with dumb fun and downright weirdness | BTS

Published by Sam Flores

The general consensus seems to be that as BTS’s commercial stock has gone stratospheric – more than 500m units sold worldwide, including over 104bn streams, making them the bestselling Asian act of all time – the actual music has become more and more irrelevant. Before taking their hiatus in 2022 to fulfil their mandatory military service in South Korea, their saccharine, English-language bops such as Dynamite and Butter – while gargantuan global hits – had smothered the K-pop-specific idiosyncrasies that peppered their earlier material. By 2020’s double whammy of Map of the Soul: 7 and Be, the band’s early years as a hip-hop-focused collective were a distant memory, and thanks to a more westernised sound and studio cast list, so was their identity as a Korean act. On the eagerly anticipated Arirang – pointedly named after a Korean folk song dating back to 1896, and presented with the tagline “born in Korea, playing for the world” – the septet do their best to right those wrongs. Crucially, it manages to capture the K-pop spirit of …