The committee tried to appease Trump by offering it to a Venezuelan right winger. They learned the lesson so many have learned; that these people cannot be met halfway, if you give them an inch they WILL take a foot.

I am worried, because there are increasing cases where open source docs are going offline because they can’t take the bandwidth costs of the big LLM bots recrawling hundreds of times per day. Wikipedia is also getting hammered. There is so much waste and diminishing returns

How the hell else are PMs going to get positive reviews this quarter? Waiting for Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Windows to all be called Copilot

I think some people won’t be able to switch just because they’ve passed the point where learning new tech is possible. But I do think for those with the will to change over, it will increasingly actually be happening rather than being muttered a threat to Microsoft, especially because the main pain points of the past (software exclusivity) is starting to break down. Some games are now running better on Linux. MS Office is increasingly being superseded by alternatives like Gsuite, Libreoffice, or just learning to code in easy languages like Python/R. And unlike in the past when Microsoft overplayed its hand and changed course to regain users with Windows 7, 10, etc, this time it seems like they aren’t going to change. They are in too deep.

You can only abuse your customers so much before they move on. I have long enjoyed using Windows, but when they announced my perfectly usable laptop wouldn’t be able to get 11 thanks to no TPM, and I had to go through a complicated set of hoops to manually install it, that was my breaking point. I will keep Windows for some limited stuff on dual boot on one machine, but elsewhere I’m going Linux only

The article doesn’t single out Tesla. They call it Tesla-style since they pioneered this kind of design and most Americans associate Tesla with it, but as the article mentions, in China, various brands have adopted that motorized retractable handle setup, or the push to expose handle of the Model 3, or the complete lack of handle like the Cybertruck. I was in a couple EVs when I visited China and each time was completely mystified on how to get in the car, lol. Because these retracting handles are not standardized, it produces hazards, such as when people are rushing to pull a driver from a sinking or burning car, when every second counts.

I still feel the handles where you have to press to make it appear are unintuitive and an example of form over safety. I have used them in Ubers and I always have a quarter second remembering how to open them. I don’t want a first responder to have to deal with that delay.

These recessed handles usually have some sort of fallback. For me, I don’t want rescuers to have a single second of uncertainty of how to open my car. They should be able to quickly yank the door open, not fumble for some recessed/hidden button. Every second counts.

I have long observed that moving parts, particularly involving motors, are destined to give me grief as a car ages. The difference is that little motorized interior luxuries aren’t going to prevent people from pulling my unconscious body out of a burning wreck, while these door handles have for dozens of people

In Python it can work but sometimes with crazy inefficient methods incorporated. In obscure geospatial stuff it often loses the plot. Still occasionally recommends functions that don’t exist

Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won’t be able to buy electronics because they’ve taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It’s almost like we’re barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes…

I wonder if normally, such a light outage would trigger a remote operator to intervene and drive the car through the intersection, but the sheer number of disrupted lights, combined with the spotty connection due to parts of cell network going down caused the remote operator system to not be able to keep up across the city.

I would recommend playing a mediocre game you don’t intend to replay. If you’re anything like me, I associate movies and games with the feeling of sickness I felt watching it. So Shadow of the Colossus, for some reason, is strongly associated with the feeling I had being home sick playing it as a teenager. I still replay it but have that kind of aftertaste of the memory lol. I similarly associate the movie Dark City with having chicken pox!

My Chevy Volt 2013, which still runs great, no longer has OnStar because they never planned for a way to upgrade the connectivity when 3G networks were retired. So I am concretely less safe when driving and lose other useful features like remote start, milage tracking, etc.

One day, literally every Gsuite product immediately and incessantly started nagging us to use Gemini. Fortunately our tech staff quickly switched it all off. We have slowly been re-enabling features that are useful like meeting transcriptions. I just wish these corporations could have more restraint. In previous waves of improvement in tech, usage dictated investment in new products. These days, they seem to feel the need to coerce us to use their products as they insist we should. I think users are getting fatigued by this dynamic. I used to be the first to install every update and try new apps and products. These days, I’m excited when I can stop using a product, and I don’t think it’s just due to age. It means I can stop having to be vigilant about some company I know is searching for ways to exploit me.

Popular doesn’t mean just.

Oh that’s good news! I really only use it for myself, so that sounds like I can stream my music without worrying

Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I’m grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.

The first one, yes. That’s what I do. But IIRC hosting media via cloudflare tunnels goes against the TOC and they reserve the right to ban users over it

Idk if it’s rare, but my wife thinks it’s weird that I can smell on the breeze if we are near a winery. It’s kind of an astringent smell