Except My Cousin Vinnie

It’s a solution in search of a problem. And boy are they searching.

Yesterday I accidentally commented in .ml and mentioned that voting third party in our current voting system is playing with fire to get a worse candidate in office. I was told I must therefore start a grassroots movement for ranked choice voting, because apparently I can’t have an opinion without a movement.

Normally I let a few downvotes get under my skin more than I care to admit, but in this setting it was kind of a badge of honor. Honestly it was kind of “fun” to see what people were saying.

My friends (one of whom was vegetarian until fairly recently) went to Iceland recently and said that puffin was absolutely delicious

In theory a decent QA team will catch things being done by shitty developers. If your dev and QA is shit, management is shit for letting it happen.

For what it’s worth, I picked up Radio Australia on shortwave from Denver on a recently-restored tube radio (albeit a higher-end one). It was surprisingly clear too!

Ask anyone who works support how fucking stupid the general population

They’re going to have a huge selection bias though - much of the “general population” will start elsewhere with things like documentation or brains.

I forgot about that! And most songs sound like ass when you hear it over a phone, especially before whatever they did in the last decade to make voice calls more clear

I don’t think that’s going to be an unpopular opinion around here. Maybe a little tricky in the logistics of distinguishing between an artist and influencer and finding an artist who you like and can pay for a phone background, but other than that you’re not going to find many Lemmings saying “no, pay an influencer!”

Remember when people paid for ringtones? Doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid, especially as a subscription, but people do stupid things and other people take advantage.

Not really. There were plenty of random pages, but you really had to seek it out to see it. Now an overwhelming majority of non-ad posts are stuff like this (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pay to have this stuff seen, basically making it an ad)

I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. There are plenty of military contractors out there, and a driver is the kind of position you would expect to be likely contracted out. That in no way makes one a soldier.

The Bolt is ok. It has a screen and Android Auto and stuff, but I only use it for Android Auto navigation and energy stats when I’m curious. For pretty much everything else, there are good ol’ fashioned buttons.

Oh, it does have OnStar and some stuff associated with that, but GM discontinued the worst of it after a class action lawsuit.

Part of the problem comes when companies go out of their way to provide a service on their end that could be covered reasonably easily on the consumer’s side of things. Why put a few cents worth of storage in a device and make it locally accessible when you can make it cloud-connected and hosted to turn it into a revenue stream?

Another example, GM has had OnStar for ages. It does the same things your cell phone does, so it’s hard to justify the subscription. Plus Android Auto/Car Play works really well and relies on something you update more often. So naturally, GM revamped their infotainment to do the things you’d have your phone do and got rid of Android Auto/Car Play.

I’m not a fan of the company, but at least this one has a handful of different platforms underneath it - Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Having Facebook the product and Facebook the overarching company kind of ads a little complication.

I don’t quite feel the same way about Alphabet/Google, but at least that’s more subtle.

X can fuck the duck right off.

That’s for me, the buyer to decide. A pickup truck is also the incorrect product for me, because I don’t want one. Someone else may not want a black car. We don’t want stickers or badging on our cars. Others may want a black pickup truck and doesn’t really care if it has a sticker on the back for whatever reason. All that is totally fine - it’s our choice to buy something or not.

But it’s certainly not vandalism for the dealer to do that to their own car any more than it is for me to put an “I love puppies” bumper sticker on my car and then sell it a week later.

If they do it after you pay for the car, sure. Before you give them any money, it’s their car to do as they see fit.

It’s a battery. You put it in the car, and it powers it. How much support does the manufacturer need to provide that can’t be baked into the initial cost?

“initial” could very well be the key word here. Same goes with any new technology, including the relatively outdated Chevy Bolt design (which was pretty expensive at launch and is now a dime a dozen)

Honestly, my biggest issue with LLMs is how they source their training data to create “their own” stuff. A meme calling it a plagiarism machine struck a chord with me. Almost anyone else I’d sympathize with, but fuck Spez.