A fridge keeping track of inventory is a massive PITA until all food has NFC chips in it and that raises further concerns.

I’d rather have a barcode scanner over the trash can if I’m gonna connect that much. Or even better, a full on camera. Then I can use it to scan barcodes on stuff as I throw it in the trash, plus semi-important mail and receipts.

That’s actually a cool little gimmick of some of the smart features. Downloading extra finish jingles.

Of course these are only a few bytes (or so I’d hope). And limited to what they do. Still sometimes they have seasonal selections. It’s cute and gimmicky and totally unnecessary, sure. But that’s the charm.

Push notifications are nice. Especially when the washer is uneven. But especially nice just to get a notification when it’s done.

Maintenance reminders too.

Best is when you leave the house with a blanket and a hoodie in the dryer on “remote start” mode. Turn it on when your 10-15 minutes from home and have a hot blanket and hoodie to snuggle up in as soon as you walk in the door.

Hey man, if it’s brown shoot it down. Thats the American way.

That’s actually a requirement?

Do they have to hold up the Holy Grail and yell out “Jewmanji”, too?

Bluetooth does, legitimately, suck, for gaming though.

The only official two-way audio profile (that is, mic and speaker working simultaneously) mandates a low bitrate mono audio.

Stereo audio itself has a slight latency which may be fine for music or even movies (especially with lip sync adjustments), but for gaming it can be a problem when your audio is a big part of your situational awareness.

I don’t mind not supporting Bluetooth for games, at least for multiplayer. 3.5mm to controller and a proprietary protocol for the audio is the perfect compromise. For single player or media, though, I’d agree it’s dumb.

This is a beautiful analysis. They can make perfect people, or plants, or whatever, and they know what we would identify as “perfect”…but by being perfect, they can’t be real, and our brains recognize that. So the art has to be intentionally made imperfect. But intentionally making an imperfection that seems real is actually a lot more difficult than it sounds.

This is like how I feel when I see amazing vocalists intentionally sing way off-key. Like, you can tell they are singing badly on purpose.

Wait, what do you think is happening? Do you think the car just wants to see a tow truck driver and is acting out to get its way?

The vehicle is immobile. There is more to do to prep it for towing than simple shift-to-neutral. The message explains how to do that. What the fuck about the message is keeping it from functioning?

That message is for the tow truck operator pulling out the car.

Believe it or not, sometimes the tow truck operator sees something for the first time. Sometimes, even, the savvy car owner sees things for the first time.

I had an 86 Cougar that got struck in the rear quarter panel and wouldn’t start. While I was waiting for a tow, as luck would have it, my regular tow truck driver lived right in front of where I broke down (I’d crossed paths with this guy a lot of times because my dad was restoring a car and had bought a couple donor cars to pull parts from). He showed me that there’s a safety switch in the trunk that turns off power to the fuel pump. He reset it and it started right up.

Now, guaranteed, at one point in time this guy had never seen a post-Pinto Ford that wouldn’t start after a collision. I’m sure a screen that told him (or the owner) that there’s a safety switch would’ve helped him that day.

Now, when my jeep radiator hose cracked and I didn’t want to risk driving it home overheating, the tow truck driver (AAA) saved me a tow by cutting back a bit of the hose and reattaching it with the good part in tact. That’s the type of trick that a good driver knows and can share. But you can’t expect them to know of the safeties and bypasses of dozens of different configurations that come out every year, off-hand, potentially somewhere without internet access.

Modern cars have some stupid functions in the form of nicities.

How are you going to put a car in neutral if it’s a push-button shift that’s unresponsive because the infotainment system has to boot for the transmission control module (probably for some stupid reason like being able to display errors like this).

My wife’s minivan has a push button shift. And automatic headlights. You want to go to the drive-in? Gotta hit the (pushbutton) park-brake to disable the auto headlights. And the radio will turn off every 30 minutes during the movie to save battery.

Did you pay by the SLOC?

I pretty much only look at All and somehow like a good third of my feed is Star Trek stuff. Mostly memes, and mosty TNG/DS9.

I somewhat enjoy it because I’m not really a big trek fan and it reminds me what it feels like to not be “targeted” by an ad. But ironically, it had the effect of me starting to put on TNG at night.

Id feel weirdly awkward and embarassed seeing my computers innards posted in a YouTube video, and I don’t know why. Like if my middle school yearbook photo showed up on Facebook.

That actually happened to me recently. My grade school best friend posted a pic from a field trip like 30 years ago and I’m naming off every person in it like I just saw them yesterday…then I see one person in it and I’m like “who the fuck is that hideous looking child? Is that me??? Shit that’s me”

I’m a big fan of retired systems for every day use. A 14 year old server has more function as a space heater and whitenoise generator than a desktop, though.

7th-8th gen Intel retired corporate desktops and laptops from Dell/Lenovo/HP are a dime a dozen on eBay man. Lenovos tend to run Linux very well out of the box. And Linus himself sent his daughter to college with a Dell XPS.

Many WMs allow for moving a window by holding alt, left-clicking anywhere in the window, and dragging it to move, by default.

Some use Super+Drag. They usually also have resizing the window by right-click-dragging.

That’s great and all…but Alt-Drag is missing.

I’ve honestly been using Linux on and off for nearly 25 years, and daily the past 6 or so…and somehow just found out about this, and now my life is changed.

Nah Debian 12 is weird. I recently installed on a few systems and they all do the same — usermod isn’t in roots $PATH by default, and my user account wasn’t a sudoer by default.

I’ve added myself to sudo but I keep getting “kicked out” when I start a new shell. Have to newgrp sudo to be able to sudo again.

I never use them but I can see the point. Like when you’re poking around for a log file, not sure what it’s called or where it’s stored and just going on a hunch…but you’re in an SSH session and don’t want to deal with X shenanigans.

It’s a legit PITA to ls, look for files, cat/tail them, etc. sometimes you just want to ls -alR but your corporate build runs tmux on SSH sessions with no configuration so you can’t scroll back since your shortcuts don’t work so you have to pipe everything to more and it just sucks.

This really doesn’t seem like much.

My utopia would be a home assistant with a chat bot who is, quite literally, an “imaginary friend”. Somebody to just…talk to. No judgement, no drama. Remembered what you talked about before. Knows your emails and IMs and texts, and essentially every digital memory. Maybe not quite an actual therapist, but more like a trusted confidant.

Of course this would have to be self-hosted or Google would have to absolutely guarantee that all of its data is sandboxed and only used to train your friend.

Well, no, I think you’re missing the point.

There’s really no reason for a lawyer to be carrying a huge gaming laptop as their daily driver. There’s no advantage to it over an ultrabook, MBP, or any high-end productivity laptop (that’s probably in a lower price bracket to boot).

Now, if they do game on it, and also use it for work, that speaks to very poor IT security practice. Sensitive/valuable client data, especially for such a high-profile case, shouldn’t be on the same system that is built for gaming. The main reason being that games aren’t designed to be run on secure systems. So many of them arbitrarily require admin rights to perform properly, which means that this lawyer would have to have local admin privileges to be able to use them.

Giving a non-technical user admin privileges to a system that contains sensitive data for a high-profile client is absolutely a recipe for disaster. That system needs to be locked the fuck down. Not running Baldurs Gate during recess.

Now, perhaps, there’s a logical reason. Maybe her practice has a really good IT team and they’ve been able to effectively set up a good, secure BYOD environment. I’d still question this lawyers judgement in their professional image to select an RGB gaming laptop for their work. To me, this is no different than a shady personal injury lawyer that features their trashy Hummer H2 in every commercial, which exclusively airs during reruns of Jerry Springer.