• 0 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • Side note -

    I literally have the reader pictured in the thumbnail. It is a Kindle keyboard from 10+ years ago at this point. It still works fine. At one point the original battery went to shit, and it cost very little to get an aftermarket replacement and install it myself.

    I keep it offline and read 100% sideloaded .epub books from various sources. The lockscreen ads don’t even try to display anymore.

    Sure it isn’t backlit or waterproof but it still functions flawlessly as a generic reader. Old tech like this is awesome. Why not get a decade of use (or more) out of something that still works?


  • I’m having an OK time with alternatives, namely GrayJay on Android and Windows desktop. Basically I had to make sure my subscriptions included the 50-75 creators I am actually interested in, then the list becomes 100% relevant because it is just videos from creators you are subbed to. On the Desktop app it still uses algorithm of some sort for sidebar content based on the current video you are watching only. So if you still want to “organically discover” things you can, but don’t have to.

    The only bad part with the Windows desktop version is it will crash the entire app mid-playback sometimes. Hopefully the bugs get fixed eventually. Also the “home” tab of Grayjay is some weird pseudo political stuff but at least you can ignore that entire tab and just look at your own subscriptions.





  • Please at least just phase it out instead of immediate elimination.

    Eliminating it at this time would mean there is a pretty large demo who want to go full EV or at least PHEV for their next vehicle but they won’t be able to as easily.

    For example if you’re driving a late 90s or early 2000s car, you practiced austerity and deferred maintenance over the last decade to survive financially and/or build savings, your current vehicle may be on its last leg.

    This means that during that time, your tax money subsidized a bunch of rich douchebag early adopters to get themselves a Tesla Plaid, and now it’s finally your turn to dip a reluctant toe into the new car market, and for your trouble you get tariff-induced price hikes and evaporating EV credits.





  • This is ironic because all the 40 year old chicks who are career users of FB since college, all cite the same justification for continuing to use it: “But all my photos and the current happenings of my friends”.

    If you showed them epirical data that only 17% of what they consume on the platform is actually even tangentially related to their friends and family, maybe they’d finally decouple themselves from FB.





  • The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

    The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

    1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

    2. manually generate CSRs,

    3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

    4. schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

    As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.



  • What many Americans would gravitate toward in the market is a “transitional” medium SUV or crossover type vehicle that is a Plugin Electric Hybrid (PHEV). This is the best option for many suburbanites because the infrastructure isn’t there for full electric for most uses cases, but most people living in single-family homes could afford to retrofit their residential electrical service at their own cost, and thereby do 90% of their driving on electricity while still retaining the capability of doing longer trips with gasoline. They need to be able to take the kid to baseball practice and fit the other kids Tuba or Cello in the back hatch etc.

    Personally I know many people who would settle for this compromise as a transitional vehicle. We just need a few more options that aren’t $50K+ new.


  • Even if the stated goal was to reshore large amounts of production of goods to the US, there are several problems with that.

    One, history shows that it is largely not possible, at least in any practical sense. US companies make t-shirts in Vietnam and Pakistan because they can sell them to consumers here for $10. Are US consumers magically going to decide they’re OK with an Old Navy (low quality) garment costing $35 instead of $10?

    Secondly, standing up manufacturing and distribution domestically isn’t an overnight thing. Funding, site selection, construction, supply chain integration etc. all take time. Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

    “Sorry little Johnny, not only can we not afford new Nikes for you anymore, but also you can forget about that Nintendo Switch 2 for Christmas because we can’t even order one. But at least we know your GED-educated uncle Jimbo in northern Michigan might be able to get a lower-middle class factory job assembling widgets again… maybe… in 2 years.”

    That isn’t a good economic pitch for most people.