Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It’s been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there’s nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

Even for companies that don’t rely on the consumer market there’s a trickle down. They’re producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That’s not a good thing since we’re talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who’s goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.

I mean that’s all I can really do.

Unfortunately when my bank or other critical institution rejects Firefox for failure to use attestation, I can’t even do that. I’ll be forced to use Chrome. Firefox would have to adopt WEI to remain compatible. In that case I can use Firefox, but it would be the same as using Chrome.

I’d say the monopoly Google has with Chrome is way more threatening than in the early 2000’s with MS and IE. That threat resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit, but not a peep from any government about the destruction Google is doing.

We’re doomed. We were always doomed.

I’m afraid that’s always been the case because the mass majority just don’t a give a shit. They’ll happily conform to whatever the monopolies tell them to.

There might have be a time when Google tried not to be evil, but they’ve been Satin himself for a good number of years now. It just took them a while to realize the irony of their mission statement. It’s funny I used to get mad at Microsoft for being evil, but they’ve got nothing on Google.

This is the problem for me. If my bank or other critical institution decides to refuse me access with Firefox, I can’t use Firefox. This is the crux of the issue. Google is creating a browser monopoly with it’s market dominance and attestation scheme.

MS tried to exert control in the early 2000’s with its IE dominance and was thwarted by an anti-trust lawsuit. Google will probably skate on this one. Nowadays the consumer is only a resource to be plundered. The customer is shit.

Great software, used it a lot. Also Handbrake.

What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

Biggest tool in the history of tools.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.

Relying on “the people” to uphold consumer rights usually doesn’t make much ground. We’ve already lost so much we’ll never get back. People are just too busy dealing with their own lives to be concerned about it. This is how corporations get away with what they do. The public lets it happen. As sure as the sun rises every day, corporations like Google and Apple will continually extend their reach.

It think it was unusual the US government perused an anti-trust suit over the MS browser monopoly early 2000s. The climate is much more forgiving now. I’d be surprised if we ever see a lawsuit like that again, as deserving as it may be.

I think we need to read between the lines here.

I honestly think he’s intentionally driving Twitter into the ground. Thing is he can’t just fire everyone and shut down the servers or he won’t get the tax write-off. He’s burying Twitter in a way that maintains tax status. So in a way that’s smart, but also stupid he spent what he did only out of spite.

What he’s doing to Twitter is like a jumbo jet pilot that commits suicide by crashing the plane (that’s actually happened). Why do you need to take all those innocent people with you. Just go jump off a building, same end without killing a bunch of innocents.

Really his destruction of the platform is about control, he has some kind of personal beef with Twitter so he used his power and money to kill the whole thing. He’s taking his bat and ball and going home.

I like them when they are actually amusing. Problem is that’s maybe one in ten so it’s not worth browsing them. If someone posts one and it’s actually good, no problem.

Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.