DavidPeiffer

Buying used is great and all, but so many more products and product features have become cloud and subscription reliant across all industries. They'll be able to get you profiled and locked into a dynamically priced subscription eventually.

I'm sure someone is working on an AI powered toaster though, and we'll be able to achieve the ultimate goal of a talking toaster as they had in the TV show Red Dwarf. Hopefully it'll use Claude tokens while it engages intelligently with us.

(Iowan)

We've been losing our importance in the election cycles. We did have a pair of very long tenured senators who definitely gave us an outsized representation for decades, helping to establish many of the ag friendly policies we have in place today (Senators Harkin and Grassley).

I went to school for industrial engineering and have worked in manufacturing the last decade or so.

Bus production would be an entire refactoring of an auto factory. Tons of equipment would need to move around, electrical conduit would need to be re-run to different places, much of the existing equipment would be too small. The equipment would need to be ordered from suppliers who already have the next couple months to years of business booked, new suppliers sourced and contracts signed, etc. On an American timeline, I can't imagine it being done in under a year if you threw money at every problem aggressively.

We did change some auto plants to manufacturing airplanes and airplane components for WWII, but there was a lot more human labor involved, manufacturing tolerances were more loose, and we had widespread support of the American public to do what we needed to make things happen. It'd be incredible to see the War Powers Act implemented to publicly fund bus transportation, but I cannot fathom that occurring with this administration.

I was really hoping this CVE would have been caused by the Copilot integration into Notepad.

Calculator hasn't been infiltrated by Copilot yet, but I'm sure the day is coming.

>It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me

The old trick years ago was to translate from English to different language and back (possibly repeating). I'd be curious how helpful it is against stylometry detection?

This reminds me of a neat piece of computer keyboard -> audio software I found on what had to be an "old internet" site 15-20 years ago. For lack of a better phrase, it was relative tone keyboard. I've looked but have not been able to find the software, not remembering any hint of the name, but it was fun to play with.

It worked one of two ways, I'm not positive which.

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You stared with musical note C. One note could be played at a time. G would go down a half note, H up a half note. F down a whole note, J up a whole note. Repeatedly pressing G would go down the chromatic scale. Playing a Diatonic scale up would be a combination of pressing H and J.

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Pretend the keyboard letter G is the base note, mapped to C in music. F would give a half note lower, H a half note higher, and so on across the home row of the keyboard. Then you could adjust the base note (perhaps T to go down a half note, Y to go up a half note).

In essence, you could transpose a song from the key of C to D by doing a modifier, and your fingers could complete the exact same sequence. In a jazz application, something on Spiral Synth like "FSA, GDS, HFD, K" might have been

I worked with some supply chain consultants who mentioned "internal suppliers are often worse suppliers than external".

Their point was that service levels are often not as stringently tracked, SLA's become internal money shuffling, but the company as a whole paid the price in lower output/profit. The internal partner being the default allows an amount of complacency, and if you shopped around for a comparable level of service to what's being provided, you can often find it for a better price.

>This is one of the reasons I am so skeptical of the current AI hype cycle. There are boring, well-behaved classical solutions for many of the use-cases where fancy ML is pushed today.

In 2013 my statistics professor warned that once we are in the real world, "people will come up to you trying to sell fancy machine learning models for big money, though the simple truth is that many problems can be solved better by applying straightforward statistical methods".

There has always been the ML hype, but the last couple years are a whole different level.

Yes, this works very well. The element zapper interface is a little challenging or I intuitive, but just using a default block list is so much better than using the internet without any ad blocking.

>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?

I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.

I graduated in 2011. Smart phones were rare, but dumb phones were quite common.

The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.

I'm not positive whether Target's system from ~15 years ago was a TUI, but a friend worked there in college. He mentioned the process for tax exempt purchases was a bit challenging/not the most common. There were some frequent shoppers who had heard the assistance from the manager enough times, they could walk an employee through what buttons to press to get it setup correctly.

It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.

For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.

In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.

I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.

The YoLink system works great! I was able to spot an issue causing my chest freezer to very slowly increase in temp (roughly -10 to +10 F in a month) and move the contents before losing the food. Across 5 temperature sensors, I've needed to replace batteries on 2 in 16 months.