cfeduke

I bought a Model 3 in 2018, a Y in 2020, and another 3 in 2024. The end user design has only continued to get worse on various aspects of the car. Regarding non-safety issues, living in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, the door handles freeze shut during the winter and become impossible to open from outside of the car.

But why continue to buy these poor end-user design experiences, you think? My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires. So I deal with poor design decisions.

But the cup holders in the latest Model 3 may be my breaking point.

Generally speaking, for most people, bills go up as they age (kids, health, yada-yada).

To a point yes. There was a time when you could realistically pay off your mortgage before you were fifty, and for some people maybe this is still the case. College expenses are another consideration, just depends on how much you as a parent are going to shoulder those costs compared to grants/military/self earn.

For myself, costs have lowered and I'm able to donate more money to charity. So if you can swing a bigger paycheck and you're motivated help others I think it's worth doing so.

From AWS pricing:

Per 10,000 API calls

$0.05 per 10,000 API calls.

So imagine you have some number of cron jobs which require a bunch of secrets and these things fire every minute or 30 seconds or what have you. You could save as much as $0.25 a month!

Okay I guess I've just had a different experience entirely. Maybe I'm jaded by hallucinations.

The code ChatGPT generates is often bad in ways that are hard to detect. If you are not an experienced software engineer, the defects could be impossible to detect, until you/ChatGPT has gone and exposed all your customers to bad actors, or crash at runtime, or do something terribly incorrect.

As far as other thought work goes, I am not consulting ChatGPT over, say, a dietician or a doctor. The hallucination risk is too high. Producing an answer is the not the same as producing a correct answer.

Tesla uses independent body shops they certify, I know this because I've used one as a result of a deer accident. The service centers do not handle beyond some level of damage.

My personal experience so far with Tesla specifically - and this is not to say they are doing the right thing in regards to parts or anything - was when my wife hit a deer and a bunch of the driver's front side of the car had to be replaced was that it took six days. Of course the bill insurance covered was around $12K which is just insane (headlight, hood, fender, panel, side mirror, camera). The timeline to repair was probably because the Tesla density for my area (around Richmond, VA) is not high like it is in places such as California.

Other than that, which was $0 out of pocket, I've had my Model 3 for six years in July and almost $0 in parts or service. I replaced the 12v battery which I had to buy for $75 and tires twice. This way more cost effective than my Lexus (around $4,000 in repair service over 5 years, not counting tires) and Mercedes (around $3,000 in repair service over 2 years, which - not counting tires and I had these AMG rims that were wider on the rear tires so tire replacement had to happen early). So its hard for me to complain about Tesla, but I can see where for other people who have had issues where there are a lot of Teslas on the road could be an issue.

If its tech and they want a 30-45 minute interview with live coding on something like hackerrank - especially if whatever brain teaser they've chosen has absolutely nothing to do with the field they operate in - I'd put the chances around 80%.

I don't see how AI, quantum and block chain are at all equivalent.

It's not that there is any claim to equivalency, its that these are the technology trends that are most useful - the trend itself, nevermind any sort of usable technology - for those who grift.

For all these "it is better" points, it still doesn't even begin to outweigh the "you get to spend time with your children" point. This is the most important part of child rearing and once they've moved on you'll be thankful you spent your time with them instead of... whatever all that income/societal optimization stuff is. You get to raise your children once.

browser search bar and get perfectly good answers

That depends. If your search engine is Google, you'd get things like "The best 17 AAA games by budget to buy in 2024" or "22 triple A games for a tight budget in 2024."

Alexa is about as useful as a toaster

The toaster at least makes toast. Alexa can only prompt me about adding toast to my shopping list.

In the early 90s I ended up taking a Pascal course in high school for a math credit. Afterwards I joined the military in a computer software MOS and was trained in Ada. Of course... my actual day to day was often working with Visual Basic or VBA. The government employees assigned to my unit regularly worked in COBOL or Fortran... we had a single Ada system that required rebooting into 16-bit DOS to compile, but ran under Windows 95. Imagine the fun that was to debug from a single computer!

I am happy to contribute to your off topic meandering.

We pour concrete to make Atlas stones for specific weights knowing that these artificial stones will eventually be ruined by accident by the people who have a new interest in stone lifting. We also collect natural stones which may get ruined by mistake so people in the club can get used to lifting irregular shapes.

But when it comes to the historical stones, all the prep work above is so these stones are not ruined. It's a privilege to try to lift a stone that Irish or Scottish men would lift to become huscarls for their lord and breaking one out of carelessness is a loss for everyone in this hobby.

3 billion devices run Java!

;)

I had a Sears Admiral refrigerator that was built in the 90s which recently (three months ago) had the compressor go out. I've had the refrigerator since I purchased the house in 2001 and I have performed zero maintenance on it, so it was no surprise that the... uh... solid dust build up finally wore out the compressor fan. Though my wife and I did purchase a new refrigerator I intend to replace the compressor in the Admiral because >25 years is a good run and I expect the resurrected refrigerator [when I get around to resurrecting it] will outlast the new one.

I've never hooked up water lines for ice makers for my refrigerators, including refrigerators at my other properties. Call it a hunch.

It's not problematic, its just plain wrong.

Also, the phone number is right there on the flier so its not like the fliers owner can't be contacted after seeing a flier to see if the animal has been found and if the flier can be removed. Doing the right thing sometimes takes a bit of work.

Corruption is everywhere, not just in big cities. The more rural the county in US, the greater the chance that "stuff like this only happened in 3rd world countries" is necessary to get anything done [permits especially]. Anecdotal personal experience - living ~30 years in rural Virginia versus ~15 years in a city in upstate NY.

Haha yes, similar for me. It was word scramblers as games in AOL chat rooms that lead me to my love of programming... and of course Visual Basic 3.0. What an amazing product back then.

Why would anyone think a two-hour buffer for something so critical would be appropriate?

This sort of negligence is intentional. My guess would be it started as a requirement for analog recording and was carried over without change and purposefully left at two hours when equipment went digital. The fact that EU has a 25 hour length requirement and the FAA refuses to update their rules to extend to some reasonable length tells us everything we need to know about this situation.

I have fixed numerous home appliances over the past two decades almost entirely thanks to YouTube and eBay, and a willingness to apply myself. If the YouTube video has no intro and its subject is about your problem, you can be almost certain you're about to find out how to fix the problem.

From experience in the 3D printing space, it's too early to say Bambu out-Prusa'd Prusa, because there hasn't been enough time to know whether the Bambu printers will outlast a Prusa printer. The business model the author is discussing is not unlike the business model for Glowforge, and based on my wife's experience in that industry I'm not sure that business model is working out so well.

I've been printing continuously on a pair of Mk3s for 4+ years, minimal maintenance. (That is, wear and tear on print plates and nozzles, and one thermistor replacement.) Maintenance is important once you venture beyond hobbyist needs.

I did buy a Bambu P1S instead of a Mk4 this year when it was time to add a another printer for my wife's side gig. It's a great machine, except when it has problems. The software is bad at diagnosing the problem, and the UI gets really confused on status messages, and the software wants nothing more than to hold your hand down the wrong path to fix the problem. There's a veneer to everything Bambu that makes it look good as long as you don't look too closely. I'll see where this printer is at after 4+ years of continuous printing, but based on my present experience I'd be surprised if my P1S is still running in 2 years. (And no, its not lost on me that as a Prusa purchaser I bought from their competitor this time around.)

I expect Bambu to push Prusa to compete on features - I am fine as a non-hobbyist paying a higher premium for reliability.

it will be just in maintenance alone

Can confirm; >5 years on a Model 3 and other than tires $0 in maintenance so far. >3 years on a Model Y and other than tires, $0 in maintenance so far. Absolute huge cost and time savings compared to my ICE vehicles, even when I perform my own maintenance on them.

I have that problem but it probably some something to do with some combination of browser addons I have installed. When I launch the link in a Private Firefox window they seem to work.

I've owned a Model 3 for over five years (~100K miles) and a Model Y for over 3 years (~45K miles). $0 maintenance excluding replacing the tires. This has been a game changer for me, since I perform my own maintenance on all of the vehicles I own - it's made me lazy about cars and I love it. :) Of course I cannot replace the batteries and I will have to have that done sooner or later, and who knows how much that will cost.

My friend has worked as a mechanic for some years and completed his diesel mechanic certification a year ago because the need for gasoline engine mechanics is likely going to decrease substantially before he can retire.

From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:

It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]

As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.

Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.

Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.

1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/

2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb

X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html

There's some selection bias in here too. People who have had excellent customer service experiences on Twitter aren't taking into account the number of people who did call or email customer service versus the substantially fewer people who used Twitter for the purposes of contacting companies for customer service.

Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.

and mostly I just try and avoid the medical system.

Me too, but the medical system knows no matter how healthy we were when we were young, in the end we'll need the medical system in one way or another.

Bathtub caddies that hold books are $10-30, with the upper end having a few other niceties.

I grew up in a small city in upstate NY where a lot of eastern Europeans immigrated in the early 20th century up until the second war. Going to my friends' houses in the 80s - it was normal for the extended family to all live under one roof - there were a few families with grandparents who did not speak any English at all, and only spoke Czech, Hungarian, or Polish. Of course, the people these non-English speakers did business with on a daily basis for most of their lives in the US were speakers of those languages, and they could also rely on their children - my friends' parents - to translate.

For several undergraduate courses, especially the preconditional courses for more advanced courses, there exist CLEP exams. I took a handful of these and got full credit while in the military - at the time they were $99 for each test, and my education command paid for them as a benefit.

There could be a better system here, of course: for example if MIT offered a pay-per-exam for everything they released as open coursework and stood behind the accreditation. It doesn't have to be 1:1 for credits either, as an exam may not be representative of lab work when lab work is present.