drew870mitchell

AWS is basically a utility. I think it's inevitable that their carelessness around billing will end up with them being regulated like one.

Electric battery storage is a better option, but also your home is a very leaky battery storage for conditioned air. At my last place i got a plan that was nearly free on overnights and ran the HVAC all night, turning it off during the peak period. This was in the worst part of summer when the overnight lows were 80F or above so natural ventilation couldn't help much.

Living in a warm climate US city i noticed roaches almost disappeared once off the first floor, i saw only one in five years in a 7th-floor apartment.

Whenever we get to talking about three letter agencies, i wish people spent more time thinking about their threat model. Is the TLA surveilling me because they're broadly interested in everybody? OK then, the return on investment isn't there to pull an evil maid attack on public randos. If the TLA is interested in you because of who you specifically are, the average individual can't begin to plug all the possible holes in their lives.

As a Honda owner (but the kind the company probably doesn't really really love since i'm still driving a 2006) i actually think it's better for the long haul that their cars are hackable given physical possession.

Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.

Same, i'm doing a kitchen reno and gave up on Home Depot because of this

Balancing out the other comment - there's two real supermarkets within a fifteen minute walk of me (another American). It's fun to leave meal planning up to whatever is on sale that night.

For people in the outer suburbs where that's not an option, I don't know why a service hasn't arisen where you can plug in, "we have X adults living here, they average Y meals per week made at home, we want Z grams of protein per meal, here's our dietary restrictions, solve that system of equations out of whatever's in your warehouse and take a flat rate for delivery and percentage for your overhead." The pure delivery services all seem to be plays to hide huge prices behind tricky introductory rates. Both my local supermarkets offer delivery and presumably have the data to make that possible but they want me to still pick individual items in a vastly worse interface (any website or app) than the experience of standing in a dry goods aisle.

IIRC there's a legal distinction between mere unauthorized entry and unauthorized entry that involves circumventing any kind of lock

This is also where i'm at with ChatGPT. Its bullshit meter doesn't exist, but it has "read" everything in a way that i can't, so it's bad for truthiness, but it's great for search and correlating items in domains that are out of my scope. For those things outside my scope i ask for links to publication or discussions by real humans. If the source conflicts with the ChatGPT output (which does happen frequently) then i ditch the problem for a while. But it's great to replace hours of my own undirected haystack searching with getting credible needle candidates in a few minutes.

We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.

My guess is it's cost driven? IIRC insurance would not pay for mine when i was out of the recommendation pool but they did (were legally required to afaik) when the pool expanded to include my age group.

The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.

I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.

A friend bought land to build a house on where dowsing was culturally pervasive. He knew it was bogus but it was cheap compared to the land price and everybody around was heavily pushing it. An old guy came out and, during the performance, told him the total history of the land parcel, including stuff that would be inappropriate in formal disclosures ("those neighbors are assholes" etc). They did hit water, but the whole area is pretty verdant.

The book is wonderful, as biz-tech-optimist quick reads go, and some of its ideas have stuck with me over a decade after reading it. I'm almost entirely off MSFT products now but i was heartened to see the Recall announcement the other day. Bell was a rare visionary. RIP

The students were nonconsenting lab rats for a bizarre media experiment. They have every right to feel used or betrayed because they were.

We lost something as a society when McDonald's shifted its good prices to their app. I'm able to keep up with the app deals but it's frustrating to spend any brain space on something that was simply $1 or $2 without fuss a decade ago. If McDonald's was simply keeping up with inflation instead of cravenly trying to revenue-management squeeze their customers, these items would be $1.30-$2.60 now. Certainly they're squeezing more orders out of fewer staff so I'm not sympathetic here to arguments that low-end wages are to blame.

There's a regional chain here whose prices (and ads, interiors, and everything else) seem to be stuck in the 90s, and i like them, but i groaned when i saw that my last order came in a bag promoting their new app deals.

Weather Underground used to have a great tool for this that they called Road Trip Planner, but it broke and they took it down several years ago rather than fixing it. While trying to find the exact name i found a forum post listing a couple alternatives (Accuweather, get-there-dry, Weather Channel, EDD) that are also 404 now. But the hunt did lead me to aviationweather.gov which has hour-interval forecast coverage for US airspace e.g. https://aviationweather.gov/gfa/#temps