thaeli

Same here, except we just defaulted everyone to Auto and expect the percentage of tokens spent via the auto router to be high.

At an operational level for the railroads, we have PSR, which is even worse.

Also, my phone follows me between vehicles and provides the exact same interface in all of them. Heck, I can switch vehicles and my podcast or music starts back up right where I left it. That alone is a major win for the phone-based approach - if I drive my spouse's vehicle for instance, or my old truck because I need to haul something, doesn't matter, they all have the same navigation and audio.

I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.

FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.

Emissions related components work very similarly, replace the software and it’s presumed to be a defeat device unless proved otherwise.

For emissions related components, EPA rules do kick in though. While the current administration appears to have paused enforcement, their position for many years has been that running anything except factory approved firmware on an ECU or other emissions related computer constitutes a “defeat device” and is illegal for an on road vehicle subject to emissions controls. (Granted, in practice 99% of the reason anyone installs new firmware on their ECU, or switches to an aftermarket ECU, is for a “tune” that does affect emissions. I’m sure there is some edge case exception, but it’s very rare in on road engines.)

The alternative, and there are a very few tunes that have done this, is to prove to regulators that the tune does not negatively affect emissions in any way. In practice this is done by getting a CARB exception since they’re the ones actually checking for tunes.

Well, many areas have banned app-only payment requirements (along with card-only) so it’s possible we’ll get some mandated alternatives.

Ironically, this check would be a pretty good use for a LLM.

Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

Yeah, interested to compare this with optimized and properly cached GitHub Hosted Runner builds.

The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

There was a common scam back then of sending cheap goods to someone, then billing them a high price, when they didn't order anything to begin with.

Compare this to EMS, where unless you're lucky enough to be fire or hospital based, worker protections are almost nonexistent.

Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.

The concentrated force for candidates to counteract this would be an industy-wide union. Which isn't happening.. but if you look at unionized industries this is one of the major benefits for candidates, or at least for candidates who make it into the union..

It's not ideal, per app would be preferable, but at least global can be a toggle in the global quick settings UI.

As a user, I don't care about your ML model. I care about not sending you personal info. Coarser info isn't good enough - you can convince me you actually deserve my real info, or you can get no info (preferable), or you can get fake info (alternative if you degrade or break my user experience because I wouldn't give you that info).

I understand there are some legit use cases for validated info. Unfortunately, targeted advertising and other types of profiling are also common use cases for the same info. It's a lot like MAC randomization on public wifi - it sucks, it breaks legit use cases, but it was needed because too many companies were using it to track people.

We do that, but we're joking.

Isn't that pretty much what immobilizer bypass modules have done for years?

It was correct when the book was written, but isn't anymore.

If you read Brave New World and think of the lower "classes" as instead being automation and AI (really, most of the jobs done by Epsilons and Deltas in the book were automated decades ago, and the Gamma / Beta jobs are rapidly moving towards AI replacement as well) it's not a bad system, nor is it a dystopia.

The local maximum of "fix it but don't improve it" is a problem, and the requirement for major reconstruction to be done to current codes is foundational to almost all building codes. Note that small repairs and routine maintenance don't activate this requirement - it's activated when major work is being done, and there is a percentage of total project cost cap to the requirements.

If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.

Just emphasizes how much the "existential threat" stuff is a scare tactic to advocate for regulatory capture.

That's the nature of steam. 15 year boiler recertification, which is effectively a refurb. Hours in service don't matter for those.

I'm in the US and have had a heat pump for 15 years. It was a fairly small cost add from a straight cool. I get this depends on region, especially for the older units, but I never understood why they were such a hard sell even in mild heating climates.

Ironically, I bought this system because at the time natural gas looked like it would be becoming more expensive more quickly than electricity in my area. Since the cost delta was small, and I don't think it made my total monthly utility bills any higher, no big deal, but I might not have even bothered with a heat pump if I'd known about the fracking boom at the time. (I'm also fortunate enough to live in a state with powerful utility regulators, so electricity prices never spiralled like they did in "deregulation" areas.)

I've often wondered why this is. My best guess is that the EPA cert (not actually hard to get) has been turned into some sort of weird quasi-guild-membership thing.

I can walk right in to a "to the trade" electrical or plumbing supply and they'll deal with me, no problem, no questions asked. With HVAC.. they won't even talk to you without an EPA number, even if you're not buying refrigerant.

DTC for whole house systems, if they can make the regulatory side work and provide a good customer experience, is the most important part of this.

As a backup option, the incumbents already make this. Carrier Infinity is a good example. Proprietary protocol (RS-485 based, so it can run over existing thermostat wiring) between the smart thermostat and the furnace, and between the furnace and outside condenser unit. Even with all these smarts, there is still a fallback mode provided with a regular old dry-contacts control wires that can hook to any standard thermostat. Yeah, the system won't operate at peak performance, but it will operate, and that's very important when every HVAC tech carries a standard thermostat with them, or even uses basic jumper wires, in an emergency until they can return with correct parts.

In the last few years, the US has finally started allowing small appliances containing limited quantities of flammable refrigerants.

Except that gaming these metrics is in the interests of so many people up and down the chain. The "park everyone strategy" for getting drive thru times down should be a blatantly obvious cheat in the data, but no one cares to go looking for it because it makes the stats look good.