This was him justifying what was a cost saving decision that became a face saving battle for him personally as everyone told him he was wrong.

If there is one thing Elon cannot stand above all others is admitting he was wrong, especially when he has spent years promising this and now he would have to retrofit at his cost Lidar to all those cars he sold as self driving ready with an expensive optional extra.

He might be able to avoid any sort of punishment from the US government as long as he stays in Trumps good books, but he will not be able to do so in Europe or similar.

And I think that at some point enough people will have had enough that they take on production of that themselves via open source projects.

Sure, some will always be driven by cost, thats never going to change, but self sustainability will become more desirable as main stream brands, not just temu tat, drops in quality.

All of which is true but it doesn’t matter if the product is crippled by the designer. Whole point of my model is that you are the designer so its only shit if you are.

Open source devices will become more mainstream as a push back by consumers against enshitifcation, privacy invasion, disposable products, ever rising subscription costs.

Not just things like phones and laptops but things like mice, keyboards, headphones, even tvs and kitchen appliances. I know some of these are possible now, I use a ploppy trackball and qmk based keyboards but a wider spread of these across the home and more than just hobbyists like myself.

Large chunks will be 3D printed, moving the large component parts of manufacting to the local area. Plus things will be endlessly fixable and upgradable.

I agree it has some value, but the problem is that value doesn’t seem to align with the cost of Western AI.

If you look at what Altman said about how much OpenAI was losing despite charging an arm and a leg for its premium subscription, no one will pay for that for low value items such as transcription or scaffolding code.

Unless it can actually replace high value jobs long term rather than short term pretend replace as with Klarana then its doomed with the current models.

Most of these are just slow by modern standards, MTV changed film editing for good

Into the Wild is pretty minimal once he moved to Alaska

The Master is very minimal of plot but the opposite of relaxing

Yeah Japan is awful for that and the tourists have only gotten worse with their behaviour over time. I did the main spots of Kyoto once, biggest mistake of my trip.

If you avoid the popular spots entirely then its usually pretty easy to find places that are more authentic. But its been a few years since I last went, its a very tough holiday for me as I am coeliac and the Japanese just do not take gluten allergies seriously (they had something like three people in five years diagnosed in total) so I have to self cater the entire trip.

Toss up between saying BVI a year after Irma, it was so quiet and empty. We spent the day on the beach at Bitter End (its absolutely amazing now its reopened) and if you know that beach its never empty except we had it to ourselves. Went to a bar in Little Bay and just spent the day hanging out with the owner, only ones there, told to help ourselves to beer from the fridge and had dinner with them. BVI is never that quiet during main season, its usually busy to packed.

Other one is Antigua during COVID, quiet beyond belief. Restaurants only allowed to do take out, so they would bring you the meals to your boat. Had a BBQ of the best steak and lobster on the main beach at Barbuda cooked just for us. Last night they opened up restaurants for dine in, only customers at this fancy Mexican fusion restaurant on the beach. They were so happy to have people back, ended up sharing the head chefs bottle of (very expensive) wine as we chatted at the end of the meal.

Most of my favorite holiday stories are when we have gone somewhere and its empty of tourists and just pretty quiet overall.

Well I did say I was being pedantic, which is absolutely the best way to watch fast and furious with friends

You almost had me charging? You never had me charging - you never had your car charging, it had tripped the socket

Pedantic but: 7kw isn’t three phase in the UK, just 30A. Three phase electric can give you up to 22kw in the UK for charging, obviously not every EV can charge that fast, most only go up to 11kw AC. I would kill for that extra charging speed but I can’t justify the extra cost and effort to get it fitted by the electric company

We have a granny charger that came with one of our EVs that we use as a backup and with our caravan to charge on sites that allow it. As I am UK it tops out at 2.4kw (10A @ 240v) and its annoyingly slow even charging for more than 12 hours at a time.

Our main home charger is 7kw, and as we get cheap electric every night for 7p a KwH for 5 hours, we can charge about 40kwh in that time period. Means even our largest battery is fully charged in two nights from completely empty. If we tried that with the granny charger it would cost significantly more, as it would be up to 40p a KwH outside of the main hours and take 40 hours to charge the same amount.

Now if you doing only a few miles a day, less than 40 miles (4 miles per KwH, charge for the 5 cheap hours using the cars charging timer, charge 10 KwH), it might work out ok for you, but then charging every day cannot be good for the battery? I know it would get annoying quite quickly. It would also get pretty painful if you have more than one EV, we have three between us and the kids, so its not remotely practical.

Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.

I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high

My mother did the slitty eyed gesture and said that there were too many chi*ks here, in the car part for a large asian grocery store in the local chinatown that she had chosen to go to, to buy asian food. Yes other people heard and saw what she did, including asians. This was more than twenty years ago so not linked to the current rise of more overt racism.

Yeah I am the same, I would rather pay more for a better device, and preferably not one from Amazon if I can help it. Its only a matter of time before they start cracking down even more on side loading as they are in the process of removing backing up your own books already. They were only ever cheap in the first place because Amazon wanted to dominate the market and close up shop around their own bookstore so they heavily subsidised the price and turned a blind eye to piracy.

I upgraded my ancient paperwhite for a PocketBook InkPad Color 3 because I wanted colour and a larger screen to read comics but also something that was more responsive. Sure its never going to beat a good tablet for colour depth or responsiveness, its still eink after all, but its so much nicer to use than my old paperwhite.

For something that I use for at least an hour a day, every day (I had a near 600 week streak on my kindle), I do not see the money spent as a bad investment when they lasting a near decade. I could have just replaced my battery in my paperwhite and carried on using it, but the upsides of a nicer ereader that is away from Amazon was a big pull for me.

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Red Dwarf, but with both Naylor and Grant continuing on from before the split. It felt to me that the quality dropped once they fell out and Grant left.

GoT, shame it got cancelled after GRR ran out of material, what would a sixth and seventh series looked like? Not some badly written, overly nasty, fan fiction, but actual quality as we had in the earlier seasons and books?

True Detective season one, by that I mean actually carrying on that plot line with the abuse cult rather than the “reboots” with new casts and settings in the future seasons. Those are great, I still want those, but I also want more of what we had in season one.

Hannibal, its time to revisit this overly stylized wardrobe of a cooking show

I can snap the heads of cheaply made screws or ones made from softer material like “brass” with a screwdriver let alone an impact driver.

If I am doing something with a lot of screws, say decking, then I will spend more on my screws simply because I want better quality if I am going to be fitting a few hundred in a day. I also want to know that if I come back to it in a few years that the screw will unscrew quickly when I come to it. Sure it can be a significant cost increase but the time and frustration saved makes it back.

Quality screwdrivers like Vessel Megadora or Wera or Swisstools or similar tend to cam out less than the pack of ten you got from the dollar store. Same with the hex bits for your impact or drill driver.

Last test I heard had Roberson above Torx for reducing cam out, but if you camming Torx that easily I would just switch to an actual hex headed screw if it needs that much torque to tighten.

Watching UK 70s TV now is wild. Prime time sitcoms using camp gay sterotypes as a punchline in themselves, black characters being called Chalkie or similar. These had regular repeats throughout the 80s on the main TV channels. Hell, known ephebophilie and bigot, Jim Davidson, had a prime time game show till 2002 and would regularly do his Chalkie character on it.

Late 90s/early 2000s UK TV was still pretty homophobic and racist, see Little Britain for yellow and brown face combined with racial stereotypes, big name comedians of the time like Frank Skinner making homophobic jokes.

Early 2000s in the UK was aggressively misogynistic, mostly in the printed press, absolutely rabid.

Obviously these issues haven’t been solved, but at least its unacceptable for mainstream TV in the UK to pedal this shit.

Interestingly the AI stories are voiced by real people, ractors. That would now be one of the first things cut, see James Earl Jones