my personal vehicle is an ancient shitbox with mechanical everything and no A/C that technically qualifies as an “antique” in most states due to its age. I take good care of it, drive infrequently, and maintain its maintenance schedule.
I had to suddenly drive a work vehicle recently and it’s like this new star trek looking bullshit with more screens than a buffalo wild wings. I was to drive it from somewhere I had never been, but I just assumed among all the screens, it would have a navigation + gps thing. NOPE. it expects you to have ApplePlay, and sync it all to your phone. I don’t use that shit. why am I having to fuck with my work phone and config shit on it to do the one decent thing that tech has innovated for cars in 20 years? that is literally the only screen that should be in a car: an interactive nav map.
also it played chimes when the Dash’s view of my face was obstructed, because I drive with one hand at 12 o clock when I’m cruising on the interstate for a while.
also, everything is a goddamn rubix cube for park, drive, reverse now. heaven forbid some shit breaks, you are definitely not figuring out a damn thing by yourself.
new cars are extremely stupid.
A colleague of mine had lots of trouble with their brand new car chiming and alerting them that they had left a child on the seat every time they left a bag there.
Why did the car need to see your face?
Some cars have lane assist, so they have an IR camera looking to see if you’re paying attention to the road
deeply unnecessary
Tesla has this because their “self drive” isn’t actually good and if you get in an accident this enforces that you’re actually paying attention to the road so they can blame you and not their shitty tech
Tech really is going down hill exponentially fast. It took all of 1 android update for my phone to decide that it should “serve” me random news articles, and download a jpg from the article. And put said jpg at the top of my download folder. And I’d need to root the fucker/usb debug to uninstall the shit. I’m getting to the borderline support the death penalty to the devs that decided you shouldn’t own everything on your device. Creeps just want to install spyware and enforce “intellectual property”. If you obfuscate runtime or uninstallation more then 2 clicks (or worse, not remove everything besides things like saves, settings, and you better let me know if that was left), you deserve to be dunked like the poor witches were.
Maps wouldn’t let me use voice without enabling their shit bot (I don’t usually use it but someone suggested it for notekeeping and I considered it). I just want a device that has a brick of battery, can play yt videos, has usb c, and can make calls. Oh and won’t break if it gets dropped more then 3 inches. Maybe a 3.5 jack (lol remember those?), a decent camera, and maybe a thermal camera. My requirements are nothing, but if you actually want that, you’re looking at 5 year old phones or 1 of like 3 new ones that cost 3x for nearly the same specs. I’d be fine with the old ones, if I knew its going to get newer updates (I don’t care about “”“features”“” but really don’t want to be carrying around a security hazard).
Its incredible that usability of tech peaked in like 2017. Opening a server nowadays (that isn’t tied up in some service) to the web sounds like an actual timebomb before someone ruins it for you, and javascript is unworkable for my brain/style. Google/amazon/whatever has to “abstract” data/algorithm you could have just downloaded and ran but nope, pay us a penny per call. I’ve literally used godot to bundle boilerplate I/O for a basic app because I was sick of figuring out the magic words to make some simple program in C/Python, and am too ADHD to maintain a proper personal toolbox.
I checked my resume because I’m having a certified moment at my job. I wrote it in Latex because everyone was doing it back in ~2019-2020. Now, the fucking editor I used wants to have its fucking “ai” editor “help” me and put the error somewhere I didn’t see. I had to manually review the code and I was missing a single fucking }. Yeah guys, totally going to pay for your bot to tell me nonsense, instead of the thing that has been doable since before I was born. The thing they’re steadily degrading in VS. The shit we discussed in undergrad, and professors said, yeah its solved and boring so let’s just cover it in theory and not in practice (IE, make a abstract machine and not write actual code for it). The amazing tech of bracket matching.
I feel like its a matter of time at this point until something fundementally breaks and computers just stop being tractable objects for a decade or two while those of us in CS not chatgpt-brained and not brain dead from exhaustion figure out how to make printers work again.
TLDR:
Printers at this point are eldritch entities detached from any other mainstream technology. The newish one on my desk is 84% identical to the fax machines I was fixing decades ago. No-one wants to fix them, no-one knows how they work, thousands of years after humans are extinct a Ricoh printer in a downtown office will come to life and complete a lost print job from 2004.
To be fair, printers are machines sent up to us from hell to torment us for eternity.
There was a brief time where tech was about efficiency with mid resource consumption. That went completely out of the window when harvesting data became more profitable then crypto and powerful processors push and finally openai with the ‘let’s just use an abysmal amount of resources to solve this problem’ model that other companies followed shortly thereafter
So many of the things I hate (embedding you’re stupid fucking llm bot in my fucking OS) would be more acceptable if I could turn this shit off in a reasonable way. I do not want Google lens on my phone. I don’t want their image recognition software having access to my device. How to disable this? Good luck!
someone needs to teach rural people how to dismantle a data center
“It would be a shame if someone turned these 5G towers into Sherman neckties.”
Theres Copper in them there GTX 5060s
My job will literally fire you on the spot for taking a work call while driving or taking any call while driving a work vehicle. What pointless c-suit bullshit
One guy at my job is infamous for taking calls on his way to pick up his kid from school. Drives with the windows down too so all you hear is “WAWAWAPFSHHHHHHHWAWAWAWA”
I’m absolutely certain having a Teams meeting on the Q3 budget projections while doing 80 down the interstate will in no way be unsafe, distracted driving.
I look forward to the dashcam footage
Honestly, a top of the line Benz is pretty much driving itself on the interstate. Auto braking, auto follow, blind spot cameras, lane correct, etc.
cars will have self driving soon, dw about it /s
lol imagining some rich asshole spend 80k(?) on a car that comes preloaded with bloatware is hilarious
i drive a scion. it costed 5000 dollars. it looks cool and it has toyota reliability. it doesn’t advertise to me. i just do not get how shit like this mercedes has a market. who is buying these new cars knowing they all have this bullshit preloaded into them?
i probably will never buy a car made after 2014.
This is one of my favorite parts of the gadget era that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately - that no matter how rich and powerful any person is, they still just have an iPhone like anyone else. Like maybe it’s gold-plated or maybe they have the fancy folding android stuff, but they still have to use the same stupid bullshit enshittified garbage the rest of us do. Like, their TV might be a hundred inches and 16k, but it’s still just hooked up to an apple TV box at the end of the day, and they still have to use that trashy little remote and wrestle with the awful voice commands to get it to do anything, same as anyone else.
Cars and houses and stuff are a little different, but gadgets really only get so much better even with infinite money. And that does feel kinda nice to think about.
who is buying these new cars
Rich people who pay people to drive for them.
Or petit bourgeois people who want to look rich but can’t afford an actual rich person’s car.
Look I don’t want to suggest anything
but how well guarded can the data centers and crypto mining operations really be?The data centers themselves are very well protected. They’re modern fortresses with tall fencing, cameras, guards, biometric and RFID requirements for gaining entry into the building. Any remotely modern data center should be considered relatively impenetrable. Physical security of the servers is one of the primary concerns when designing a data center.
The power transformers and cooling equipment outside of the data center building, much less so. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-grid-terror-20140207-story.html
Don’t do adventurism folks. Any competent IT project can be redeployed in a new data center with a few keystrokes, any halfway competent data center operations team can safely shut down in the event of a cooling or a power failure before damage is done to the servers. If you actually took a rifle to an AWS data center, all you’ll be doing is ruining some on-call engineer’s weekend.
Data centers are designed to face off against state actors, with some being designed to survive getting nuked. Your plucky adventurist guerillas aren’t going to do shit.
Won’t that be fun when someone sends you a corrupted Excel file and your car stops running
“Here’s that report you needed boss!”
The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough
Now you can have meetings in your car!
Can we not have meetings in our car? You cannot not have meetings in your car.
Why are you upset?! That’s twice the 'not’s you asked for!How come the cybertruck doesn’t have discord?
Because it comes with Polytopia (that weird Civilization mobile clone that Elon loves) instead
Don’t hate the game hate the player
¿Porque no los dos?
Cause it’s a fine game, nothing particularly wrong with it, just Elon being a fucking weirdo
twitter spaces coming soon to a tesla dashboard near you
At no point did anyone at Mercedes-Benz sit down and ask themselves “Is this really necessary? Is there any conceivable way in which this will actually improve someone’s life?”
Business idiots. Management is out of touch with both users and products
Because the luddies were so successful, right?
The fact that they didnt succeed doesnt make them wrong.
They were morally in the right but it’s still silly to copy proven failed tactics.
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
-Sister Miriam Godwinson, “The Blessed Struggle”
Modern civ like games could never create something so meaningful like this again. Too bad that alpha centauri came out in the “communism is dead 4eva” aka the 90s, I am sure we would have some banger quotes if they included an actual communist faction (no I am NOT counting the free drones)
For the second time in a week I am going to stan Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
the PRC fell apart and turned into the “golden dynasty” or something circa 2005, where Yang grew up and became a martial arts master and a qigong master and then somehow became a “chairman” because to USians that word sounds like scary chairman Mao
Yang has some good quotes though, he’s like one of those movie villains that you can’t help but love even though the creators tried so hard to make him scary and evil
The “blue screen of death” will now be literal.
The CEO of MercBenz should just throw an Elon salute and get it over with. Including Micro$oft-Mossad software is the same thing.
