All I ever see is most people using (whatever system cloud provider comes with their computer/phone/tablet) and forking over $3, 5, $10, $20 a month to make the “your cloud is full!” alert to go away.

Somewhere in the middle is the way, and in countries like the US, that something in the middle should probably not be a US cloud provider anymore.

Remember when Steve Jobs said FaceTime was going to be an open protocol? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

This is the point where the pet owner teaches the kitten not to bite so hard. If the human has any idea what they are doing.

Bungle did a sweet remix of a Snow Patrol track.

You’re supposed to take it to the Apple store, where they will charge you $800 to “clean” the keyboard, by replacing and throwing away half the computer. This is the correct user experience. /s

Apple hates making functional serviceable machines anymore.

Cats actually get some of their moisture from dry food. Old dry food will be more dry.

Go to a pet store and buy 5 or 10 single serving flavors of decent quality. Might be $10-15 for the experiment to land on something they like. Plan and accept that a lot of it will be thrown out. They also might love it, but not day 2 when refrigerated.

Try Quake LAN parties. You also gotta drag that tower around and belt it in. Oh no, it slipped on the expressway and knocked you out of 4th gear into neutral!

I consider LLMs basically high-frequency StackExchange trading. You gotta be exact and not keep the thread alive too long or driftrot is real though. Much faster to parse, though.

Also, the ones that can access the web are great for “I want specific lib x version y to solve a weird problem, what support libs are needed?”

What happens when you feed your chia pet after midnight.

I just realized how odd it would be to see people walking around in brandless clothes. As odd as when someone removes all the badges from their car.

The advertising has been so prevalent for so long that it has been normalized. Fascinating.

They’re about 2% better at being a telephone IVR than the older ones, probably at 6x the power cost.

I had an AI render a simple diagram for a presentation with explicit instructions. It rendered a Rube Goldberg nonsense graphic. I included it anyway for the lulz. Sure, they will get better, and maybe some day be almost as useful as the Enterprise computer. No way they’ll be Lt. Cmdr. Data this century.

That doesn’t change the fact tech companies just marketed it as an excuse to make one feel it is now “safe” to use their phone in bed in a flim-flam interpretation of science. You ever look at those blue filters on phones? Blue is still very present.

Books still exist, other non-blue reading mediums, as do non-blue lights. Thus the “real science behind that” part.

There is real science behind that. However, tech companies just created an adjacent flavor filter of dubious actual value to increase user engagement and avoid potential lawsuits.

People have read books in bed for centuries without issue via all sorts of light sources.

It’s all down to good lifestyle behavior.

Think about it this way: They were literally the most spoiled highest quality-of-life group of humans to ever exist on Earth in any timeline.

• Ubiquitous access to healthcare and vaccinations for longer life.
• Access to pensions and retirement options no longer available where the employer did all the legwork to ensure they had a future post-work so they didn’t have to learn a thing about investing or retirement savings.
• Infrastructure that was borne from the Great Depression, so they had roads, bridges, dams all built up to last their lifetime with no care about maintenance, as they figure, “oh it was always there, it will always be there,” so no money was committed to maintenance we are now having to do, freeing that money up to live like kings and queens in the short-term.
• Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that “walk in and hand them a resume” trope they love to perpetuate.
• The most modern travel technology and geopolitical climate to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on the planet, and access to time to have vacation.
• Relatively calm planetary climate so they didn’t have to worry about things like today’s weather weirding with tornadoes where they shouldn’t be, hurricanes going inland, hail everywhere, and on and on, all the while driving their 5 MPG giant SUVs all over the country while tossing their food wrappers on the side of the road.
• Cheap (during the majority of their lives) to relocate anywhere in the US or abroad if they wanted to work or live somewhere else, or be “snowbirds” when they’re too wimpy to tolerate the winter in their home states.
• The same geopolitical climate prevented them having to grow up in war-torn anywhere.
• Access to any kind of entertainment imaginable any time anywhere.
• Artificially post-world-war inflated US economy that took some decades to spin down (that “Great Again” they fap to) - which only happened because the US joined so late and had few losses ourselves. The war never happened at home, so we got out for minimal effort/casualties/infrastructure loss.
• And they got to adult in an age of computer technology that enables them as olds to not have to drive their car, pick up food, or do any errands they don’t want to do themselves, all without having to learn any technical skills because the tech was designed for idiots.

No human generation before or after them got to, or likely will ever, experience such a prosperous story-arc. They should consider themselves damn lucky and act like it, while supporting future generations to have a sliver of what their spoiled asses were able to enjoy.

President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho is an American treasure. Have the respect to say his name!

(/s obv)

There are pit toilets up in the Rocky Mountains at parks that have a vent pipe up above them.

Well, when the wind is blowing around 9,000+ft above sea level, (which is frequent) you get a blast of cold mountain air up your rump, like a York Peppermint Patty of freshness. It is quite an indescribable experience.

People in the past have used the entertainment bus to get into the flight telemetry data, hopefully only in a read-only state, but that will only be true if you trust the competence of the IT group that set up the programming for the switches.

Just be careful of where you try to write data and you should be fine! (and stay away from /dev/wing0 and /dev/wing1 on the network mount!)

They run Linux now.