Mr PoopyButthole

OK but why is my state mandated minimum insurance nearly $90 a month for a Toyota Prius that I only drive like 30 miles per week?

My liability only plan was $55 in 2018.

I’m over 30 years old with no tickets or accidents on my record.

Maybe the whole data farming thing is being used as an excuse also, but this is bullshit all up and down.

I love it when companies think the (often invented) number of pirated copies has any meaningful correlation to lost revenue.

My girlfriend and I have one Nintendo Switch. We share it. But the only modern Nintendo games I play are the Legend of Zelda series. Since Breath of the Wild, when a new one came out, we’d buy it right away, and then I’d end up placing a copy on my PC to play so we could play together.

If Nintendo thinks I’m gonna buy a game twice just to play at the same time as my partner, when we only have the one console, think again. If Nintendo thinks someone who only likes one game is gonna buy a whole second console, they’re out of their minds.

What I do own is a Steam Deck, because Steam is a platform first and I can play my games on my fancy PC at home and on multiple devices. My Steam Deck can even play non-steam games great too!

The second Nintendo makes a PC store that let’s me play their games on my other hardware, I’ll start buying that second copy of all our games solely for the convenience of it. Until then they can suck an egg.

I keep thinking how great it would be if the federal government made a central server system to access digital content for free via taxes.

All public domain and publicly funded research and content, all in one place. Could also host owned content for people/entities and pay out royalties automatically based on consumption.

There are ways to make this fairly affordable to everyone via taxes, but maybe the big opportunity is it could also allow companies to train AI on all the data for a fat, but fair subscription. The value of that could easily pay for enough to shrink any tax costs for the public.

I hope they both go down when Team Rocket hears about this

I think accessibility options in games are fantastic and as long as they’re optional you can do no wrong.

I think the best thing, that’s still not as common yet, is the ability to custom map game controls within its settings. Steam’s own software can do this pretty well, but there should be support for that in every game up front.

Not only does it make it easier for people missing limbs or dexterity to play games, but it makes it easier for any person to tweak the controls for their play style.

I really hope we see more support for features like this because they can be so useful to everybody.

I don’t think he was trying to make literal statements with things like that. Yes, he used sociopolitical commentary as his medium, but he was still a comedian.

He’s not trying to convince his audience that everybody is stupid, he’s speaking to a feeling most of us have had when looking at what others are doing. Everyone sometimes feels like like everybody around them must be stupid, just like we all sometimes feel like we’re the only one missing something.

He’s beloved because most really talented comedians can derive humor from relatable or absurd situations and stories, but Carlin could make a rhythm linking broad abstract concepts of human experience to really specific examples.

He’s not a god, he was just a really talented comedian that had a unique style and medium.

Already likely to be untrue, but honestly I’d happily sign up for a world wear “hold music” isn’t the same 20sec loop of shit jazz

I wish I remembered the details, but I read a couple years ago about new batteries using the same sort of principal.

It was being studied as a way to handle a specific part of radioactive byproduct from nuclear power.

You sandwich the tiny radioactive bit in materials to generate a charge, and the whole thing is encased in conductive man-made diamond.

A battery the size of a half dollar coin could generate roughly a watt of power for, ostensibly, up to hundreds of years.

The big seller beyond its lifespan is that the diamond is dense enough to shield the tiny amount of radiation inside.

Incredible potential that probably wont be realized in consumer goods for decades. Just think about never having to change the battery in a remote ever again. Or even a lot of wireless smart home sensors and devices.

A shocking amount of things take very little power. Air tags that never die. E-book readers. You could make super dim puck LEDs that are always on and can go anywhere for illuminating pathways.

You could never scale it much in size/output because the diamond encasing would become disproportionately heavy and expensive, but for anything 1.5 Watts and less, and possibly up to 3 Watts or so, could be totally feasible.

Damn, what’s going on with his facial hair?

I’ve been raving mad about this exact shit for years.

I’m not a developer, but I remember how long pre-smartphone would last with little 500mAh batteries. Even after 3g and into 4g connectivity and well after the proliferation of less efficient Bluetooth a phone would last anywhere from 3-14 days between charging.

Now every phone has 3,000-4,000mAh batteries and, besides 5g, the wireless standards have become significantly more efficient.

The only notable offset is the big touch screens, but even those have gotten more efficient, and seems not to matter because standby time is still trash now too.

I doubt there’s a continous A/V feed to servers, but 100% our phones are always listening for keywords/phrases locally and then sending “relevant” data back for ads, on top of the always on location tracking.

It’s hilarious that phones cost as much as they do, considering how unwieldy and low screen-time they’ve become, on top of the idea that we’re paying to be tracked.

What’s funny is that this could only help if just one or two people use it in a given meeting. But if 4/6 people were to use it, then most of the meeting’s purpose is gone, and the notes are about nothing.

I feel like these LLM transcription summaries are better for quick reviewing of info.

The real dream is that when a boss has a long shpeil to dump on everyone, they could just ramble on to a conference room of bots and then it turns their whole “talk” into the paragraph email it should have been.

Everybody knows the fifth element is love

Nobody has beef with the annual developer fee.

The problem isn’t even that they want to charge 30% for processing app payments. They can charge whatever they want for their own services.

The problem is that Apple prevents users from installing any apps from outside their own app store, then bans developers from using any other service but Apple to process payments. It’s anticompetitive 101.

If Apple allowed 3rd party app stores or let apps implement their own payment processing, there would be no issue here.

As a graphic designer, I knew at a glance that nobody was paid to make that stupid “x”.

If a client as big as Twitter asked me for an X logo I’d be so fucking depressed. It would be such a pain to make a proper logo like that without looking exactly like a dozen other ones, because it’s hack and has been done to death.

The X everything app is literally some high school composition notebook doodle shit Elon has been clinging to for over 20 years. He’s like the dad from the movie Holes that thinks he’s a great inventor, but just keeps catching the house on fire and stinking up the place.

This is not only an ad written by a hack, it contributes to widespread gaslighting on what our phones do.

It’s well documented that our phones are always listening and sending keywords to advertisers.

Battery life is the single biggest indicator of how invasive our phone are.

If you’re old enough to remember flip phones, you know they’d last easily days, to a week, or even longer between charges.

Even as Blackberrys came about with GPS navigation, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc, the battery life stayed about the same. Over time we’ve expanded the ability of those features, but we’ve also made them all significantly more power-efficient.

Some argue all the “always-on” features for optimizing signal and spontaneous device pairing is responsible, but these can all be turned off.

Even with all the Android Dev settings optimized for minimum background activity and all apps restricted, an S22 Ultra with 5000 mah battery will burn through most of its capacity in your pocket in a day.

Worth mentioning how tiny flip-phone batteries were too. A 500-900mah battery would take a flip-phone through a week where a modern smartphone with a 5000mah battery barely lasts a day.

The only dock that’s actually as advertised with all the bells and whistles is made by Caldigit.

It’s ungodly expensive, which sucks, but it has been 100% flawless for my M1 MacBook Pro and M1 Mac Mini for at least a year now.

A UK clinic designed for treating video game addiction, originally expected to help just 50 people a year, has had more than 850 referrals since its inception in 2020.

850 game addicts across 2-3 years is pretty small potatoes. Wonder how many alcoholics and gambling addicts there are in that area.