Like I said, I got the crossover before I understood what actually gets you safely across unplowed roads and unpaved farm driveways in the winter, but I at least knew just enough that I went for a crossover and not some disgusting oversized SUV or truck like plenty of other folks around me go for.

Now that it’s been totaled (cosmetically) by hail damage it’s simply not fiscally reasonable to replace it until it’s entirely worn out so that’s just a past decision that I’m going to have to live with for the next decade or so

The factory window tint that’s now standard is also incredible for making getting into a parked car on a hot day so much more bearable

I recently inherited an older Toyota Sienna and it’s made me realize the current crop of 3 row SUVs and gigantic trucks is mostly sold to people who would absolutely love a minivan but just don’t know it.

• I’ve got more cargo space than any truck I pass on the road made in this century
• I can fit my entire family plus drag along multiple friends and still have space for everyone’s bags
• I can stand and walk through the interior if desired, even climbing to the far back from the front seat
• the sliding doors mean you can get in and out of the vehicle from any parking spot without a door in the way
• it’s got a turn radius so short that I can do a full U-turn without reversing on any road or parking lot
• the high seat+low nose means I can nussle up within inches of a vehicle in front of me and still see the bumper
• the engine is has enough power to be comparable to some small locomotives.

I would never have bought a minivan on account of the gas milage (~20mpg just ain’t great, and filling up the 25 gallon tank every week hurts the pocket book way more than my crossover that I got before I knew snow tires were a thing) but holy crap having this much space for people/stuff is incredible and I thoroughly enjoy playing bus/truck with it for all of my friends and family. For anyone who’s considered a truck/3-row SUV to be a requirement, they need to do themselves a favor and try out a minivan

This is part of why I was hoping the conflict in Iran would keep ballooning gas prices, we got so many small cars and creative approaches to save gas out of the 1970s oil crisis, and a new oil crisis could absolutely do the same thing again, except now a lot of that technology that companies were experimenting with in the 70s is far more viable, so just that small push of a couple of years of oil crisis (honestly just needs to be >$4/gallon from what I’ve seen) could easily push oversized vehicles off a cliff and usher in the bike revolution that New York, London and Paris have been experiencing across the entire US

It’s basically what New York City has been doing with some success already and there’s been attempts to create a similar program for parking enforcement as well

…because young kids are insane and constantly make poor choices when left to their own devices.

I don’t think kids should walk to school independently until they’re at least about 9 or 10. Before that point their decision making skills are simply not developed enough and their understanding of risk is basically non-existent. Is it probably fine at a younger age? Yeah, but it’s not a risk worth taking, especially given how society at large generally considers all kids to require 24/7 parental monitoring even at ages where they should gain some independence

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish the police had an easy text line for reporting obvious violations like that. Seems like the kind of thing where you should be able to snap a photo of the vehicle, license plate and violation in one photo and text it off for an officer to look over and verify then write and mail a parking ticket. Best part is, it’s a low risk enforcement, and if the law is written well enough it could be a net good in preventing parked cars from blocking shit without lending itself to over-enforcement

I live in a town about that size, and I’d estimate that over half of students get to/from school via their parents driving them. Which is insane because the way the buses are setup, your kids will just be picked up/dropped off from whatever the nearest school to your home is, so the parents spending multiple hours each day going to multiple schools to drop off then multiple schools to pick up could entirely avoid it

It’s seriously the only real rush hour in my town is when school starts/ends

About the only edgecase I’ve seen with busing in my town is if you have multiple kids in school and one is special needs, because the special needs bus exclusively goes door to door and they don’t let siblings ride with them unless the sibling is also special needs, so parents have to be in 2 places at once for both kids to take the bus

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play

A while back there was a local kerfuffle because some vandal was slashing the tires of cars which came to visit a local park at the top of a bluff. The vandal would only slash 3/4 tires and it apparently made getting insurance to cover it hell because insurance would cover 4 damaged tires but not only 3. Also 3 tires is more likely to be less than/about the insurance deductible thereby making it more costly to the owner. So the vandal was really causing maximum possible chaos by slashing only 3 tires

The price is irrelevant, because they aren’t for you or regular consumers. They’re already reserved and being shipped to AI data centers.

I mean this is the standard operating procedure for all top end data center products, they aren’t sold on consumer marketplaces but can be purchased by suppliers with existing contracts and relationships

As they ramp up yields larger capacity drives will slowly trickle into more consumer channels until eventually the 40+TB drives are like the 8-12tb drives are today

we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons

Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this

Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that’s not a good faith argument.

The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA

At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called “super surrogates” who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population

I’m curious how this impact snow plows. Every speed bump I’ve seen in the region I live in that gets a few feet of snow each winter will have little flags that should stick out over the snow to indicate to plows where they should lift up for a speed bump. I should look sometime to see how scratched to hell they are though to see if plows hit the bumps a lot

Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don’t need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

To be entirely fair, the speed limits they have entered into their database are often incorrect. For an egregious example, I was on a state highway in Illinois last year (I think highway 16 or something like that) and Google Maps said the speed limit was 16MPH despite the clearly posted 55MPH speed limit, so obviously whatever person or tool they had reading the signs misunderstood the highway signs as speed limit signs

There’s also plenty of local roads where Google Maps has the wrong speed limit. Some have very few if any speed limit signs posted so they clearly just have a guess entered into Google Maps ignoring the state/local laws that make it easy to guess the correct speed limit (federal highways are 65MPH, state and county highways are 55MPH, local highways/farm roads with no posted limit are 45MPH, and 25MPH within city limits if no other posted limit), others Google Maps just simply has the wrong limit entered despite it being clearly posted for no clear reason