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Comment This doesn't make any sense (Score 1) 365

Our charger has a long cord, even if the charger was inside the cord could run outside and you could shut the door on it.

As it happens, that's not a problem either. I put the charger outside on a north facing wall under a large roof overhang where it's protected from the elements. The Tesla wall charger is waterproof and designed to live outside. I've had zero issues with it.

Besides, isn't it usually recommended not to park an EV in the garage due to fire hazard if something goes sideways?

The car parks right next to where the charger is, we plug it in every night and it's on a timer to start after 9 when the cheap rates kick in. Between the TOD Prime rate that SoCal Edison gives for EV owners and charging almost entirely at home, the electricity for the car is basically free, as our power bills are actually lower on average than they were before we changed rate tiers.

I personally don't care for the car (it's my Wife's car) due to the driver-hostile control setup (no buttons) and the fact that it tracks your every move, but it works for her because she has a long daily commute and we were spending a lot of money on gas every month.

Comment Re:seatguru (Score 1) 108

Thanks for the update. I did use Seatguru fairly recently and the information on my particular flight was still valid as far as I can tell, but maybe I just got lucky. I did notice that it was transforming into a booking gateway to maximize revenue. I've bookmarked the new site and I will refer to it for the next trip.

Comment Meh (Score 2) 138

You know, some of us are introverts and hate talking to machines. I don't want to have to interact with a machine pretending to have a human-like personality. I don't use voice input on anything except occasionally when composing text messages using speech-to-text, and even that's aggravating and useless half the time because it gets so many words wrong. No thanks.

Comment separation (Score 1) 27

Have they found a less energy intensive way to separate H2O into its component pieces? Otherwise you may as well just burn the source fuel directly without the conversion loss. If it can be done with electricity, powered by wind, solar or nuclear, then it might be an OK storage medium for things that have to move long distances.

As some other commenters mentioned however, there are serious downsides to even doing that in terms of storability and safety. It would be better to pour research into making more efficient electrical batteries for the same application.

Right now nothing beats the energy density of gasoline and related fuels. Electric is probably the best bet in the near term, but likely not for aviation unless they solve the weight problem too.

Comment Facebook SocialFixer (Score 3, Interesting) 14

He's wrong about the Facebook part. The SocialFixer extension for Firefox does a huge amount of stuff for the Facebook experience and it's still active and usable. I couldn't use FB without it. You'll see like 10 'suggested' items blocked and minimized, and then actual friends' posts. It's so helpful. I'm reminded of what a garbage dump FB is when I occasionally use the app on my phone, which is the full unfiltered experience the way they want you to see it. It's all ads and suggested posts. SocialFixer allows me to continue using Facebook as a place to connect with friends and groups with shared interests, as it was in the earlier days.

Comment the dial (was) awesome (Score 1) 52

Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.

Comment It's a scam.... (Score 1) 191

First of all, the amount of money that gets back to the creator is vanishingly small compared to what's kept by the cartel. While you think you're supporting the creators when you pay your license, you're really just supporting a vast army of middlemen leaching the money out. I'll say that to the apologists in this thread.

Secondly, they'll hit you up for a license even if you're just playing over the air radio. A radio station that's already paid a license and is playing advertising to pay for it. They will blatantly double dip. This happened to me when I owned a cafe / art gallery a long time ago.

I'm all for supporting the aritsts, but the system as it exists is seriously broken.

Comment Firefox's death is greatly exaggerated (Score 3, Informative) 240

I'll add my voice to the chorus of "who cares about pocket, firefox works great" and it's the best platform to load up on anti-tracking, anti-adware, anti-spyware plugins and go surfing.

If firefox as a product degrades enough, someone most likely will come up with a viable replacement. The fact that there hasn't been a huge effort put into one shows that Firefox is still a very viable platform. You can change / disable just about anything that bothers you, and it has robust extension support. Those are the two most important things. Performance is just fine. I'm not exactly looking for top speed when running AdBlockPlus, Ublock, Social Fixer for Facebook, etc. Those are going to slow things down a bit and that's just fine. I mean c'mon, my first experience getting online was with a 300 baud modem, I can't really complain. I have synchronous gigabit fiber at home now, which is astonishing. A little rendering lag from FF is not going to bother me.

Comment Mazda3... (Score 1) 185

The Mazda3 is available as a 6 speed manual if you are still looking for a fun manual car in general.

Funny thing though, now manuals are typically only available with premium trim levels aimed at enthusiasts, whereas before the cheapest version of a car was the version with the manual transmission.

Comment Firefox plugins to avoid this? (Score 3, Interesting) 77

Would a plugin that blocks tracking pixels fix the problem? I use firefox for android with Ublock Origin installed when I browse on the phone. I do use the facebook app when I access it on the phone, as they have made the mobile browser experience fairly terrible in comparison (on purpose.)

Comment Re:Fuck Adobe (Score 0) 59

Uh, no, not even close. CS6 master suite (with everything you get now) was $7,988 circa 2007. Photoshop alone was $700. Illustrator similar when it was a standalone product.

Now, if you have a CS subscription long enough, year after year, yes you'll pay that much eventually. But not for one year's subscription cost, even under the new price. But unlike the old days, you're getting all the updates continually without paying $150 - $200 for upgrading one standalone piece of software like PS.

I would say that for people who use a lot of the apps and on a continual basis year after year and want the latest updates, they are probably saving money overall and spreading out the cost evenly. (i.e. a design agency.) But for us little guys buying it personally as an independent artist, people who used to skip four or five versions before upgrading (that would be me) or only need a few pieces of software and not the whole suite, yea it's a raw deal over time.

When Adobe came up with the perpetual license, I'm sure they put in a lot of thought to the pricing model to make sure they overall weren't going to lose money and that they would make more money and make it more consistently in the long run. But it creates new winners and losers in their customer base in terms of what they are paying and depending on their needs. They definitely lost a lot of good will from regular starving artists who don't need another monthly bill, but can afford to occasionally buy something that they'll use for the next five years without dropping another dime. Paying $800 up front for 5 years of use rather than $800 every year is a big difference, even if you get access to everything else. Frankly, most of the new features year to year are just fluff and cosmetics, the only truly groundbreaking new feature has been gen AI.

Comment Meh (Score 1) 59

As an existing subscriber, I will likely go with the 'reduced AI' option because I don't really use AI except for light object removal with generative fill now and then.

I could actually live with the photographer plan but I actually use Illustrator a fair amount, and Acrobat to assemble, edit and otherwise convert and modify PDFs. I don't use much of anything else anymore.

I'd have to check to see if there's an alternative for Illustrator that will actually work for me. (usually the 'alternatives' are missing some key functionality...like CMYK support...or that one amazing vector graphics tool I desperately need that does not exist outside of illustrator.) Illustrator is a fairly terrible piece of software overall, but there is a lot of power buried inside of it if you need to do something esoteric.

Adobe CC is one of the very few 'subscriptions' I'll tolerate, simply because I've been a PS user since 1995 and I know it inside, out, backwards and forwards, and I like Lightroom for processing images. I even give classes on it at photography workshops.

Looking at it now though, the full suite price is starting to not be worth it at all given how little I use. They need a pick-your-own plan, but of course it's more money if they force everyone into the big one if you need to go outside PS and LR.

Comment Not surprising, but scary. (Score 2) 85

Convincing arguments and skilled debate are both learned things that most people are not good at. (I am not.) It's something you generally have to study and know and become good at. A few people are naturally good at it. AI algorithms hoover up all of the most convincing debate material and have that at perfect recall level, giving the average human a significant disadvantage. This is one area that it is not surprising that predictive AI is good at.

As a non-real-time debate person, usually I'll think of a good answer a few days later. With the algorithm, it's pretty much instantaneous. I'm sure it's already being used in troll farm posts everywhere.

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