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Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 1) 96

That may explain it. I have a Qrevo S, which is from 2024, while yours is from 2022. The only thing that it ever gets stuck at is one spot where, from under the couch, it can see out the ground-level window, and get stuck between the couch and window ledge (not actually stuck, just confused), because the LiDAR sees out the window. And I fixed that just by setting a small exclusion zone there. It never "gets lost" - maybe your house has some vast open spaces that it can't handle? But the LiDAR seems to see pretty far. The only other issues I've had are things like where I'll have a loose cord on the floor or some large piece of debris or whatnot, and even then, it's usually good at not getting stock on them. I'm also impressed with how well it deals with doors vs. a Roomba - my Roomba used to always get itself locked in rooms by accidentally closing doors after it entered, while the Roborock really tries to avoid ever touching them.

The Qrevo S has actually rotating mops, and they do a superb job with the floor. Spotless. My robot has the hardest mopping job in the world, too - it has to clean under my parrot's cage, and he poops off the edge onto a plastic mat under it ;)

I've never had to contact support - hopefully I don't need to :)

Comment Re:Will Ford even exist in 5 years? (Score 1) 99

For people that think I'm wrong, ask yourself if you were one of those people who said... Nobody wants a phone that doesn't have keys when the iPhone came out and everyone had Blackberrys.

I think you're wrong. I think the U.S. government has too much incentive to bail them out again no matter how badly they tank.

But you're not wrong about Ford being the least likely to survive the next ten years without massive government bailouts. IMO, Ford has never made good cars by any reasonable standard, giving rise to jokes all the way back in the late 1980s of Ford standing for "Found On the Road Dead" or "Fell Off the Road Dead", and I've seen no evidence that they have gotten much better since.

Comment Re: Wrong approach (Score -1, Troll) 99

Tesla was recently named the least reliable vehicle in America.

By someone legitimate, or by someone looking to get page hits?

Oh, Consumer Reports... the same company that has pretty much been dumping on Tesla for many years, and whose criticisms have been widely ridiculed by actual Tesla owners.

Comment Re:DOGE for courts (Score 1) 133

The intent was for everyone to have access to military-grade weapons so that they could form militias. Early drafts specified they be the same sort of guns used in the Revolution, but that was removed, apparently for futureproofing.

There was a separate law passed in 1792 that defined what weapons should be available for people in a militia, but I can't find any evidence that the second amendment ever did that. It was based around similar laws in other states and in England, none of which specified such things, so it would be very surprising if they had considered doing so.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if the founders would have included select-fire (what you called automatic) rifles, had they known they would exist, as that's what you'd want your militia trained on.

Even if we assume that the intent was to protect the right to bear all future military-grade weapons, it was still intended for forming militias for the defense of the country, not for storing high-power weapons at every individual's house for their personal use where kids can pick them up and shoot each other.

Weapons of that time would not have been easy for a kid to discharge multiple times. They would not have been easy for someone to discharge a hundred times in anger and mass-murder people. And so on. And that's the point I was trying to make. These weapons are materially different from anything they could have conceived of at the time.

Comment Influencing via fear mongering versus good humor (Score 1) 169

See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
Full episode: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."

Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alfiekohn.org%2Fblog...
        "Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
                "Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
        The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."

That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).

Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcognitive-science.info...

And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.humorproject.com%2Fd...
      "Taking Humor Seriously
        By Joel Goodman
                "There are three things which are real:
                God, human folly, and laughter.
                The first two are beyond our comprehension.
                So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)" ...
        Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going: ... (2) Use humor as a tool rather than as a weapon. Laughing with others builds confidence, brings people together, and pokes fun at our common dilemmas. Laughing at others destroys confidence, ruptures teamwork, and singles out individuals or groups as the "butt". In the words of one fifth grade teacher, "You don't have to blow out my candle to make yours glow brighter." Humor is laughter made from pain, not pain inflicted by laughter. I subscribe to Susan RoAne's AT&T test- is the humor Appropriate, Timely, and Tasteful? If so, you can reach out and touch people positively with humor. ..."

Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).

Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...

Comment Re:Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score 1) 96

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 3, Insightful) 96

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

Comment Re:We've done the experiment (Score 1) 161

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

Comment Re:Losing section 230 kills the internet (Score 1) 161

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

Comment Re:We've done the experiment (Score 1) 161

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

Comment Re:DOGE for courts (Score 2) 133

illegally banned

That's every gun law. But there's no "shall not infringe upon solar and wind rights"

But you leftoids don't follow reason so what's logic mean anyways. Liberal activist judges just rule then come up with any rationale that'll hold water.

When it comes to gun rights, I'm personally in favor of a strict originalist interpretation of the second amendment based on how someone in that time would interpret it, just like the right end of the Supreme Court claims to believe in.

You have the right to own and bear as many muskets and flintlock pistols as you want, so long as they are for use as part of a militia to defend the country.

Wait, what? You think the right to bear arms grants you the right to a fully automatic assault rifle of the sort that wasn't even invented until almost two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution? Sorry, but no. You want to buy a firearm so you can threaten your ex? Also no. You want to open carry your pistol so everyone knows not to mess with you? Still no.

The second amendment doesn't say what you think it does. It never did. It says that because a well-trained militia is essential to the safety and security of the country, the right of the people (as a whole) to bear arms (of some kind) shall not be infringed. A logical reading of those words does not prohibit taking away guns from specific people (e.g. those with a history of violent crime). Nor does it preclude restricting specific types of weapons to people who have been more thoroughly vetted (e.g. high-power semi-automatic or automatic rifles).

Strictly speaking, you could allow people who have never been convicted of a crime the use of only non-lethal weapons, and so long as learning on those weapons would qualify you to be able to use more powerful weapons if we ever get attacked, such a highly restrictive legal environment would still at least arguably meet the rather low bar for what must be allowed by the second amendment.

So no, gun laws do not inherently violate the second amendment. To violate the second amendment, they would have to make it substantially more difficult for an average person to obtain or use a typical firearm. Until a law crosses that threshold, it likely isn't a violation of 2a.

By contrast, executive orders that exceed authority specifically granted by Congress and exceed the constitutional authority of the executive branch to interpret and execute existing laws are per se unconstitutional. And those are highly scrutinized regardless of which party is in the oval office. The Republican presidents just have a tendency to wipe their a**es with the constitution a lot more often than the Democrat presidents, so their orders get overturned more often.

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