There are real limits to repairability in modern devices, some placed there just in order to force you to pay the manufacturer more money. But you’re right that there’s a lot we could do that we’re just not bothering to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/business/cpi-report-inflation-june.html?smtyp=cur

But if you hate your data there’s no quicker way to lose it than a single 36TB Seagate drive.

I like the understatement. Shame they spoiled it with the “game changing” claim at the beginning.

I abandoned Rogers years ago after they billed me for a service that they then told me wasn’t available, and denied me a refund. It took a total of 7 hours on the phone to their customer service and eventually losing my temper so badly I was yelling before they made any effort to sort it out. Since then they’ve been sending reps to the door who all assure me their customer service is totally transformed and much better than before. I always told them I doubted it and would never return to Rogers. Seems my instincts were right.

You’re no more likely to lose keys with KeePass or KeePassXC than with an online password manager, as long as you keep good backups, and maybe sync KeePass to cloud storage.

I can see where the censors are coming from, and how they might see these as pornographic, but I think they’ve responded to the surface appearance rather than what’s actually going on in the book.

These excerpts are fairly explicit and describe sex acts and being turned on. In that, they resemble porn. But they also tend to be describing teenage sexual discovery in a realistic way, showing how the development of sexual feelings can be tender and complex. If you remove teenagers’ access to these books, what are they left with to help them understand what they’re experiencing? Internet porn and the manosphere? It can be helpful for kids to have access to more nuanced and sensitive materials, even if they are somewhat explicit.

So I can see how the censors see this, but I still wouldn’t ban these books just because they contain sexually explicit scenes, and I still think it’s a mistake to classify these as porn.

When conservatives call something pornographic, it’s very doubtful whether it really is.

I know it’s an awful headline. I’d still be interested in what people think of the content, because there’s something legit in there it seems, but this article (which is published on a number of websites and may be a fairly unedited press release) doesn’t explain much. The headline writers seem to see the word “battery” and run with that, even though it’s misleading.

Who are “you guys”?

I tried to dictate some documents recently without paying the big bucks for specialized software, and was surprised just how bad Google and Microsoft’s speech recognition still is. Then I tried getting Word to transcribe some audio talks I had recorded, and that resulted in unreadable stuff with punctuation in all the wrong places. You could just about make out what it meant to say, so I tried asking various LLMs to tidy it up. That resulted in readable stuff that was largely made up and wrong, which also left out large chunks of the source material. In the end I just had to transcribe it all by hand.

It surprised me that these AI-ish products are still unable to transcribe speech coherently or tidy up a messy document without changing the meaning.

“Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.”

This whole industry is so full of hype and scams, the bubble surely has to burst at some point soon.

What’s with the suggestion that they’re injuring people at all? Has it happened?

This crude recourse to “evolutionary fitness” is the rhetoric of fascists.

I’m almost won over by your charming manners, but…

1. What is your source?
2. What happens when the severity of accidents are taken into account? Because it could be this: Tesla Has the Highest Fatal Accident Rate of All Auto Brands, Study Finds
3. Tesla’s self-driving features expose their cars to a distinctive kind of risk. It would be important to distinguish the accidents where this played a part.
4. Regardless of the statistics, there are some other clear design problems with Tesla’s, such as batteries that explode in a crash and doors that won’t open without power (not to mention autopilot’s limited camera-only inputs and software glitches). These are still concerns specific to Tesla that other brands don’t share, so again it’s worth reviewing accidents where these played a role when gauging Tesla’s safety.

I quite like lane assist in the 2019 Honda I drive, even though it gets it wrong occasionally. It will not function unless it detects that you’re providing some steering input of your own, and it’s easy to override just by steering the way you want to go. That and cruise control are handy on the highway and have worked well for 6 years with no problems. But it’s very far from either functioning or being advertised as “full self driving.”

Wouldn’t someone have noticed all the traffic on the network? And if the conversations were processed locally, wouldn’t someone notice the energy and cooling needs of the processor in the bulb, not to mention the presence of a load of memory? This seems very implausible.

It seems to be a common thing, couching misogyny in the language of “protecting” or “defending” women. This stuff makes my skin crawl.

We all know that cops will try to charge you with assaulting them if you so much as shrug while being arrested. And they’ll contrive situations just so they can do that. I’d say that makes their statistics meaningless without specific details and proof.

Trump will destroy it because it’s icky stuff relating to women, and it serves to help women.