There are some people who really love their teslas. They don’t have any models that fit what I want so I ignore them.

unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.

I don’t see why we can’t just say that for everything. If the government wants the data, they can get a warrant. It’s not that hard - don’t we regularly complain warrants are too rubber stamped?

I don’t know how I feel about this. I think to some extent, it’s again trying to do the wrong thing. Instead of banning phones, like for years they banned calculators, perhaps they should be teaching skills around time management, how to configure the phones to be less disruptive for set periods or all the time, and the like. It’s not like people at work don’t have phones in most work environments. It’s not like most people lock up their phones when they’re at home.

Instead of pretending that we can “go back in time” to teach kids, we should look to teaching skills kids will obviously need. I remember being taught to balance a check book in 1997 or so, roughly a year or two before I never used a check in daily life, and the less than one time a year I needed one, I didn’t really have to do any “balancing” cause I can do a single subtraction for the day or 3 till it was updated in my online bank account anyway.

Teaching kids stuff sans smartphones is like teaching kids sans books, the schools just haven’t accepted it yet. And to all those who are like - well, what if your smartphone dies, or is lost, etc. Well, what if your car dies? You do the same thing, you have a backup plan, but that plan isn’t to go back to walking or horses.

The other argument I can foresee is “kids won’t learn anything”. This has always been a problem for some kids, and phones aren’t the cause. For everyone else, you get out of school what you put into it. Maybe some kids can be shown by teachers why learning is important and they’ll be self motivated - in which case phones are a net good. The solution to learning isn’t to torture kids who don’t see any point in it. It’s like you never screwed around or just slept in class… You don’t need a phone to not learn stuff is all I’m saying.

The important thing is to teach people how to teach themselves. At work I’m always asked to figure stuff out. Nothing I do today has much if anything to do with what I learned in high school or college. No one asks me to do calculus, or the details of the war of 1812. I’m solving problems using my phone or computer and the internet. As soon as you’re in a job, all these sorts of restrictions tend to go away in the vast majority of cases.

If he hasn’t been scared by Xerox, Brother, and Epson, he won’t be scared by a FLOSS printer. At this point, the only people who buy HP printers are those who don’t even google it and remember hearing the laserjets were good circa 1995.

Mostly crafts - making custom t-shirts, or bags, and patterns for stuff like crocheting and knitting. But Ink is cheap if you get one of the Ecotanks from Epson - no way to prevent 3rd party ink, and it’s a big tank so doesn’t seem to dry out anywhere near like tiny cartridges. And 70-100ml of ink per color lasts a while IMO.

But laser makes a lot of sense for documents.

Diesel, premium, E85, etc.

I have to admit, it’s been decades since I’ve driven a car that takes anything but 87 octane. I forgot there are other needs, and if that’s the case you do need to plan I guess. But I have yet to get to a gas station that’s working that doesn’t have 87 octane.

Tesla’s superchargers

Yea, I’d ignored Tesla’s network because I was never going to buy a Tesla, and till like a month ago, no one else could use those so they were out of mind for me. Honestly, the main thing I want to see is all charge points taking a credit card standard like gas pumps do. I don’t want apps or sign ups or saving anything. I’m driving by one time in my life, or maybe twice - I don’t want an account. I fear it’s likely I’ll lose this unless the government mandates taking normal payment options like cash (which honestly they should).

Yes they are.

Honestly, I looked at plugshare, and there’s more than I expected, though I’d go by at least 2-3 gas stations in each direction before I’d get to one. The issue seems to be they’re for some reason not on the road noticeable like gas stations, so you wouldn’t know about them without driving into random apartment parking lots or car dealerships. TBH, I had no idea car dealerships would have charging stations. I’d still feel a little uncomfortable going into a hospital parking lot or apartment lot I don’t live in or college campus I don’t go to or town hall of a town I don’t live in to use the charger, but maybe that’s just a cultural shift we have to endure. I will say that’s still not necessarily where I want to spend 45 minutes or more but fair enough. I also live in a rural area and often am going to rural areas, so the middle part is on a highway, but not necessarily significant start or end parts.

One thing people tend to ignore is that you start every day and every trip with a full tank. My vehicle starts every day with 250 miles of range and rarely dips below 200. When I drove an ICE, I’d sometimes leave for work with less than 30 miles in the tank. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to have more range at any given moment in an EV than an ICE provided you can charge at home.

Yes, I’ve regularly said for a daily commute of any normal length even around here (100 miles or so being the longest I’m aware of), if you have faster than 110 charging you’re golden for that use. I’ve never suggested in this thread that EVs haven’t met that need for like 8 years or so now. It’s just that few people have a “daily commute” car and “all other needs car”, they buy one car or truck. On trips I wouldn’t assume there’s a charger available for me at the hotel or resort for instance.

If you didn’t plan enough to have reasonable amounts of gas in your tank, I really fail to see how you’re planning enough to take road trips in an EV. What if you forget to plug in your EV? These are kind of stupid arguments - People can run out of gas, just like they can run out of charge. No one is (actually if they think about it) concerned about that, which is why I have said in this thread it’s a concern about finding refill locations, not a concern about range. And I think the problem is actually that no one (outside Tesla) is building “EV Charge stations” but that’s what the masses are looking for. I’m finally starting to see some WaWa’s put in charging stations, but we need to start seeing either better education of the masses (marketing changes) or people getting the local small gas stations to put in some charging stations too.

If you really drive long distance more than you drive locally and/or you can’t charge at home, I can see the trepidation, but the benefits of charging at home are tremendous and for some reason, vehicle manufacturers and consumers are ignoring it.

If I still drove somewhere not for a long trip regularly, I would be interested. I had been interested for a while. Now that I go to doctors appointments maybe 2 times a month and long trips otherwise, the gas isn’t that inconvenient. I just make it part of my trip to town once a month or so. This change in my life made me realize that the real win was pandemic style WFH for anyone who can. EVs can work for some people, I’m just saying they’re far from ready for everyone. I’m sure they’ll be ready eventually, but I’ve pushed out my expectation of when it’d make sense for me to get one.

I mean, it’s not how I travel, we usually take about 10 minutes every 2.5 hours if I’m with others, by myself I usually do 4 hours without stopping. The main thing is not that EVs will never be there, it’s that right now the infrastructure still isn’t there. I’m literally just starting to see chargers at WaWas and that’s not guaranteed, and I have no idea what they work with TBH. The great thing about gas is I know every gas station works with every gas car. We finally just agreed on a charger, but I still will wait a few years to see if it actually pans out to be the USB-C of cars.

And we just haven’t yet gotten the chargers where anyone wants to stop. They’re in strip malls as far away from the stores as possible. They’re in downtown parking garages. This in some ways is great, but also TBH backwards - they’re where locals, you know, the people who really ought to be charging at home - would make the most use of them. (at least around me in rural southern NY and northern PA) It’s the places you avoid like the plague on a road trip because you want on and off the highway fast, not to investigate the local downtown. They’re also not by the convenience stores or food places where you might realistically spend 15-40 minutes.

The other thing that I hadn’t thought of till seeing some other road trips (though they were in the UK) was - plan your trip is great, but what if something goes wrong? An unexpected detour? A traffic jam? Until the chargers are in way more places, you could really feel unsafe if you go below 50% charge. I don’t like going below 1/2 a tank of gas to have a buffer. And that’s going to change things also. Because worst case with a gas car on a trip, I can call AAA and get 2 gallons delivered to me on any county road forget about state roads etc. I have no idea - am I getting a tow or something with an EV?

I’ll also say, if I’m driving 18 hours, the last thing I want to hear is I’m going to intentionally make it 19.5 hours.

I’ll just repost the parent post to show how irrelevant this is to this specific thread:

I don’t think the issue is the daily basis. It’s the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don’t want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won’t work for them several times a year. It’s the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.

Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.

I have no idea what this has to do with towing or long road trips, but my personal experience is it’s usually pull up to gas station, pull up to pump, start pumping. I very rarely have waited in line anywhere. Even when I have, it’s like 5 minutes maybe. Do you claim there aren’t ever lines at charging stations, and there won’t be lines in the future as more people want to use them?

If I had Tesla Y money, I’d get an RV for a slow cross country road trip. Save on hotels. I’m talking about trips where you want to get to your destination, yet don’t really want the added expense, hassle, and limits of flying (and probably renting a car at the other end). This mostly has to do if you have 3 or more people on the trip, if you’re just one person who can avoid renting the car on the other end somehow, it doesn’t apply.

I don’t know where you live so I can’t talk to your experience, but where I live, if I want to rent a car for a week trip I’m driving at least 30 minutes one way, spending an hour getting the car, and paying about $1,000. If I want to rent a truck for towing (we tried this for like a year, for ~3 uses that year) we have to drive 45 minutes, it seems to take them about 2 hours to do the paperwork if we’re lucky - we’ve waited 4 hours or more before, and we paid $350 for a weekend because they couldn’t rent it for one day for Saturday because they were closed on Sunday, but charged for that day anyway. Then we got to spend another 1.5 hours driving there and back again to drop it off, 40 minutes doing paperwork.

This is a plausible PITA, stress and annoyance once every 5 years or so, but for multiple times a year, plus all the “we just WILL NOT use a truck and make due with a less suited tow vehicle and light trailer” which is more like 12 times a year, we broke down and bought a used truck.

You see - people don’t buy cars just for dollars and cents, they also buy it for value, and in a lot of cases, that’s paying slightly more for the ease and convenience of jumping into said car and doing what they need to do right now, rather than with days of planning.

I don’t think the issue is the daily basis. It’s the few long trips people take yearly that would blast that 200 mile range out. People don’t want to buy a very expensive new car that they know won’t work for them several times a year. It’s the same reason people who tow something several times a year make sure their vehicle can tow that.

Because renting a vehicle for a trip or to tow is actually a PITA and expensive.

I have 2 uses for a tablet, and know 2 other uses. They’re pretty niche.

1. you can use it to get AT&T to sell you an unlimited 5g data sim for $20 a month and pop that into a hotspot if you need to work while being driven in a car or in more locations than there’s necessarily easy or cheap wifi.

2. Reading Manga / Comics. I do read some on my phone, but the ability to see the “full page” on a 6.7" phone aspect narrow screen vs a 10" wider aspect tablet screen is surprisingly large, and my eyes are getting worse, not better as I age. Teeny tiny is not the best experience.

3. Using them as cheaper wacom tablets for drawing / artists.

4. Work provided portable tools for all sorts of stuff that doesn’t have any SIM or monthly fee needed / requested, and something that inherently isn’t a phone.

What you’re not addressing is that current EV drivers change how they drive, i.e. don’t go on the same sort of trips the same way (if the various articles on that site are to be believed). This isn’t addressing range anxiety, it’s saying plan your trips around charging your car so we work around the problem. And the problem isn’t “range” now - it’s where are the fast chargers? It’s getting better, but it’s still hard enough to pull off that there are regular youtube and news articles about the hassles and issues doing a road trip in an EV. No one does the same sort of reporting on ICE because you can find gas stations just about everywhere every 5-10 miles just about anywhere you go, and where it isn’t there is some reporting of the signs saying “last gas for 100 miles” or whatever. People know they can find a gas station, even if they’re going into a rural area.

I read the article and clicked through their own reporting on range anxiety: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/16/is-range-anxiety-really-worth-all-the-angst/

According to data from the US Department of Transportation, 95.1% of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60% of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average US driver only covers about 37 miles per day.

it seems to me that this screams out for better shared transportation - If I’m going less than 6 miles, I’d much prefer an Uber or easy subway ride or the like to owning a car at all. However, that’s something government would actually have to fund and do something rather than just passing rules on to other people to make happen.

That minor rant aside - I still maintain that the 37 miles per day is a commute and going out to lunch. If we actually wanted to have people change habits in a really useful way - it’d be to start incentivising / mandating telework where possible - stop all the unnecessary car traffic of any kind. You know what’s more environmentally friendly than ZEV vehicles? No vehicle (use).

That all said - most people I know buy vehicles to solve as close to 100% of their needs, not 95.1% - because vehicles are so expensive. The range anxiety haven’t been about the daily commute for like a decade - even the 87 mile leaf did that fine and most anyone I’ve ever talked to was perfectly OK if they had the leaf JUST to drive to work and back in the summer / nice weather. Very few people buy a car like that though, because they need to get through bad weather or carry more stuff or people or tow or …

And then there’s the all american road trip. Roughly once a month I go 180 miles one way on a quick trip to see family. They don’t have a car charger setup anywhere. I’m not at all sure if they can run an extension cord out, but then I’m on slow charging, and I also drive around while I’m there (unless I asked to use their car for all trips). I’m usually there for a couple days and come back. I have to get gas on each trip. This is not in reality if I had a leaf. If I had a more expensive car it’s do-able, but I still would be anxious till there’s more “top up” points. I go by probably 20 gas stations I notice on the trip, and there’s probably 100+ more within 2-3 miles from the route I take. I know of one charging station.

They have an answer in the article

Plan your route: PlugShare and other apps allow you to determine where chargers are located along your intended route as well as details like the hours they’re open, the cost to charge, whether it’s a public or private facility, and user reviews. It reminds me of childhood trips we took when my parents used Trip Ticks from AAA to determine best roads and attractions. Being organized makes any trip more pleasant, and being aware of possible charging stops ahead creates a sense of calm in you and your passengers.

Yes - plan you trip around your car. I mean, sure, but harkening back to needing Trip Ticks like in the early 1990s isn’t exactly a “towards the future” sort of vibe. And they’re right - a lot of it is vibe.

Limit your use of air conditioning or heat when possible: So be uncomfortable… I never think about turning on aircon or heat in my ICE car. This is a stupid “fix a perceived problem” statement.

Plan errands to intersect with available chargers Again, live your life around your car - this just is absurd. If I’m planning errands around my transportation, I ought to be able to use public transport and get better returns for the hassle - but I can’t because our public transport is shit, and also it’s probably not feasible in the vast rural areas of the US.

Stay calm, breathe deeply: According to research in the Journal of Advanced Transportation, range voltage depends on a variety of factors, including emotional type, age, and driving experience, and these factors may influence how susceptible you are to range anxiety.

Yes, get some therapy and Xanax and you too can love the EV.

Ok, but ranting about the sheer stupidity and patronizing nature of the article around range anxiety over - back to the road trip. Many people like to drive to their vacations to save money, especially if they have 3+ people going and would have to also rent a car at the other end of a flight. My next trip is a 900 mile trip over 2 days. With ICE I literally just put it in my GPS and go - no issues because I can stop and get gas ANYWHERE. We’re just NOT THERE yet with chargers, and even with superchargers, we’re talking going from a 10 minute break to get gas, grab a snack and use the restroom to more like 30 minutes waiting for the car. I don’t have issues with planning lunch or dinner around that, IF I could be sure there was a super charger where it makes sense to break.

The thing that’s stupid is it’s not “range anxiety” really, I have to worry about getting gas and finding a gas station. We just have gas stations already built out and getting gas is a 5 minute process to get another 360+ miles of range. If the charging was close to that to add 360+ miles of range, no one would blink an eye, but instead, it’s 30 minutes to add maybe 100 miles of range - which leads to making trips take much longer in many cases. The other anxiety inducing thing is if you run out of gas, AAA can bring you 2 gallons to get you to a station. I haven’t heard about the equivalent for EVs yet.

The important thing is - talking down to people isn’t going to get them to listen to you. Telling people they shouldn’t worry about their yearly or more often road trips because normally they’re driving to work and back isn’t a great sales pitch really. If I have to rent an ICE car 2 times a year for a road trip, that’s at least $1,000 each time, which itself pays for a lot of gas, or 3 new car payments (for most people). It doesn’t make people think EVs are cheaper.

Me feeling this way is a problem, because I do think EVs are a good thing, and I really want one, but not for massively more than a direct replacement of my existing ICE car, and not if I have to also maintain an ICE car for trips. One car is cheaper than two to keep going no matter how frugal the second car is.

Well, the first “glitch” is how bluetooth works in any Subaru too - and it is kind of annoying that there’s no easy way to tell it to just connect in pause mode and I’ll hit play when I want to hear my podcast or music. I kind of assumed it’s how Bluetooth worked in cars. I guess I’m saying this isn’t EV specific - I’ve rarely seen a good review of car infotainment in the last 10 years, and TBH the only things I thought anyone liked was the carplay or android auto (not that I want either, I do just want charging and bluetooth but would love those to be less stupid).

The rest though just confirms my belief that GM makes pretty shoddy vehicles and I would never buy a new one again. My family got burned by GM products for decades before moving to Subaru in the aughts and haven’t looked back till Subaru’s lack of real EV options.

That said, it’s not like Subaru’s don’t have faults - they do and they take forever to fix known manufacturing issues. It’s just that so far they’ve never stranded any of us anywhere. We’ve always been able to get home or to a shop, whereas like in this article we’re all to familiar with GM vehicles needing a tow randomly.

I had hoped (and been told) that GM improved their cars in the early 2010s but clearly not for EVs, and really - I already know where to get reliable ICE cars and that wasn’t ever GM really either.

Well, this is horrible. And all the Windows 11 requirements are just arbitrary from what I can tell.

Yes, everyone has nothing better to do than go shopping daily for anything they need. Nevermind having stores on hand in case you can’t go to the store daily, like when we had a pandemic. Plus, we should all pay the maximum “bodega” price for everything, no buying in bulk for things to be cheaper, or just buying at a larger central location where things are cheaper.

This just seems asinine to me.

I have no idea what you’re trying to say here. You’d need to define terms better at the very least. What do you mean by true, what do you mean by believe etc.

As to the psuedo code, as far as I know, the boolean equivalence to 1 in many programming languages is just a convenience and not some law of nature or core basis of philosophy.

I mean, as a normal person, I can’t earn Yuan in China and then convert to USD when I leave(at least this was the case for a long time), but the reverse isn’t true. If you can’t convert into and back out of a currency, I question how much it has to do with the global economy. A government currency swap is like swapping commodities, it isn’t doing anything for other countries.

I’m just not as convinced that China is as essential going forward as they were for the last 40 years or so. There’s a bunch of reasons for that. But as to other countries wanting to do business with them there’s a lot political going on too.

• China isn’t cheap labor comparatively anymore. A lot of low skill has moved to India, Vietnam, etc.
• We saw several movements of manufacturing, I see no reason it can’t move out of China just like it did elsewhere chasing either cheaper labor or better supply chains or more amenable political systems.
• China is having all sorts of economic woes in their property and bank crisis.
• China is going to go through a demographic contraction like Japan did starting in the 90s. It’s going to be on a larger scale.
• China isn’t a better partner than the west for developing nations. It’s proven it also just exploits for raw materials and the like.
• The US and Europe after COVID see manufacturing as the strategic issue it always was again, so they want to move stuff closer or back into their countries.

That said, I think a lot of people overestimate how much the US needs China. There are plenty of countries that would step up and be happy to get any set of consumer spending from western countries IMO. I think a lot of multinationals could make it the next “offshoring” cycle to move production from China to Mexico, India, etc etc. The other thing people forget is the west can and does play dirty too.

Like I said - all that would make it seem like just assuming China has a long term plan that is going to obviously beat the US is buying their propaganda IMO. The bigger issues though are the wildcards - will LLM AI actually provide a huge productivity boost again and let China manage their shrinking population in terms of economic output? Will it do it in a way that doesn’t also advantage using the enhanced automation within Western countries vs China’s previous inherent cheaper labor due to lots and lots of people?

Will Climate Change make it more and more difficult to have a global shipping network, making it even more expensive to have a world manufacturing hub in the future? Will the US Navy keep patrolling the seas to prevent piracy?

But back to being an essential part of the global economy. China doesn’t have a lot of settlement networks outside China that third parties are using. China doesn’t even let you take Yuan out of the country in most cases, even if someone wanted to take it in payment. So China isn’t a big Finance player outside their borders. COVID already showed that we can survive if China stops shipping stuff for a while, and I think that will get more robust and diversified as time goes on.

I kinda think that’s the plan. The US beat the Soviets that way, they probably think they can repeat that success. Population trends imply this might well work out for the US, but then again AI and Climate Change are real economic wild cards.

I am honestly not sure how much the US would care if China did less business with them, I think lots of people would actually be happy about that after the supply chain issues seen with COVID19.

I think this is another place I just don’t get because I never used Adobe seriously - what is a size of library? And why would it affect OSS programs specifically? I just use my file manager (thunar or krusader) or CLI (bash) and both work pretty well with dozens to hundreds of files per folder, and I try to not have thousands of pictures in a given folder because that just means I’ve got a messed up pile of photos to ever refer back to. My current trip length and amount of photos will mean I need to break it up when I copy them over to my RAID, but I’d want to break up by day / location anyway so I can go back and find them later.

Fair enough. As I’ve gotten into photography I have avoided all Adobe products due to how shit they are from a OS clean living point of view, and then being a subscription. But I also don’t heavily edit my photos so ART / Rawtherapee and GIMP work ok for me.

I find it pretty easy to want other laptops because I don’t use Apple stuff because I dislike their UX. I know I’m weird but if I never have to get close to OSX or iOS I’m pretty happy.

This may be true for chrome, but as far as I can tell anyone building chromium can also change that open source code to not break ad blockers?

I don’t need YouTube that much. It’s competing with books, more traditional TV shows and movies, and Nebula / Curiosity Stream and Wondrium / LinkedIn Learning. I guess I might miss some reaction videos, but oh well.

OMG I can’t wait. This was amazing.

This “he isn’t an idiot” or “not enough of an idiot” is the wrong way to think about things. Smart people believe all sorts of dumb things, and plenty of smart people can delude themselves, especially when they surround themselves with “yes men”.

The other thing is X isn’t the only social media platform, nor was ever a particularly large one as users go. Getting rid of Twitter just pushes people to threads, mastodon, bluesky and others. It doesn’t actually shut down much speech at all.

I think the non-conspiracy thinking is just - Musk was addicted to twitter, liked saying edgy and engaging stuff and because of what was more of a boast but legally was a binding sort of offer to buy ended up forced to buy Twitter. The legal forces were well documented at the time. Now that Musk has Twitter, he decided to make it into what he always professed it should be, along with his egomania has made it more and more like any number of “free speech absolutest” spin offs that turned into right wing cesspools that regular people find less and less appealing, and advertisers really find concerning.

I mean, the claim is it’s going to revolutionize the cell phone like the iPhone did. I’m not saying how “worth it” it’ll be. I’m saying I don’t see it changing the form factor much, or the general way you might interact with your phone much. Maybe I’m reading too much into the iPhone part - the change from ever smaller flip phones or slide phones to kind of ever larger slab touchscreens.

It was obvious when you pulled out an iPhone in 2008 you had the new hotness. AI is mostly invisible - how do you make that a status symbol? People already voice interact with their phones, or type interact with their phones. Unless this AI is mind reading and mind writing, I’m not seeing how it’s going to be that interface sea change or visual style change. All the things I can see current AI helping with are entirely incremental in terms of using an interface.

https://windowsreport.com/desktop-vs-laptop-market-share/ implies that desktops market share is shrinking, but it’s not as low as I thought it was. That said, many desktops I see out there in business (and at work) are “tiny” ones that you can’t upgrade either, they’re a laptop without the screen built in.

When I talk about a benefit to upgrading most parts, I mean that if you go buy say a general consumer model at Wal-Mart, you probably can’t just change out the CPU because the sockets change frequently. The RAM may have a spare slot, or be able to be increased in size, which is probably the most bang for your buck unless your PC happens to be a slow spinning disk. Most of the pre-built PCs have a PSU sized exactly for what’s in the box, and there usually isn’t a discrete GPU. Not only that, but there aren’t extra plugs, so you’re not plugging in a PCIe GPU without swapping out the PSU.

All things I’d imagine most computer buyers don’t or can’t do. They buy a box, and when it “dies” they buy a new box. I’ve only met PC Gamers online in the last … 15 years or so. Everyone else uses a console, phone, or gave up gaming.

No one I know upgrades PCs in a 3 year cycle and haven’t since the aughts. This is because high end PCs from 2010 worked straight through 2022 for people - Windows 11 is pushing new PCs, in so far as people care to upgrade / patch. Most people want the cheapest PC possible, which means they’re not upgrading anything till it breaks. And they upgrade the entire PC at a time.

As to the phone I have, I have a Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite from 2019. No desire to upgrade it till it dies.

I just still can’t see how AI as it currently exists will help there. I think glasses based heads up displays will be more useful if they ever figure them out, and eventually something like the Minority Report waving your hands in the air interface making the phone mostly just the “tower” would be far more likely to revolutionize phones than a better Siri or search engine. Even to the extent of it thinking… I have had human virtual assistants for like a decade and shooting them email didn’t change anything about my phone.

I don’t think that is big - no one buys tower PCs anymore where you already can do that sort of thing, because there actually isn’t a benefit to upgrading most parts anymore. I am still using my android phone from 2019 because it literally does everything I could want a phone to do. I may be lacking vision, but I also don’t really see what AI is going to do here to change the form factor. The reason the slab has endured IMO is that it is a swiss army knife of the pocket computing device. You don’t want to go back toa phone with a tiny screen and just talk at AI because that’s a terrible web browser ui. It’s a terrible book or comic reading ui. It’s a terrible gaming ui. It’s bad for displaying chat, pictures, videos etc.

AI will probably help voice to text and vice versa so we can talk text instead of making a phone call better. I can see it helping anytime you don’t want to go into your phone, but I also see it as a new interface roughly like Siri. And no one thought that Siri was the iPhone of anything.

I just don’t think AI first makes sense. Everyone wants the Star Trek computer until they actually try and use it by talking at a computer. It’s just not efficient imo.

It depends on what you’re buying - I don’t buy (commodity) books much anymore so can’t comment on those. What I can say is for “random tat” that I don’t need quickly, Temu is an unabashedly “cheap chinese stuff” that is often the same as the Amazon version, but usually a lot cheaper. I’m assuming they charge less fees to the sellers. They deliver in under 2 weeks. AliExpress has now started offering the same service. Downside is there’s not really returns - or at least I’ve never wanted to deal with the hassle. However, for most stuff under $10, I wasn’t going to return to Amazon either.

For “Brand Name Stuff” I kind of go to ebay and/or the specific retailer like Best Buy or B&H or the manufacturers site. They seem far less likely now to have counterfits because with e-bay the actual seller is tied to the specific product where Amazon isn’t, and the other stores don’t want counterfeits and have a more controlled supply chain.

For stuff like spices or the like, ebay or Walmart.com seems reasonably good. Walmart also has a lot of random sellers, but as far as I can tell, they don’t do the binning Amazon does, if you buy from Walmart it’s from them, if you buy from a third party, it ships from that third party.

Honestly I think the best solution would be what ISPs used to do. They would bundle basic email and usenet and web page with your monthly internet access account. You could pay extra if you needed more, either to the ISP or to a specialist provider. The ISP also helped you connect so non techies could still use email etc. More expensive providers like AOL would provide chat and forums too.

But we’ve stripped internet access to data access, basically web site loading. I don’t think you fix it though because you have to be pretty techie to understand why you’d want a non ad based email provider, forget about why you’d want lemmy / fediverse or usenet, chat etc.

I sort of miss the more ‘niche’ but non techie / nerdy communities but just find myself reading books again, which is also less stressful.

I can see this sort of thing being interesting - but the article says they still need an employee to pick up drink glasses it knocks over, and top up drinks it doesn’t properly fill. For now, it’s more a novelty, and one that I’d guess might wear off sort of fast.

This doesn’t seem like new automation - we have had all sorts of drink vending machines for decades, and I believe we’ve had cocktail ones for at least a few years. And if it sold, people would have already been using it. This seems more like the automatic fountains and such that’s as much the “show” as the practical effect.

The other issue IMO has always been age checking - so there’s probably a legal challenge to just replacing all bartenders with one of these. What it might eventually do is replace bartending as a skill in so much as making the drinks, but it’ll need integrated facial recognition and ID parsing, as well as a lot of speech to text and back via a likely better / tuned ChatGPT to really take over. Though anyone who’s going to a bar to interact with the bartender probably won’t for these.

The problem IMHO is just that you need a different app for each cities cab companies. That’s great if you were living in that city and regularly taking cabs. I don’t know what the percentage is, but at least for me, I only take cabs when I’m travelling, otherwise I drive my own car. I like having one or two apps, and I don’t have to find, sign up for, and configure an app for each city I go to.

Note - this is actually a bigger issue, not one that the cab companies can necessarily fix - but I think PayPal is doing the best here in having a “checkout with PayPal” on random websites and I don’t have to do anything but log into paypal. I’m still surprised it seems like no one else is really doing it. I’ve very occasionally seen Pay on Amazon, but I don’t recall if in those cases I still needed to create an account on the website etc unlike the newer offering from PayPal.

Where’s American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Zelle, Venmo, Cashapp, etc or even another new offering that just makes it as easy as PayPal does to have your “Pay online / in the app” account that if you do it gives the seller the payment (without exposing your actual card number), and address if needed for shipping?

I still believe there’s a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there’s no “magic” or subsidies in what they’re doing. Yet what they’re doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.

Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they’re not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I’ll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.

Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for “free”, compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you’re on Linux, then f**k you, so I don’t use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.

I still think there’s a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don’t cross compare.

I tend to think this will play out as a tech demo if it happens. At least initially. Then we’ll probably have the same split people have over all the other AI art - some people will love it for cheap content, others will feel it’s completely “fake” (whatever they mean by that), and some will pay extra for “human made” stuff. Similar to furniture and other mass produced vs hand made …