Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

Good to know. It has helped me reschedule my next visit to the USA to a billion days after never.

Just when you think you have seen the ultimate depths of human stupidity... something comes along proving you wrong.

Gee, pay $199 to $399/year for the privilege of accessing temperature controls. Or buy a $79 non-Internet-connected electric blanket. Hmm... tough choice...

> Why? Absolutely no idea

This isn't surprising to anybody who's studied the psychology of political science.

Those who identify as 'conservative' value maintenance much higher than those who identify as 'progressive'. You're more likely to see them in their driveway changing their oil and measuring their tire tread depth. It's just different kinds of people with different time-preference mindsets.

Note that with a limited budget maintenance spending is money that cannot be spent on immediate benefits.

You need to allocate some of the benefits money to upgrading the IT systems so there's less to hand out. "How could you possibly cut their benefits?" is the kind of misplaced empathy that undercuts the system that they feel is valuable.

Of course there's usually a Federal bailout in the wings for people who don't plan ahead so the incentive systems are all completely misaligned for good governance. Since the Lockdowns we've seen the weaponization of the Dollar through sanctions and tariffs that have pushed world oil markets to the Yuan and cross-border settlements in sovereign currency exchanges, so the Dollar is in freefall compared to commodities which means those bailouts are going to end very soon.

As this reckoning becomes too real to ignore the populations will move strongly to vote for candidates who seem to understand the value of maintenance.

Yeah, and Healthcare is 20% of GDP.

According to Keynesian economists, if we were all much healthier the economy would be worse off.

I'm not sure how much more evidence you need that the entire economic school is a bunch of self-styled money-priests making excuses for government spending.

Keynes did some really good early work but then he got caught diddling kids and after that the King's spending was all the best thing anybody could do.

An early version of "trust the experts".

So the code was written by people who aren't familiar with the idea of "fail-safe"?

I might have gone to school for software engineering but I never equated it with building a bridge at 4000' over a canyon. Those are different things.

But none of my classmates would have thought about building a stack that fails into random or dangerous conditions. We always built from the ground up and verified states as new functionality was added with test evaluation of the possible error states.

And those classes were in C++89 without the advantages of proper exception handling like Java or Python provide.

I think if I were in the market for a $5000 IoT mattress I'd want to see something like a UL label on it. I guess the hardware guys put in a thermal switch so the heating elements shut off at 110*F? Thank goodness a runaway fire wasn't a failure mode.

I wouldn't personally ever spend that kind of money on something like that but if I were rich and disabled maybe there would be use cases.

Part of 'learning AI' is understanding what it is and isn't good at, and the kinds of prompts that are likely to get you useful answers.

OK. But that doesn't directly help you get your answer, and so doesn't directly help your productivity. And in my experience, figuring out the kinds of prompts likely to get you useful answers is trial-and-error and a bit of a black art, so I'm not convinced that AI will ever meaningfully improve people's productivity. Instead of being stuck trying to think of an answer, they'll be stuck trying to prod a recalcitrant AI into giving them a useful response.

I don't think cultural collapse is the issue. The issue is what usually ruins things: greed. And now of course AI garbage, which is really just greed multiplied by a factor of 10.

As more and more people tried to "monetize" the Internet, they realized there are only two business models that work: Advertising or social-media-style attention-whoring (as you called it.) And both of those things suck.

I've played around with AI. I was unimpressed. I don't really know what it means to "learn" AI. As far as I can tell, you just hector it and keep rewording what you ask it until the turds it spews out are minimally smelly and maximally acceptable.

There's no science to this. Given that an integral part of every LLM is a random number generator, I don't see how there can possibly be any science to it.

I do not use AI. And I don't feel like I'm being "left behind".

FOMO is not a good reason to do something.

I retired in April, 2023. Right before all this AI BS exploded and turned software development into a hellhole. As long as AI doesn't destroy humanity or tank the stock markets, I consider myself extremely lucky to have escaped the AI hype.

The AI snake-oil peddlers are pushing hard. But there's yet to be a single company making profit from AI, save Nvidia which profits by selling hardware to the suckers. Not to mention that the gen-AI industry is theft of intellectual property on an industrial scale; a rapacious environment-destroying energy consumption beast; a supremely confident liar; and an exploiter of underpaid workers whose jobs are to make sure the training doesn't go off the rails and filter out the most disgusting or misleading data from the giant training set.

Doesn't the Nissan Leaf get about 60 miles?

I was looking at a cheap used one that was down to 45 miles, I think.

30 miles gets me to town and back so it would only last a few years at that rate.

Thanks, I'll try it. Yes, anything that can rehabilitate Starbucks' noxious brew is worth looking into!

I think you're right; I became acclimatized to instant. However, sometimes I go to local coffee shops that make espresso or cappucinos and I prefer those to my instant. Maybe it's just the home espresso machines I dislike.

I honestly prefer instant coffee to most other kinds of coffee. I bought a Nespresso machine with high hopes, and it's terrible. Way too bitter for me.

But you have to use the right instant coffee. This stuff is head and shoulders above any other instant coffee and better than most other types of coffee.