I remember getting my first 9600 baud modem and using macros in procomm plus to spam middle finger ansi art on dialup BBS in the late 80s knowing most users were stuck on 1200 or 2400 bauds still. I thought it was so funny at the time.

I used to be such an asshole. I mean, I'm still an asshole. But I used to be one too.

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

Neither is erudite language. Grow up.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

Defrosting happens at any temperature above freezing. 50F is a perfectly reasonable max temp for a refrigerator. 50C is not.

First, they are refrigerators. They do not need to be connected to the internet and should not be, period. You want to remotely manage them? Use anything but the internet.

Second, why would you make them remotely accessible FROM ANY IP ADDRESS? Do you not know what a firewall is? A whitelist? Conditional access?

Third, why the fuck would a REFRIGERATOR need the ability to COOK anything? Did someone forget the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius and give them a max temp of 50C when it should've been 50F?

Fourth, vendors should be held liable for this shit. Manufacturers who provide always in fully connected devices should not get a "get out of liability free" card by saying "you should always upgrade to the latest firmware" and should be held accountable for producing REFRIGERATION units that can be turned into OVENS.

Fifth, and finally, as per the norm, I did not RTFA so maybe it mentioned this, but I'm willing to bet there were default passwords still in use. Yet another thing manufacturers should be held liable for. It shouldn't be possible to hook it up and start using it without configuration that requires setting reasonably secure credentials.

For roughly $60 you can buy a RPi 3 model B+ with a power supply, heat sinks, case, and SD card. Load it up with pi-hole & unbound and you needn't worry about any of the big players like cloudflare blocking DNS you want and you can block as much DNS you don't want as Quad9 or more on your own. You don't even need the RPi. If you have an old laptop or PC laying around you can probably run it on that. Just remember to use BOTH pi-hole AND unbound and don't point pi-hole at Google or cloudflare or quad9 resolvers.

It was very much built upon an existing code base. If not, what was the AI trained on then?

I asked my buddies ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and grok and they all said they would never lie to me!

It has happened under both.

Free speech includes lying.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.