I'm old. Like, well, really REALLY old. And you would think being essentially immortal would come with perks like being able to see, but having effective ciliary muscles and them being completely dead are two different things.

I watched the preso and my first thought was "Jesus (... thank you again sir), Apple keeps making better phones for old people!" This seems like one such phone, although I don't see myself opening my wallet for one until my 15 pro max is truly utterly dead (heh), and I know for sure that the hinge / crease is going to hold up.

Been creeping in for a bit. First in news, then in the stock ticker, tv, music, books, and now maps.

All passed off as helpful "suggestions."

The ones that really torque me off are "suggestions" in books, tv and music. I've disabled what I can but some of this can't be turned off.

Apple makes enough with hardware alone. They don't need to whoreify the whole "ecosystem."

I let 'em know what I think of it, but that all goes to the bitbucket. No one gives a rip. 2.5 billion is not even a dime's worth of pocket change, to them.

I won't move to Android, because that's Alphabet, ergo 100x worse. So here we are. I feel like Dark Helmet. Surrounded by assholes. Greedy assholes.

At least, for now, apple ads aren't *bam* in your face like others - but a "sponsored" result is an ad by another name.

I"m starting to understand the desire, of some, to move out to the woods, in a cabin, sans grid.

I'm a practitioner of "guerilla hi-fi" - you buy used, or build it yourself out of old schematics, rescue gear off the curb, etc.

o Speakers: 39 year old horns from Klipsch
o Receiver: 21 year old digital from panasonic
o Turntable : 49 years old Thorens
o Tape deck: 10 year old PC
o CD Player: Old beater Sony DVD
o Streaming: 20 year old Airport Express, hooked up with toslink, paired to my phone. AirPlay whatever I want from whatever "app" I want. Or from my own internal MP3 collection.

Not being beholden to a vendor like Sonos: Priceless

Sonos can go suck it. I can't even fathom its use case.

I get to stream whatever I want, and have studio-grade sound, all with kit nearly as old as I am.

Really? You must be in BFE or something.

Here where I am - somewhere in South Florida - FPL has consistently jacked up our rates, for a variety of stated reasons - including feeding the new colos.

Your experience != everyone else's.

My power bill has increased by about 20% DESPITE switching to LED lighting, which reduced my light draw from about 700w to maybe 50w for the whole house minus home cine and bathroom.

My power bill has increased DESPITE setting higher aircon temps.

So yes -- datacenters are absolutely jacking up rates, and have completely made irrelevant the change to LED.

I want my tungsten lamps back. A pox on the next son of a bitch who mandates a switch to a "higher efficiency" light, only see all those gains in efficiency wiped out by a much bigger power user.

The small drop in demand from going to LED is gone. Now, we have a massive increase in demand, supposedly solely to AI.

RAM, and other related prices, through the roof.

Happy, yet, tech bros? Not only did your greed jack up the global demand for electricity, now your insatiable thirst for cash and power make it so hardware's that much more expensive.

We abandoned our beloved tungsten, for this?

Do this to me, and I'll sue. I don't care for what -- the usual bullshit of "emotional damage" and "mental anguish" and all that.

I encourage every person erroneously flagged to do so. The only thing that hurts corporations is a hit on the wallet -- so hit their wallet, hard, and often.

Just a couple of random notes about the practicality of this.

• Some new inference data centers don't have gens. The idea is that with inference if a resource is not available it can be requested from another pool (availability zone). In these cases when the power goes out, the UPSs hold the load for 4-5 minutes to give the servers time to drop and then the site goes dark.
• Imagine 32 diesel freight train engines all powering up. That's what this is like for a site-wide utility power failure for a smallish data center. Thankfully most DCs now require an enclosure for each gen which limits the noise they produce while running.
• Most providers have between 24 and 48 hours of diesel fuel on-site. This is either in large central storage tanks or in belly tanks dedicated to each gen. A provider would have typically a 4-hour SLA on fuel delivery so once the gens start running a call is made to start running fuel trucks to the DC to begin the refueling process.

I'm not amused by it. The human on the other end is hoping the "AI" chatbot will give them results stripped of all SEO bullshit.

This alters that behavior. The chatbot will be unduly influenced by the ad, and the user will be unaware of this influence.

The answer is obvious: Online advertisement must die.

It's hard to parse sentences some of the words are.

Do not the cat.

Models and meteorologists want a *vertical* sample of the atmosphere. The ideal sensor would not bend, deflect, or drift off with the winds aloft. Balloons do a *lot* of drifting.

The soundings returned by the balloons are all skewed to some degree or another.

It's probably a way to prevent model collapse. So they don't train LLMs on data that has been generated by LLMs.

Every time you wash your car, hose off the underside too, then go for a long-ish drive to dry it all out.

Ziebart is still a thing.

Waxing the undercarriage is also still a thing, and now there's even better - silica coatings, ceramic coatings.

You do'nt get a car to last by being a passive customer, you get one to last by being an active steward.

And yes I've lived in rust belt. In snow country where sand and salt are used. I've worked on machinery that required the ultimate persuader - the blue wrench. (the torch.)

Today I live in sunny south florida, the car is garaged since day 1, and I still hose off the undercarriage at every wash as if I still was in snow country.

For every risk, there's an action you can take to reduce / eliminate that risk. in cars it's keeping it clean, on top and under the car, too.

I wouldn't know - my UI is toggle switches, rockers, rotary controls, levers.

The few times i've had to drive a "new" vehicle with touch-everything, they've all been uniformly terrible.

And I can't stand Tesla build quality. Have a co-worker with an S. It's mid-70's Detroit build quality. Loose trim, things that don't line up, panel gaps that aren't perfect, etc etc.

I'm keeping my current wheels until death do us part.

if the wheels fall off I put em back on again.

Light, stickshift, simple, joyful. No watchful eye. No connection to any network. It does have a black box that can be played back tho.

But today's cars? An affront to privacy, an affront to the person who enjoys driving, an affront to basic decency.

Maintain your old cars, folks - they don't make 'em like they used to now, and this time is far worse than prior shockwaves.

Stuff like this makes the federally-mandated screen seem downright tame.

...you could have a jar where you put, say, $20 a week. Or $10.

Even if you have a device now.

Let that jar fill. In 2 or 3 or 4 years, when you need a new phone, there'll be enough in that jar to buy that new phone outright without having to finance.

I understand if you can't do it the very first time. Fine. Finance that first phone. But immediately start on the saving $10-20 a week, for years.

You'll break the cycle, and it is liberating

(jar is metaphorical. You could open a savings account that you don't touch for anything except phones. And direct-deposit a tiny slice of your paycheck into it, and forget it exists until new phone time.)

Try it.