It's like those Cthuluh (sp?) stories where you have cults that worship a destructive god that kills them instantly whenever it manifests. When you read it you think "why would they worship something like that ?!?" And now I'm not surprised anymore.

I haven't been on one project that was improved by hiring a consultant.

One company hired a consultant for $7M and their best advice was to skin the app black. $7M.

Yeah. Companies already have so many rights and advantages the people don't (being immortal for example), it's getting crazy that they want to pilfer the few we have. Citizen United has done *so much* damage for democracy and the world at large.

I have a Honda with an obsolete "infotainment" system, but at least it has an Aux In next to a USB port that provides power, so I can plug in an $11 UGreen dongle and listen to whatever I feel like. If I cared there are some nice 7" 1080p screens for cheap in the Raspberry Pi space that could be shoehorned in and run at 12V. But I'd rather have no screen at all.

Funny thing is that UGreen pairs faster than any other bluetooth device I have and never doesn't work. For eleven bucks.

With the fickleness of Google and Apple there's no chance they'll even support the current CarPlay and Android Auto in 20 years. I like to keep my vehicles 15-30 years, depending on how well they handle rust.

Maybe Crutchfield will make bypass harnesses for these systems in ten years when absolutely nothing works but the screen and speakers are still useful.

We really should be looking for standards at that level, so the compute modules could be upgraded after the manufacturer abandons their platforms.

As Louis says, you shouldn't be a felon for disabling ads on your refrigerator that you never agreed to.

"Organic" means there is a specific list of SUBSTANCES that are allowed. This is the list:

National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances

What is allowed seems sensible, judging from the detailed explanations.

Heliboard is its modern replacement that gets updates.

Install Obtanium.
Install Heliboard.
Install Futo voice typing.

Jettison the Google input stealers.

Wrong. Even 50yo models were accurate enough to predict the current (and ongoing) situation: https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming. And a recent comparison of 15 models of the 80s recently showed that they were all basically correct. But who am I kidding, you are not gonna read that anyway, as you are confusing weather and climate on purpose as usual.

That way you'll *really* get off line, what with you recording it for posterity!

The science of AI, Artificial Intelligence, is rapidly advancing. The "Intelligence" is NOT "Artificial".

The speed of advancement is partly because AI reduces company expenses.

> 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.

You are indeed the troll here, not rsilvergun. You have a mental problem, please get help.