Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

Smart fridge pic.twitter.com/xKSSLdCR3b

— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) September 3, 2019

However, in Britain, we have let the meter design be driven by the energy suppliers. They have no real interest in real-time data; as for billing they only need it on a monthly basis. Instead, they compromised and designed meters which upload data once a day.

hahahaha wow this is fucked up

Getting DDoS'd by my cats - whose dumb idea was this cat flap? pic.twitter.com/bRDWyJYr1o

— Norm Driskell (@n0rm) September 6, 2019

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

read this a couple days ago, fairly convincing argument (not wholly original) that the collapse of soviet models of state-sponsored r&d since the 1960s means that the last 60+ years of technical innovation are really just the gradual commercialisation of innovations paid for by state funded research. The idea that capitalism drives innovation is a myth and outsourcing technological improvement to private industry has predictably meant declining standards as the bottom line is better served by exploiting global networks of cheap labour than spending money designing robots that can do everything. I think the caveat he leaves out would have actually improved his argument. Medical innovation has been huge in the last sixty years but it also the most socialised model of provision of any sector, even in the highly commercialised US healthcare system where the figures of state spending are famously high.

recent uk government alignment of the university sector with private industry imperatives (Jo Johnson, the national industrial strategy) shows the gov pursuing a legacy where state-funded universities must compete to secure funding by directly appealing to the needs of industry. A sort of frankenstein partial regression to the model the article outlines but with the post 2008 crash neoliberal ethos of "socialism for the extremely rich, horrible venture capital logic for the rest of you plebs." No wonder everything is truly shit.

ticket taking used to mean ripping the stub and letting someone in. obv fraud was an issue so of course they moved to the scan system. ok, one extra second or so.

but now all these events are Mobile only so you have to wait for some asshole to remember to pull up the event on his phone, and god forbid his screen brightness is low, they sit there for five minutes trying to get scanned in.

i was at Halloween Horror Nights last night using an express pass and the line would come to a standstill multiple times while the staff had trouble scanning in someone's mobile express ticket because either the brightness was too low, they were holding the scanner wrong, they didn't know how to use the scanner, or the doofus didn't have it ready when he got to the front of the line.

mmmm meter data

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

xxp - ha, the argument and title sounded familiar - that essay is also in Graeber's book "Utopia of Rules" that I read a few months back. The title essay is really good, and then I got to that one and felt like it was a filler track on a 90s album in comparison

I dream of a basic HTML version of all websites and a way to make this default

I use lynx to read nytimes

I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

Are those safety precautions? About readability? Something else?

ah, sorry, jokes bruv

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

rms otm

i see he keeps that page up to date:

A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such a threat to freedom that I could not treat it as anything but an enemy.

my man

I think you are misunderstanding, It was a DVD that had just arrived in the mail and she popped it in her DVD-R drive.

My preferred joke with the future of "high tech, self driving transportation options" has been that you try to get on a toll road or cross a bridge into Canada and they're like ... this vehicle isn't compatible. You're gonna need a dongle. Pull over to that truck stop over there and you can buy a dongle, because your vehicle needs a dongle.

nabisco!!

that future is now and it's called brexit

it's also called the SF Bay Area, where they are probably going to completely eliminate the ability to pay cash on toll bridges (the Golden gate Bridge is already automated).

no dongles required

basically you just get a bill in the mail

don't be afraid

dongles are your friend

it's the price of freedom

In this dingle dongle morning
I'll come following you

lol

Hey @Tesla can you help me explain to my wife why I can't drive her to the dentist? I gotta tell you, if you can't drive it then it's not a car. On hold 25 minutes and counting. pic.twitter.com/qA52jABFHm

— Jon Johnson (@jrjohnson_) September 9, 2019

cars have never broken down til now

you'd think we'd have figured out this whole dentist thing by now

yeah actually otm

update on my new printer: prints great, slight odour of cigarettes

we found the place arcade fire sang about

Haiti?

magical place where dude's car does not go

I'd say you're romanticizing Haiti a bit though I'm no expert on the place

cars have never broken down til now

― theRZA the JZA and the NDB (darraghmac), Wednesday, September 11, 2019 9:00 AM (twenty-six minutes ago)

adding another thing that can go wrong to stop your car running beyond mechanical issues is dumb tho

well put, though I've heard a bit about these self driving cars having a camera or something to make sure the driver person's eyes are open... I think I'm with that

My car has some kind of immobilizer if it decides something is amiss. I accidentally activated a warning for it the other day when I left it running a moment while I got out with my keys. Nice for security, but also ominous.

ominous for your dentist's bottom line?

oh shit it's just like that arcade fire song

that other one about cars, Ready to Start

cars have never broken down til now

used to be unusual for a car manufacturer to remotely cause their product to break down, because they felt it was a good time for your car to break.

he doesn't even want his car to start. he wants tesla to "help (him) explain to (his) wife."

i don't know where this fits but there's a computer system in our Honda which needs to be calibrated exactly right for the car to pass a smog test, even though its emissions are very little. I went in for the test and it failed, and the guy told me "you need to drive your car up the 2 freeway to the 210 freeway and head west for a couple miles and then exit and get back on and come back here and then it should be good, you just need steady nonstop freeway driving for at least 25 miles and that's the only route that won't have traffic."

I did it and it worked but wtf.

Jon: I can't take you to the dentist because my car broke down,
wife: I don't understand. You can't drive it?
Jon: No
wife: Impossible. If you can't drive it, is it really a car that broke down?
Jon: I've been tricked.
wife: I don't understand.
*tweet*

i don't know where this fits but there's a computer system in our Honda which needs to be calibrated exactly right for the car to pass a smog test, even though its emissions are very little. I went in for the test and it failed, and the guy told me "you need to drive your car up the 2 freeway to the 210 freeway and head west for a couple miles and then exit and get back on and come back here and then it should be good, you just need steady nonstop freeway driving for at least 25 miles and that's the only route that won't have traffic."

I did it and it worked but wtf.

― omar little, Wednesday, September 11, 2019 12:52 PM (five minutes ago)

fuuuuuuuuck

xxp that sounds fishy, like the VW emissions cheating stuff.

there is widespread fraud in smog testing

just need the turbo or whatever to be heated enough to burn off that shit iirc

head down the n4 at 120 and throw her into 3rd is the common advice here