Or they’ll just build a backdoor into it (it probably already exists) and never talk about it again.

I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.

I live in a rich suburb of a big city and as far as I can tell the city actually has control of the police, the police union isn’t run by a bunch of comic book villains, and the non-MAGA “good cops” actually want to work here, and do. Hop over to the big city and their police union acts as a 4th arm of government run by truly evil people.

Local PD can’t do anything because the second they do, Insurrection Act.

Minnesota has “permit to carry”, so you need a permit to legally have a firearm in public. Other states have banned open carry at protests. There are legal barriers.

With everything that is happening I’m questioning my state’s assault weapon ban. The feds are unhinged.

No, and if there were, it would likely give actual legal grounds for the federal government to invoke the Insurrection Act which would allow domestic deployment of the US military - not National Guard, full military. Local PD isn’t doing much for the same reason.

“Legal” doesn’t mean much anymore

Because at the same time they’re trying to implement age verification for app stores while also very vaguely defining what an app store is.

The Act defines an “App Store” as “a publicly available Internet website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes software applications from the owner or developer of a software application to the user of a mobile device.”

So… what constitutes a mobile device? Who is an owner/developer? Does github have to implement age verification for mobile devices?

I use DuckDuckGo and it is better in general, but still has a big pitfall with AI generated websites. I’ve used some others like SearXNG but those feel experimental at best. I’m willing to hear about viable alternatives.

Totally agree. In my day to day work, I’m not dealing with anything groundbreaking. Everything I want/need to code has already been done.

if you have a Copilot license and are using the newest Visual Studio, it enables the agentic capabilities by default. It will actually write the code into your files directly. I have not done that and will not do that. I want to see and understand what it is trying to do.

No, I’m saying that I bought some stuff then changed my ways. I didn’t look elsewhere previously. I am looking elsewhere now, and I will not give Amazon money. I was highlighting the problem that tons of people run into - shit is still cheaper at Amazon even if it is much more expensive than it was 2 years ago.

In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results right on the first page. Maybe an ad or two.

Now it is effectively:

• AI summary
• ad
• ad
• ad
• link that is effectively an ad
• link to AI generated website
• link to AI generated website
• link to an actual decent result
• link to a questionable result
• link to AI generated website

I forget the exact proposed bill, it might have been SOPA (or something else threatening net neutrality), and it might have been around 2010. That made me think “they want to make the internet into cable TV”. And we’re pretty close to that being reality in a way.

They have a near monopoly on certain goods. I built my home gym using Amazon 2 years ago. I couldn’t find most of the stuff anywhere else for anywhere near the same prices.

Things have changed. I don’t use Amazon anymore. Out of curiosity I checked some prices on my gym equipment and a lot of it is 50+% more now. The squat rack I have is almost double the price.

Prices elsewhere haven’t gone down. It is still probably cheaper to buy the double the price squat rack from Amazon. But I’m done, Amazon is full evil.

Yeah I had the same thing happen with a smartwatch. I want a new band made of fabric instead of the silicone rubber or whatever it is. It is extremely frustrating to find one anywhere but Amazon. I don’t use Amazon anymore, so I guess I’m getting my random Chinese products from ebay now. Not sure if that’s any better.

The font was chosen in an effort to make documents easier to read for the vision impaired.

This is like removing the requirement of having curb ramps on new sidewalks because it makes it possible for people in wheelchairs to navigate

I’m really split with it. I’m not a 10x “rockstar” <insert modern buzzword> programmer, but I’m a good programmer. I’ve always worked at small companies with small teams. I can figure out how to parse requirements, choose libraries/architecture/patterns, and develop apps that work.

Using Copilot has sped my work up by a huge amount. I do have 10 YoE before Copilot existed. I can use it to help write good code much faster. It may not be perfect, but it wouldn’t have been perfect without it. The thing is I have enough experience to know when it is leading me down the wrong path, and that still happens pretty often. What it helps with is implementing common patterns, especially with common libraries. It basically automates the “google the library docs/stackoverflow and use code there as a starting point” aspect of programming. (edit: it also helps a lot with logging, writing tests, and rewriting existing code as long as it isn’t too whacky, and even then you really need to understand the existing code to avoid a mess of bugs)

But yeah search is completely fucked now. I don’t know for sure but I would guess stackoverflow use is way down. It does feel like many people are being pigeonholed into using the LLM tools because they are the only things that sort of work. There’s also the vibe coding phenomenon where people without experience will just YOLO out pure tech debt, especially with the latest and greatest languages/libraries/etc where the LLMs don’t work very well because there isn’t enough data.

The USA approach to this is to mandate a comical number of outlets everywhere (to prevent extension cord usage), mandate a large number of individual circuits (especially for things that draw a large amount of power), and more recently some combo of AFCI/GFCI/CAFCI breakers (to provide some level of sensing things going wrong and shutting off power).

The stats are not great for the USA in terms of number of fires. I haven’t done deep research. From personal experience, most homes built after modern US electrical code was fleshed out are generally fine. Modern homes (or ones upgraded to modern code) seem very safe - the “smart” breakers tend to actually work.

My anecdote here is that my relatively small hometown area (15,000 people, largely built up between 1860-1940) still has frequent fires relating to electrical and heating systems and the current city I live in (95,000 people mostly built up starting in ~1960) has very few fires ever. I spend 2 weeks a year around Christmas back in my hometown. 3 of the last 7 years had a structure loss fire while I was there. In the same period of time there have been 2 structure loss fires in my current city total.

I think the switches are nice but in the modern world you really don’t need to unplug a vast majority of things. Even my $30 120V USA space heater shuts itself off if it tips over or gets too hot. My cell phone charger pulls functionally 0W while idling.

They won’t kill it, just like it hasn’t died so far. The content, viewer demographics, and algorithm continue to shift. There’s too much money with all the ads and subscription fees. Most people view some content on it by default.

Its gonna be the new cable TV in a way. Kinda sucks, some good stuff on it, but mostly slop filled with ads. And everyone will still use it. Even if they block all 3rd party access, people like me are still going to use it to some limited degree. There will be a video about how to fix a random plumbing fitting that is leaking in my house, or how to fix some random thing on my 15 year old car.

Could it be your carrier somehow doing that? I’ve literally never had that happen