Even living in the US (but being on Lemmy and therefore knowing computers and hating advertising) getting stuck watching cable TV at a relative’s house can be a real “boring dystopia” experience.
It can be genuinely disturbing when you realize the majority of the ads you’ve seen were for ONLY medication and gambling.
Live TV is so bad that I would take $65/mo of corporate streaming services over FREE cable.
I choose neither, but if those were the only two options there’s no contest.
I feel at home in this photo. My beard has turned 1% more gray this blessed night.
The key differences I have come from the fact that I am drawn to the “chief engineer turned goose farmer” future even more than the “greybeard recluse inventor” one. I
get to use a Debian machine at work all day anyway, plus of course the home PC runs it. With KDE there is nothing that feels old about it unless I check when the kernel was released.
My car isn’t THAT old but it’s on its way. I drive an almost 15 year old mazda3, which we have owned for all of those years. I just did my biggest-yet DIY maintenance/repair when I had to replace some disintegrated-yet-seized brake hoses in addition to pads and rotors and flushing the fluid. In my driveway, no garage. I got a bunch of new wrenches and vise grips!
The mazda is an automatic since we originally bought it for my wife. But it was right after the company debuted the Skyactiv stuff. Among other things like great fuel efficiency, that means the transmission locks up the torque converter as often as possible. And it has manual shift mode. So when you’re in gear holding some mid-range RPM, you do still feel that direct powertrain connection between engine and wheels.
Part of me is casually keeping tabs on the “fun” new car models out there that still offer a manual transmission or DCT. But another part of me is constantly noting to self how I already have a nearly perfect old familiar car that is fun and practical for the whole family. It has low mileage for the age and a good maintenance history. And it is $FREE versus $30,000+.
Aside from the car difference, I have cast off a bunch of little devices and accessories thanks to my conscious efforts to be less connected and more about experiencing life at my natural pace. I no longer wear a watch, ever, even though I definitely have the chunky leather wallet. Also no glowing visible clocks in the bedroom or family room. And no big stereo because 95% of my music listening is via headphones at work or working outside in my yard.
However, if someone went to a phone store with a stock graphene on display and anything else next to it, which one do you think they’ll choose?
Given the past couple years I’d like to think the fraction to choose graphene would be multiple times what it would have been 5-10 years ago. But not close to a majority.
“How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”
Spoken like a true sales/con artist. I can almost hear the brand guidelines poking through… Always mention safety before privacy, always treat safety as a given and privacy as the buffer zone in which to find compromise.
The compromise is how far each town chooses to go above security tier 0: emergencies with immediate threat to life or property.
Yeah it’s less like something new and more like “Thank you, ancient me, for deciding it was always a good policy to go heavy on the RAM.”
Even if generated images originally could be traced to the training data, I think that maybe just maybe the shady gigacorps would have some incentive to remove or obfuscate the copyright & IP violation paper trail from their trillion-dollar toys.
Oh no, I will be sure to keep an eye out for these scary vandals invading my peaceful town over these next few days!
I mean, you never know when a passionate young person needs a “thumbs up” to brighten their day and boost their confidence.
And in case any of them want to step to me, I can threaten them with all the old power tools I have in my house that they could learn to use.
God: eternal and omniscient.
Also god: surprised pikachu.
As a middle-aged homeowner with a modest house that’s older than me, not to mention two old cars for the family: This is a situation where I’d probably try to spend as little as possible at first, but I could also make that money vanish overnight and nobody would notice.
Well shit, I never cared about the name but this convinced me because adoption and teaching about FOSS matters more.
If it IS fun for you though, I’d suggest it is far more valuable to you than the soap itself and/or any savings.
Just rolling through here like “Do not cite the old firmware to me Witch. I was there when it was written.”
Sometimes it’s not the moutains that get you, it’s the smaller hills and valleys surrounding them because there are actually people and roads there.
Sometimes if you make a wrong turn in Pittsburgh, you are not just going the wrong direction but are also at the wrong elevation or on the wrong layer, and there’s no looping around the block to get back to where you started.
Disclaimer: This thread led me to read the Wikipedia article about Appalachia. Some definitions of the region do not include Pittsburgh or even parts of Pennsylvania, but at the same time there’s a photo of downtown Pittsburgh at the top of the article, so I went with it.
Translation: I am uncomfortable with people different from me and I want to dictate how they live their lives, therefore I project upon those other people that they must want to do the same to me and all the world’s decent people who are (of course) like me.
Another story on the pile of “I’m a middle aged american and France was always the butt of the joke, yet they seem to have their heads on straighter than most places on the planet.”
Some glass can be surprisingly strong to the extent that it feels wrong and unintuitive.
Not auto glass in my anecdote, but last year I had a medium sized aquarium (30 gallons, ~114 liters) where the bottom got broken. I didn’t need to fix it because I had a bigger spare waiting, so I decided to break it apart to more easily package the glass into a safe container for disposal or recycling.
I was able to smack that thing on a wide flat surface with a HAMMER and have it bounce right off. They were really hard swings too. My biggest concern was how freaking loud the hits were, like I was going to disturb a neighbor in their house or make them think they heard a gunshot. My second biggest concern was that I was going to fling glass across the yard using so much force. I believe put it into a large bin or wrapped it in something before I got the courage to turn it up to 11 and break the fucker.
I think I used a 3lb drilling hammer too, which looks like a mini sledgehammer. Heavier than a standard claw hammer, just not very pointy.
I actually used to do single dots in my own file/folder names. It’s probably my favorite way visually, since it’s a minimal separator and as you showed it works without a separator at all.
oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.
I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it’s unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don’t even use a year.
MY man!
First, I appreciate that your comment is even longer than mine AND came with the multimedia.
I totally get what you mean about it being an occasion to listen to music with the old equipment. I had at least one portable CD player with no anti-skip. So not only can I feel some of that experience just through nostalgia, but then I start thinking about nerdy little kid me getting a player with anti-skip. It had a clear window on the lid, so I could see how the disc spun at 2x speed for while when starting a song or causing skips. I started to understand how it was filling a buffer and must have had a bit of extra RAM in there. And now middle aged me monitors and controls engine RPM all the time in my automatic car, lol.
On listening to MP3s, I see no issue there, but I have always been more of a videophile and less of an audiophile. However, I have also transitioned away from locally stored music, to just streaming from my Jellyfin server. Thanks to that practically eliminating audio size concerns, I just use FLACs of everything.
As high tech as that sounds, the server capacity also helps me discover music in the old-fashioned & natural way rather than algorithmically. When I realize I am missing some song I want, I will add as much of that band’s entire discography as I have available. Then it’s just a question of whether I listen to albums or random songs. Any songs that noticeably stroke my neurons the right way gets added to my single playlist of bangers, for when I don’t want random or albums.
Finally, a manual transmission midsize sedan can still be had in a few non-BMW forms. I have actually been researching current fun-transmission new cars even though I don’t plan to buy anything any time soon. Most of them will be performance oriented models that recommend premium, but most seem to be able to run regular these days with just reduced max hp. So just going off memory for now:
Civic Si - This might be your best bet. High fuel economy, great 6-speed, well equipped, well priced. I think it’s in the Car & Driver top 10, with a 10/10 score, alongside the Type R which is like $20K more.
Mazda3 hatchback - ok it’s not a sedan, but for some reason you can get a specific premium trim level of the hatchback with a really good 6-speed. It’s also a FWD 2.5L that recommends regular unleaded.
Elantra N: 6-speed manual and 8-speed DCT available. Seems like an extremely fun performance bargain. Lots of tech and adjustability, including fancy LSD.
WRX: 6-speed AND full time AWD. I had one long ago and loved it. It isn’t regarded as being quite as aggressive and refined as the Si and the N these days I think, but it’s definitely a great all around vehicle and you aren’t stuck with FWD if that matters to you.