I was thinking all the big name critics from the 90s had all passed, but Shalit is still around.
Iced Raktajino
I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.
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Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: July 15th, 2025
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Yep, that’s the one.
I’ll reserve a phone but not a truck, lol. Looks like those are scheduled to be out late 2026, so probably at least next year before I can even think about getting my hands on one.
At least it’s still a thing.
I used to drive a 2004 Ranger and loved it. Would absolutely love an EV version even if the range isn’t super great. Mostly need a truck occasionally and for hauling stuff from the home improvement store or if I find furniture at a garage sale or something.
Need to check and see if that $20,000 no-frills EV truck is making any progress.
If it turns out to be the former, I don’t blame them.
I used to buy their stuff and use
tuya-convertto flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.
- Not every
<input type="text">is suitable for political opinions. - Political opinions are like assholes: we all have them, they all stink, we all think our own doesn’t stink, and the world is a better place when everyone doesn’t have them on constant display.
- People who inject politics into everything are generally insufferable and there’s a reason major communities have rules prohibiting politics.
- Not every
New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud
Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.
Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains.
New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries.
The move is “one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades,” according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. “It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines.”
Carmakers will need to attest to the U.S. government that, as of March 17, core elements of their products don’t contain code that was written in China or by a Chinese company. The rule also covers software for advanced autonomous driving and will be extended to connectivity hardware starting in 2029. Connected cars made by Chinese or China-controlled companies are also banned, wherever their software comes from.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won’t attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.
“Since the beginning of this administration, CISA has made significant progress in returning to our statutory, core mission and focusing on President Trump’s policies for maximum security for all Americans,” CISA spokesperson Marci McCarthy told us. “CISA has reviewed and determined that we will not participate in the RSA Conference since we regularly review all stakeholder engagements, to ensure maximum impact and good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
McCarthy declined to comment on whether the decision had anything to do with former CISA director Jen Easterly being named chief executive of RSAC last week.
I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.
My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.
I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).
Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.
The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.
I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.
The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.
I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.
Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.
I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).
Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.
Comcast’s attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn’t stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports:
The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh’s] comment about Comcast “not winning in the marketplace” nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.
“Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity,” Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast’s residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.
Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, “consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines.” Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly “for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing.” Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing “a more competitive environment from fiber” and continued competition from fixed wireless. “The market is going to remain intensely competitive,” he said.
I mean, first layer adhesion is a problem common to more than just a specific printer and there are all kinds of tips and tricks to deal with it. The only one I tried (covering the bed in painter’s tape) didn’t pan out, and a friend was talking up the glass bed he just installed.
So instead of trying more tips and tricks like taking a glue stick to the bed surface, I went with the glass bed. I was expecting it to be like a $60 part but it was only like $15 so that worked out really well.
My Ender 3 V3 SE (I think I got all the initials in there?) has been pretty painless. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the stock magnetic bed with the glass one. I was having constant adhesion problems with the base layer and the glass bed fixed that immediately.
The other thing that (seemed to) help was switching from whatever slicer I originally used (forget which) to OrcaSlicer and just using its generic defaults for the filament and printer options. When I first started, I took the specs from the filament rolls and made profiles for each brand, but that just made my prints worse. Orca’s defaults “just work” for me and less effort on my part. Win-win lol.
I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:
“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”
I guess what you’re calling “toxicity” is something I’ve dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my “see things through the eyes of a new user” experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I’ve had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that’s just me being naive.
Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or
/all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better “duplicate” detection system where there’s like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it’s basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on
.worldbefore I moved to startrek.website and the “feel” is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that’s primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don’t play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it’s significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today
True. I’ll admit I’m impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it’s just a reminder that we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I’m going off on a tangent, I know, so I’ll stop here.
I love it!