We use Amazon way too heavily and my page was still super boring.

Search results also really suck these days. It’s pages upon pages of SEO slop.

I do similar, but in my case I made all notifications silent minus three total apps: the app my wife and I use to text and the two different apps my kids teachers use.

It’s… so nice. It’s almost as rewarding as my recent email unsubscing binge and setting up rules some of the other stuff I want to keep out of the spotlight.

I wonder if we’re going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn’t solve search though. It’s also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.

Search, and the web in general, are still horribly broken IMO. This makes the results crap in many cases. The SEO game was round one. Round two were all the different sites that were scraping each other and posting the same information with different formatting. Today the top results are all basically just slop on plausible sounding domain names that were registered within the past year or two.

smart lights are amazingly useful

I’m not saying your wrong, but I also don’t understand the use case? Maybe I’m a Luddite, but things like like dimmers, motion sensors and two way light switches seem to meet my needs well. It’s also not difficult to buy high CRI lights in the color temperature we like.

What am I missing?

You’re not wrong, but the whole thing is also a bit of a house of cards. If the buyers don’t have the money the contract won’t be fulfillable.

We have a data center planned not too far from my house. It was approved by the city council last December despite a lot of public skepticism. The developers aren’t moving because they don’t have the money. They’re waiting to have someone on contract to lease capacity from them before taking out a loan. In the best case that will simply never happen.

Out of curiosity when did you get out? We have kids in elementary school and they were issued Chromebooks. Our older one is expected to bring it to/from school daily.

I hate the device. Chromebooks kneecap computer literacy. This kid also has a (used) Thinkpad, but greatly prefer the Chromebook because it’s not locked down. It has no time limits, can access websites like YouTube with zero content filter, etc. It’s on a VPN so I can’t easily block sites like I can on everything else, but at least I can limit Internet access time to make it less appealing to use. The list goes on.

Another source of annoyance are the apps teachers use to communicate. Teachers are allowed to choose between two and one of the apps paywalls functionality behind a subscription.

I really liked my 3a. My wife had a 6a. I cringe when I think about either of us needing to replace what we have.

and hardware innovation has stalled out. Because of course it has. They don’t have the space of a dedicated camera.

You’re totally not going to fit even a micro four thirds sensor in a phone, but there are a bunch of Chinese phones with larger sensors. Although they can be a PITA to find if you’re on the US, reviews like them.

I suspect the reason why we don’t see them from the mainline phone manufacturers comes down more to hardware BOM cost than packaging or size.

Pumped storage hydroelectric plants are totally a thing for the uninitiated. This approach seems less reliant on geography.

Tech genius is only the most recent wave in this fad. We love our hero worship, which results in cycles of this type of thing.

The most recent example is probably the Robber Baron era of the guided age. Some notables of the time include Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, etc. Edison and Bell didn’t reach that level of wealth, but they probably would have if they were alive today.

Don’t worry, a lot of that money is still around wrapped up in family trusts. Sure, they’ve given a decent chunk away to white wash their names but these weren’t good people.

TIL that IBM designs and/or fabricates ICs.

You’re not kidding. Some towns like Los Algodones built their entire economy around medical tourism.

Goodhart’s law in action.

Can confirm. I’m still rocking a 1070 Ti on a 1440 monitor and it more than meets my needs, granted I’m playing somewhat older AAA games. Looks like a 4060 is even better.

It’s a 19 minute / 2.4 mile trip. But your point still stands - you’re not covering wear and tear.

You’re going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).

Self hosting is a viable alternative if you’re interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.

I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. “It can double as a server!”. Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so… You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self hosting.

How big? Potentially huge if you can get people to abandon car ownership by having a super convenient offering. Owning/leasing/maintaining a car is already expensive. We seem to be running at a situation where lower priced new cars become the thing of the past.

pro grade kit standards

Which are you referring to? Build quality and repairability? IME, enterprise laptops are well built, but generally have horrible quality displays in terms of both resolution and color gauntlet support.