I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

So in my case (I didn’t want to, but not my choice, but at least it was cheap and without subscription at the time), it was about the water cooling/warming. It’s really nice and essentially inaudible.

I think Chilipad is a brand that does it without the online bullshit, though I didn’t get to try that.

None of this should ever require an internet connection, and it’s abundantly clear that’s an anti-consumer hostile forced behavior Eight Sleep did.

The designers were thinking “we want to force users to a monthly subscription”.

So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn’t so crazy expensive and the basic ‘cloud’ functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.

From the onset, they were hammered with “phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something”, and they kept responding with vague “we are working a solution”. Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.

This is not “crappy developer stupidly doesn’t know how to make local control work”. This is “developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working”.

A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.

Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.

Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.

I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.

Still based on taxes, they know how to make it work.

The basic logistics or the least of the open questions.

If every one gets 2k a month, how do prices react? Social security participants are only a subset of participants in the economy.

If everyone’s compensation is equal, guaranteed, and sufficient assuming prices didn’t just screw up, can you still get people doing work like sanitation? Social security is from a mindset that no productive prior is no longer required. It pays more to someone that made 100k a year than someone that made 50k a year, so your get proportional to what you put in.

It’s less a matter of needing years under its belt and more about paying out an actual basic income to everyone regardless of means testing or work requirements and without an expected end date for participants. We’ve just not seen it done at all.

Alaska is too small a payout. No one could have even basic needs meet there. It faiils the criteria for “basic”.

To receive social security, you can’t earn too much money. You generally have to choose either receive benefits or work. Also your payout depends on your specific pay in. You have to get paid during your younger years to “earn” your social security.

You can’t just do a "study’ of UBI. Every single study attempt I’ve seen looks like: -They have funding from something or another, they do not model the taxation half at all -They end up means testing because they can’t model taxation, so they fixate on those in need exclusively. -They tend to last maybe a year or two. The beneficiaries know this is a limited term benefit and need to make the most of it. -They do not target everyone, so the local market won’t even notice the difference in base earning power. You still have lots of poor people excluded from the study. -They did not just force people into the program, participants had to actively seek out participation.

What the experiments have repeatedly proven is that welfare can work to give motivated poor people a needed reprieve to get their feet on solid ground, which we already knew. We haven’t had an actual “study” of real UBI, just studies on welfare that they say is about UBI. About the only difference from actual welfare programs is that the participants are not audited to try to make sure the benefit shuts off the second they get a job. Which may be a good indicator at least that auditing the benefits could stand to be more lax.

UBI might work, but to date we haven’t actually tried it in any useful way. We have universal income in some places, but it’s generally well short of even basic.

We have voluntary programs, they are called charities and they gave so little participation that they have to pick and choose their battles and ensure they spend money on those that care.

Also hard to know if the charity is efficient, competent, and free of corruption.

UBI needs universal participations on contributor and recipient to maybe work. Hard to say even then since the nature of it resists meaningful experiments, and the few actual programs tend to fall well short of even “basic” income.

Those metrics aren’t any more trustworthy than their own subjective word anyway. If they wanted to say they took more time then they could delay at their whim anyway. If they said their production costs increased, then again, they could spend the money to fit the narrative. On those particular points objective evidence is so susceptible to being gamed that it isn’t really more valuable than their subjective reporting.

Numbers of subscribers/views could be a bit more informative, but then people inclined to disbelieve would claim it’s because of any number of other reasons not because of AI slop.

Killing in this case sounds like the content is becoming harder and harder to create, which they lay out the subjective case for, but that wouldn’t be exactly something they could use figures to present, since it’s so subjective.

The one point they might have been able to show with numbers would be the emergence of AI slop ‘infotainment animations’ diluting the audience, but that wasn’t exactly the biggest point of the video and it might be a bit early to be able to demonstrate statistically credible evidence on that one.

Also, presuming they are sincere and put in all that effort, they are competing with other sources that have no such discipline and they are able to flood the field and grab eyeballs faster than they could.

It’s so fun when it’s so specific about some detail with casual confidence that is based on absolutely nothing at all. I know ultimately it’s architecture is more akin to a predictive word generator, but it seems so much better.

Saw a clear demonstration and it is wild that the output is consistent, but at least in the model I saw being run, every word is generated without it having considered what the word after would be or what the general concept it is going for. For a human one has to already know the concept before he/she starts putting words to it, but at least the models I’ve seen explained with detail, it manages to assemble it word by word without knowing where it is trying to go in advance.

Here comes the botulism breakout…

<blink>Welcome to my web page under construction</blink>

Generally I see a few:

• People wanting the highly deterministic, but slower behavior of the rc scripts.
• People liking the fact that the rc startup was generally almost entirely defined in plain script files
• Some folks criticizing certain opinionated things in systemd, as systemd delves deeper into things like capabilities and users.
• Systemd can sometimes be a bit weird about how it does/does not capture stdout/stderr as one might guess in some situations.
• Some folks not liking the journald angle of binary-only files

Mainly the last point is the only one I personally find potentially aggravating, but since I never really am in a broken system without journalctl I’m not too bothered by it. I have saved myself some effort thanks to systemd including stuff that the daemons used to provide for themselves.

Oh man, I remember seeing things go from burned in subs to sub tracks with all kinds of nice functional markup and managed font color schemes and such to… Slapping white text with no border/shadow in the bottom middle of the video unconditionally without formatting…

What about a compromise, Trump doesn’t get one but we also rescind Obama’s? I like Obama and all, but that peace prize was not really warranted.

Obama is certainly way way better than Trump, but the peace prize was silly.

Kind of miss how much effort went into fan subs, with notes explaining things that didn’t exactly translate without context…