Was actually looking at these probe thermometers to give as Christmas presents this year… some brands actually advertise that they connect to nothing and need no phone or account to operate.
Those are strong selling points that we’re all going to be looking out for constantly now.
But we do have flying cars. They’re called planes. You can get a license to fly them and everything.
Planes are not flying cars. They’re flying buses.
You can get tiny planes that seat 1-5, like a car.
Sure. But you need to think lived experience, less technical specifications. Think of how these machines actually interact with everyday life. Car and bus are socially defined categories. We could just classify them all as automobiles, but we have separate classifications for cars and buses because people interact with them in fundamentally different ways.
Right and I’m saying that there is a class of small plane that people, particularly in remote areas, use as personal transportation. Commercial jets are flying buses, the Cessna 172 is not. Your “um actually” is a false generalization.
And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren’t how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn’t “umm actually,” this is you being deliberately obtuse.
We’re talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.
Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, “flying car,” they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:
- Can provide point-to-point transport.
- Can be operated on your schedule.
- Doesn’t require expensive licensing and training (at least no more than a regular drivers license.)
- Can be owned or operated by the typical American family living in a typical American neighborhood.
This is what a flying car is, and it’s why planes are not flying cars.
Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:
And this?:
For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot’s license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you’re no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.
Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.
We also have actual flying cars but they consume so much energy that they can only fly for a few minutes. Turns out rolling wheels is a lot more energy efficient than lifting up a 2000 pound vehicle.
But we got gaming on Linux!
Pussy
if if
You thought they would research how to make life better, while they researched how to get more value from the customer.
- Flying cars - impractical
- Jetpacks - do exist, but limited to trained operators in special locations
- Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)
Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)
There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.
The amount of times I’ve thought about liberating one of those sushi waiter bots you see sometimes is more than zero.
“smart”
Didn’t this guy get banned? Or was that a slightly different username?
Unbanned 14 hours ago, per the modlog.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS
My refrigerator gives me recipes to use up expiring ingredients and can send the recipe to my stove to preheat. That’s my flying car. We’ve peaked.
Okay, that is actually really cool. If it could function without WiFi I’d be all over that. However I’m not down with my fridge and stove accessing the internet.
Does it know which items are expiring, or do you select items that you’d like to use in general?
It has a camera that recognizes and logs items going in and out (and occasionally my dong if I raid the fridge naked)
The “internet of things” sucks.
Smart local devices rock though. Its not the technology but the implementation for many IoT devices that sucks 🙂
I have this pipe dream of a noob friendly router/hypervisor/NAS combo that would trivialize the installation and running of server-side apps like nextcloud or home assistant. The reason it’s also a router is to automagically forward ports so you could have remote access without
someone else’s computerthe cloud.Zigbee has been great, as I know it’s a local device. Finding WiFi devices that don’t phone home is impossible.
Not if you flash them with Tasmota or ESPHome
I hate that anything smart needs my location to be enabled before it will work even if it’s use is unrelated to location. Like my smart light bulbs. Why do they need to know a location ever
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As a rule of thumb those device go straight back for a refund.
I always download the app first before buying. If it requires an account (and they usually do) I don’t buy.
Take it a step further and don’t use anything that requires a proprietary app. Even if they don’t require sign-in they’re still hoarding an egregious amount of data on you. I’ve been free of those shackles for years now.
If your bulbs use Bluetooth and your phone is an android, that’s because on Android you need location permission to scan for Bluetooth devices (as known Bluetooth beacons in range could give away your location). It’s still bad, because you can’t know if the app uses that permission for anything else.
They really don’t. Look into home assistant, there’s no reason the network packet controlling your light bulb needs to go across the internet at all!
And stop buying from vendors that don’t allow full free local control (Google, etc.)
That verifying email for everything shit is something else all together. And yes it is true. Like what the fuck man? I am glad my fridge and stove and microwaves are all low-end crap that do the one basic job they are required to do (and they do it very well mind you).
I had this exact same reaction last week when I bought a new toothbrush.
You had to use your mail for a toothbrush?
Please tell me that you’re joking…
I had to look closely to not get a “smart” electric toothbrush.
Some electric toothbrushes have these gimmicky features where they can map your mouth while you brush and report on your hygiene habits to tell you how effectively you’re brushing, or even nag you if you don’t brush enough. Guessing that’s the kind they have.
So for the manufacturer, why allow the device to simply use a local account to track that information, when instead they can force you to register an account online and associate your brushing habits with all of the other shadowy telemetry data being collected about us online?
Don’t spent money on that, it’s complete bunk and just a very expensive gimmick.
If you’re going with an electric toothbrush, avoid the absolutely cheapest ones because the parts tend to be rubbish. Get the first tier up that has a pressure sensor. That’s all you need. They don’t need different brushing modes, they don’t need a masturbation setting, they don’t need bluetooth connectivity, or 3D scanning or whatever.
You want a pressure sensor, and a motor that lasts more than a couple of months. When I bought my toothbrush some four years back you got two for ~$80.
But also, these aren’t hidden features. That info should be on the box. I’m not trying to defend companies demanding your email and an account to use an electric toothbrush, but also at a certain point you gotta look at the consumer and say, you bought that. Electric toothbrushes aren’t exactly a monopoly out there; you can buy one that doesn’t require an email.
I doubt that the packaging could help you find a “smart” toothbrush that doesn’t ask for your email
It’s pretty easy to put something on the box like this can make your phone buzz if you forget to brush your teeth, and people who worry they’re sometimes forgetting to brush your teeth will see that as an advantage without necessarily realising that they need to give the manufacturer their email and the right to associate it with their brushing telemetry.
If it’s not prominently displayed on the box, then it’s not the consumer’s fault.
I agree, but I suspect that info was on the box.
LMAOOOOOO
Friendly reminder that mechanical toothbrushes still cost a buck and require no account signups. This should really be a non-issue lol. Are people really this lazy about just brushing their teeth?
