Garbage they’re largely responsible for producing in the first place

I think Lemmy is turning into a sketch from A Prairie Home Companion

I understand what community I’m in, but I feel like this relates to something I’ve thought about since using a rental electric vehicle. There are a lot of people who can write programs for computers. There are far fewer people who can create electronic devices reliably work in an outdoor, exposed environment. I started suspecting one reason so many charging stations want to use an app to collect payments online is because it’s easy to connect to Square or Cybersource or whatever. Making a card reader that supports magstripe, chip, or NFC and can survive being exposed to sun, rain, snow, ice, and extreme temperatures is a lot harder. Gas pumps have done this for decades, although I’m sure the roofs help, but even they had to turn to companies like Verifone when cards started using chips, and those companies didn’t make things easy (they’re why gas pumps play commercials now).

You mean like [email protected] ?

Why wouldn’t they just release an app? Why run an LLM each and every time another person wants to install it on their TV? What if the LLMs are updated to make this stop working? I’m sure Google isn’t thrilled by this and I could see them making this not work, or making it look like it works but keep all the telemetry active.

TL;DR: This is largely a review/summary of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke

A security certificate authority from India had several of their keys deciphered because the numbers used to generate them were way too short. In fact one of them was simply the number 4. Because of this basically the entire internet has been put at risk because it’s trivially easy to forge keys from this trusted authority.

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/20/indian-certification-authority-emudhras-private-keys-compromised-one-of-them-was-the-number-4/5304312

Because that’s what it looks like

I saw a mediocre movie about Walt Disney once (not authorized by the Disney company or I think even the family). It was fairly low budget and one of their selling points was having the star of Napoleon Dynamite in a minor role. Anyway, at one point in the movie a character answers a call on one of those really old crank phones where the user lifts the earpiece but the microphone stays on the wall. The caller is asking for someone else, so the character puts her hand over the phone to shout for the intended recipient in the busy building, except the actress put her hand over the earpiece in her hand instead of the microphone on the wall. I’m sure she’d never used that type of phone before, but I chalked it up to the inexperience of the production team that no one caught that goof.

Does she have some public-facing social account we should credit when we steal it?

I haven’t spent extensive time in Europe but I’ve seen that setup three times in Czechia, Austria, and France, which made me think it has some level of commonality

The problem is the delivery companies are abusing the definition of “tip” and how they pay their drivers. I used to drive deliveries for DoorDash and they typically only pay $1.50-2.50 per delivery, despite charging $6-8 for a delivery fee, on top of prices typically being 30% higher than the menu in the restaurant. As a driver, the rule of thumb is typically that you shouldn’t take a job paying less than $1/mile. So the rest of the money for the driver comes from the “tip”. A tip is supposed to be a bonus reward for good service, but the reality of the situation on these delivery services is that it’s just the rest of the delivery fee to the driver. The delivery companies know if they list it as an actual delivery fee they’ll lose customers because some customers will feel like the fees become too excessive. So instead they exploit inexperienced drivers into taking orders thinking they’ll get a tip later, but often end up with nothing. And customers who think the tip is actually a tip according to the original definition and voluntary often end up with bad service because experienced drivers will pass on the deliveries, meaning they sit and sit, with food getting cold while the delivery service eventually starts offering to increase the pay in 25¢ increments after a certain number of rejections. Sometimes orders will sit for a couple hours before someone will finally take the order. This is still bad for the drivers, because the customers will often leave them a bad review, blaming the driver for the order taking so long to arrive. The driver doesn’t know what part is “tip” until the delivery is complete.

The reviews are another bad system. Historically people think of a 5-star rating system goes from 1 star being terrible, two being below average, three being average, four being above average, and five being excellent. However, rating systems often rank anything below five stars as bad. So people will leave a four star review thinking that’s good but as far as the company is concerned is bad. IIRC DoorDash drops any driver with a rating below 4.7. And we see this problem a lot of places online: product reviews on shops, online business reviews, even hotels where 3 stars was traditionally decent now see that as bad.

This seems more common in Europe, where the toilet is in its own room down the hall. What I don’t like about that is often that means people walking around the house with unwashed hands as they make their way to a sink. In the US you will find something like that most often where the master/owner’s/primary bathroom has a water closet with the toilet in its own little room in the bathroom. That can be handy for couples and feels like it contains the toilet germs more.

They just start the fight that way, but if they’re losing then they’ll switch to the right hand

Funny enough N.E.R.D. also has a song called “Happy” but it’s definitely a different vibe than his more famous song of the same name. This one’s happy because an ex-lover is finally out of the singer’s life and their life is now so much better for it.

Good catch, looks like it was a promotional partnership for the Special Editions in 1997

Pretty sure that Doritos bag is too old for 1999, too

They already have authorized resellers, who they link to on their website. This problem would only come from unauthorized resellers, who would not qualify for warranty service. It might not help software support requests, but I don’t know how much support they offer for software since I don’t think they’re supplied with any. Anything hardware they should be asking for a receipt from an authorized reseller, and if the customer can’t provide it then it’s not covered by the warranty. And even if the customer can provide a receipt from an authorized reseller in their name, if it comes in for repair and has the wrong RAM then it’s not a warranty repair anyway (although I’m guessing for something this inexpensive they don’t repair individual units, they probably just send a replacement, so the counterfeit parts might not get noticed).