tiredofsametab

I don’t use a smartphone enough to worry about it. If I am using my phone, most of the time it’s either Anki, Google Maps, or, like you mention, banking/government stuff.

Texting via SMS (or whatever it is these days) isn’t really a thing in Japan, either, which makes things more difficult especially as I despise talking on the phone. If, for example, I’m at the supermarket and wife remembers something she needs, getting that message is good

I was redhat/mandrake of which neither worked well on my PC, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and mint (playing with distros like LoaF at various points).

I got started on Linux at home from the valley of despair on early-2000s Gentoo. It wasn’t that bad, but I did have a lot more time on my hands being too poor to go out most of the time.

I just put mint on a laptop yesterday; got no time for it anymore

My company thankfully still employs simultaneous interpreters for meetings and has one translator on staff. I think, at least in part, because of how bad translation tools can be from EN <> JA.

Both BYD and Tesla have announced humanoid robots for around $10k starting next year.

I can’t speak to BYD, but Tesla has claimed all kinds of things that never materialize or are not what they claimed to be.

That aside, I don’t think most people have $10k laying around. Most couldn’t even afford a $1k expense (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses-2025/), so I don’t think we’ll be seeing any widespread adoption at that price in the near future (which is what I took your comment to mean, but maybe that’s not what you meant).

For clarity, I’m not someone who’s just anti-AI, I’m just someone who thinks it’s way over-hyped, is being shoved in places it doesn’t need to be (especially in a half-baked state), is an environmental disaster, and has many other problems.

Computer vision to track inventory and expiration of food in a refrigerator could be useful for busy households

I don’t think this is a problem in a lot of the world. Commercial kitchens already have rules and inventory management systems. The only thing I could think of where it might be useful is looking for mold on things, but I suspect most people are using containers into which something couldn’t clearly see.

A dishwasher could cut its cycle short if it sees that dishes are clean, saving water and energy.

Maybe? It would still need to learn all the dishes the person has and what clean and nonclean versions are. That training and calling the model has its own environmental impacts and I don’t know that implementing it would save energy over the life of the appliance due to the extra costs in energy to train and call it.

My washer has settings for heavier and lighter washes based on what’s going in (as does my clothes washer)

In addition, robots are home appliances that require AI

They do not.

Robotic vacuum cleaners learn their surroundings and navigate using machine learning

This could all be done with sensors and rules and, in fact, was. Unless we’re being super loose with what “machine learning” means here. We’ve been teaching robots to semi-autonomously navigate courses and return for ages.

We’re also likely to see humanoid robots(or similarly flexible platforms) becoming household appliances in the near future.

That’s so gross to me personally that I don’t want to think about it. Both from a security as well as environmental perspective. I also disagree that it’s close, at least for how I think you’re using “close” here.

As a software engineer, hard disagree. There is no need for any AI in any of that. The device will have gone through various testing. If they wanted to implement this, they could use what they learnt in all the testing to set threshold values and run occasional diagnostics, all on-board with no internet, to know about such things. The only internet even required might be updates to those tables of values (or if a user wanted to opt in to sharing their data for whatever reason).

Fewer hurricanes out there, and other natural disasters as well. I don’t know how tuscon is seismically, but otherwise it has a lot of lowere risks from nature, probably

defenders of freedom?

We’re going through a bit of a far-right thing at the moment, so you may want to hold off on that assessment.

Function > durability > cost > tons of other things > “interestingness”

I don’t know that it is the primary factor, honestly. Jobs keep moving to places like Tokyo where daycare has a lottery system and is super expensive if one doesn’t get into the free one. Add to that that, since corona and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prices for a lot of things have gone up leading to a cost of living crisis. for many as wages stay stagnant.

Indeed, there was an election yesterday and these were some things that were being mentioned by politicians in the lead-up. In Tokyo, it looks like they are trying to make daycare and school tuition free, which would be a big help. Several schools have even had trouble properly providing meals lately because of the sudden rising costs of food (fees for school are paid at the beginning of the school year so schools have to budget for higher prices and will have worse meals at the beginning to avoid having money for none at the end). Even the far-right anti-foreigner party ran on some kind of payments for kids. Another party talked about getting things less centralized in Tokyo and trying to spread the population out or at least support hose that remain in the countryside.

As for why it wasn’t faster, rules have been on the books forever, but people and culture make it different. People feel huge pressure not to make waves so they will clock out and continue working. The more recent legislation has actually addressed this and put some responsibility on the worker themself in my understand, which may help. Corona also showed people what could be and many were angry when forced to go back to the old status quo (and one can see comments about people’s manners and patience on the train and other places getting worse in the time since). There’s also what is called “power harassment” and the like and lots of old, entitled fuckheads in positions of power at companies who think they are untouchable and, thankfully, are slowly going away.

Worker protections and their enforcement have improved in recent years, but things still aren’t fully there yet. That said, the whole karoshi thing is getting less and less, which is good. The problem now is less in the big corps and more in the smaller businesses since they end up having less oversight. My company even requires I record hours at my other job (my own company) and submit them to make sure they and I are not in violation of labor law for hours worked.

We have a lot of non-management whom are all-in and drinking the kool-ade. I’m still highly put off for a number of reasons, but an outlier.

Ah, Usenet…

Although insta has been making inroads, it was the default in Japan for a long time for govt info, shop notifications (bars, art galleries, you name it), as well as other customer interaction.

I tried to daily drive Linux. Updated mint and I had to manually fix stuff to even complete the upgrade. My video editing software, required for one of my jobs, no longer worked. At that point, I ran out of time to mess with it and am, at least for the time being, back on windows

Counterpoint for the general case: games also have a much larger playerbase these days and manufacturing of cartridges and components can be done at much greater economies of scale. In many cases, there is no physical media manufacturing cost to a lot of the sales.

For the specific point: Gearbox/Take2 have lost all faith from me so, while I don’t generally mind some games being in that price range, there’s zero chance pitchford and his ilk are getting that from me.

Just go to the normal human arcade with all the other totally real, normal humans.

Wait 'til the pigeon pope hears about this; pope wars, all over again.

/ very poopy pope wars.

I remember ours (I think both schools were built in the early 1900s) being rough but not that rough.