Uneducated.

That’s the word you’re looking for.

Stupid if you don’t want to be nice about it.

Ah, good to know!

Yup - I was thinking the fast train, which isn’t fast at all compared to the rest of the world. I think that one is only once or twice a day - could be wrong though. Price aside, it’s not a terrible experience.

I’d rather dig my eyes out with a dull spoon than take the others. Snail’s pace and stops every 5 min.

San Francisco has a pretty good bus/trolley system. There might be other cities with decent busses but I’m unaware of them.

Some major cities like New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago have acceptable subways, and commuter rails. You can probably get a daily train from one city to the next. Example: you can take a train from Boston to NY once a day - it’s fairly ok, and probably preferable than driving for most people.

Most cities have busses that suck, and literally zero trains and subways.

Most Europeans don’t realize how big the US is, and how much of it is quite rural. It doesn’t make sense to build a rail to service the few dozen families in east bumfuck nowhere.

Getting a license to drive is, generally speaking, pretty easy from most states. Usually just a written test and a road test where you just have to drive around the block without breaking any rules.

Some city dwellers survive without cars, but they are kind of stuck in the city. When they want to get out, they’ll rent a car for the day.

Same - I can reach all parts. If I couldn’t, I’d grab a something on a stick.

We used to be cool.

Seconded on Monty Python - he should feel terrible about that travesty.

Also a shower per day minimum for everyone is necessary and that’s the hill I’m dying on. Clean your stinky arse up.

I read what sounded like an intelligent follow-up on this subject. But I’m not smart enough to verify for myself, so I still refrain from using ventoy - even though I’d love to start using it again.

It was basically “wacky code from all over the place, poor coding practices, can’t find anything bad, but methods used are sus af”

Says one dude I read on the internet :/

The cost is insane though. I think there’s a disconnect between what they want and what they can afford. I think it’s like a 10x adder per user license to go from regular office 356 to a copilot enabled account. I know my company wants it hosted in the cloud - but we aren’t going to pay the going rates. It’s insane.

Meh we’ll see. But I do wonder what happens when they get packaged up easier as a program.

I think local compute will kill these huge data centers for AI. It’s amazing what you can do with free tools like ollama or rag agents like n8n. Even on a business laptop with only 16GB of ram. If you’ve got a 4090 at home in your gaming pc and some big ram sticks - well, you’d be surprised at what some models can do (and how quickly they can respond).

You all know how the internet works - in a short time someone’s going to put together a free tool that’s as easy as “click this button to install” and it’ll do 80% of what ChatGPT can do. ie probably enough for the average user - for free.

So how are they going to recoup all these billions spent on data centers if peoples personal computers can mostly do the same thing? How do they monetize your information and sell you ads if it’s all done locally?Go download one and ask questions-sure it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good locally hosted.

I think the people spending these billions are starting to realize that…. Meanwhile I think this keeps video card prices high unfortunately…

A couple of years ago I bought the pioneer BDR-XD07UHD. I just plug it in and it works great. It works flawlessly with makemkv and eac for ripping. I’ve used it on three PCs across Ubuntu, fedora, and endeavoros. No issues.

Amazon doesn’t sell this one anymore, it appears there’s a new version. Might be worth checking that one out.

New iPhones bought from Apple that are unlocked “connect to any carrier later” work on all the networks in the us. Once upon a time, there was an “unlocked” phone - meaning you could change the sim and the phone wasn’t locked to a contract. But you still had to match the phone to the major carrier. For example, an att phone could be unlocked, and then used on straighttalk (becasue straighttalk resold att network). But it wouldn’t work on Verizon or T-Mobile because they were different networks.

That’s not a thing anymore with iPhones and hasn’t been for a long time. An unlocked iPhone can be used with any carrier that supports esims.

If your old phone is still on a contract - you may not be able to transfer the phone number, or have to request an unlock, or any other shenanigans. But the new iPhone will still work on whatever network you take it to.

Ideally, your contract is done, you buy new unlocked iPhone, you take it to your existing or a new carrier, you say “I bought a new unlocked phone, I want to set it up new, and I want you to transfer my number” a prime time carrier will just make this happen for you. A reseller can be a little more of a pain in the arse.

Personally I’ve been happy with the prepaid plans from straight talk - despite their setup process sucking. If you call them and get a person to help it goes pretty smooth. And the service is indistinguishable for a much cheaper price once it’s setup. I’m pretty sure this goes for most resellers.

Good luck - you’ll be fine!

That’s no excuse for littering - but it is super annoying.

There’s a dunks near me that moved its trash out of the drive in line WAAAAAAY over to the other side of the parking lot. Intentionally, so that I don’t bother them by throwing away, you know, the bag and napkins they give you.

That was the straw that broke the camels back - I just make my coffee now in the morning. It’s 1/100th the price and aggravation.

I agree, but I was making a different point. I think most people drove larger CARS, but today most people drive SUVs. And today’s SUVs are smaller than the cars of the past. Yes any particular model seems to have gotten bigger - but I think people in general are in smaller vehicles than they were when I was a kid.

I went to this train and automobile museum place in Maine. Podunk little place, but pretty cool and they really did have a lot of old cars to look at.

What shocked me was the size of the cars. Like huge ford expedition max trunk bigger than a pickup’s bed size.

Then I thought about the cars of the 70s and 80s. My old man’s Cutlass Supreme could easily fit 6 and had a huge trunk. God help you if your auntie drove a station wagon - there might have been a dozen kids piled into that sucker going to the beach.

Then I look at current suvs. They are pretty small comparatively speaking. I can’t get 5 into my grand Cherokee comfortably. Ya there are some huge suvs, but they aren’t the norm. The mini suvs are more common.

My unpopular opinion - the new “car” is an suv. And they have gotten smaller over the years, not bigger.

Pathetic.

For my 75 year old mother who doesn’t do anything besides Facebook. Ya an iPad is perfect! ;)

She thinks it’s a full blown computer and it’s impossible to break or install a virus on it. iPads can be surprisingly good for that purpose…

This is honestly such a pile of shit from Microsoft. Right…. Grandma is going to resize her partitions with those ridiculously cryptic instructions. She’s totally going to figure out which partition we’re talking about, she’s totally going to open a command line interface as admin, heck she totally even knows to find those instructions. Its hard enough for people to distinguish between “ya that’s windows update, click that button” vs “no that’s a phishing attack, never click that button”

Now the rest of us who know what we’re doing have to fix everyone’s PCs in the family. Keep pushing everyone to iPads and Linux Microsoft…

I agree. I’m the guy who picks, buys, assembles, and installs the OS and programs for like everyone around me. I enjoy doing it, they enjoy getting awesome PCs for good prices.

My next build for them will absolutely not be Microsoft. The average person can get away with an iPad running iOS for their computing needs. So it’ll be a user friendly Linux distro going forward.

I literally did this on a new pc two weekends ago. Downloaded win11 iso, installed, typed in the key off my win 7 cd rom retail packaging that’s god knows how old, done.

I’ve long since moved to linux and just dual boot win11 for games that don’t run well in linux. I won’t buy a key at this point just for that.