At least til recently, Waymo here in California was using modified Jaguars. IDK if they started out as Jaguar EV’s or if they were ICE cars converted by Waymo. But they are everywhere in SF and also seen in other parts of the region.

I’ve never noticed that. Is it something new? Maybe it’s to get in the way of AI scraping (automatic transcription of the audio track, fed into LLM). Kind of a nonstop audio CAPTCHA.

Bettridge’s law.

This is c/asklemmy, where you ask a question and maybe get some responses. If you wanted c/therapy then you posted in the wrong place.

The problem is with your attention span, not mine, if you can’t focus enough to distill your novel into a question that people are willing to read. You’re not entitled to unlimited amounts of other people’s attention, except maybe if you’re paying them for it.

Yeah everyone gets that way sometimes. It’s part of not being a kid any more. There’s a whole branch of philosophy called existentialism around it, not that I know anything about philosophy. Anyway, the feeling passes (or else, it can be treated). You have to decide what’s meaningful to you and go with that, even though it’s not meaningful to the cosmos.

Could you rewrite this in maybe 3 sentences? My eyes glazed over. Anyway people get stuck on their own dumb ideas and there’s often not much you can do.

It’s working for me. I didn’t even know about the boycott and I still don’t have a playstation. It must have succeeded in controlling the narrative.

Like everyone says, used thinkpad. Around here, craigslist always has lots of them. Woot often has them too, but sometimes it’s worth waiting around and checking the site til something good comes up.

https://www.woot.com/category/computers/laptops

Added: Hmm obviously the US sources listed here won’t help so much for items priced in Euros, but you get the idea.

“The organizers of the American Diabetes Association meeting had a group of researchers removed from the event for sharing an editorial about negative impacts of policy changes to research funding.”

People are already asking chatbots how to vote, so we’ll get whatever govt the bot vendors want to install. The bots will reinforce their priors.

1. I’ve had trouble getting Jami to work at all, I think because of incompatibilities between versions and whatever. You might have better luck with something like Linphone.

2. I haven’t tried a VOIP hardphone but I use Linphone on Android sometimes. I would say call quality is worse than normal cellular voice calls even those are certainly VOIP at some level too.

3. VOIP is more crap to fool around with and periodically troubleshoot, but you can get it to work if you have to. I don’t find landlines to be worth it any more (I just use mobile voice) but they’re probably still the most reliable of the approaches, and I guess it depends somewhat on your family’s discomfort level with technology.

VOIP hardphones are nicer to use than mobiles, but I guess unlike traditional landlines, they don’t work in power outages. All the ones I’ve seen rely on a power cube.

Epub is html with some crap wrapping it. Converting it to text follows the html formatting, like using the lynx browser.

Mostly pandoc (for epub to text) and a few stupid python scripts. I’m a luddite and prefer reading text files. I don’t use any particular collection management beyond filenames and grep.

Heh also https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Susanna_Luchenko

This retired the whole genre:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDyb_alTkMQ

Sid Vicious’s version of I Did It My Way. I think originally from the 1980s.

I haven’t been paying attention and didn’t realize they had let those guys out of Romania.

Try smartctl -a on the drive (install smartmontools if needed), to see the error counts. Yeah, back up your stuff, which you should do anyway.

Baaaaad idea probably.

I’m going to say it’s usually bad to suddenly disconnect from someone. It’s ok to distance yourself instead; but send some kind of response acknowledging the phone call and maybe say you want to keep to yourself for a while.