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.
You thought they would research how to make life better, while they researched how to get more value from the customer.
“smart”
WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS
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.
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
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).
It’s a scientific fact that dads become 69% hotter when they wear a dadbod T-shirt.
Source: my crotch
You sure you’re not just a furry?
Absolutely fucking not. LOL. I appreciate and respect the furry community, but I want human dads with human moobs.
moobs
Man boobs, lol.
To gauge internet consensus on these kinds of questions, I check if the character is on R34 and/or CivitAI.
The answer is a resounding: ‘oh yes’
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.
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?
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.
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.
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it. What would be a more rational “this was predicted and never came about” would be social constructs like safety nets and betterment of society for all, as well as improving our management and use of the Earth. That should make us mad, not that we don’t have flying cars buzzing (and falling) in the sky.
It just hit me that we did for flying what we should have done for ground. Make it almost all mass transit.
Yeah, screw flying cars and parts falling off them due to disrepair.
The real sci-fi future is trains. Numerous and fast.
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it.
Same with living in space. Especially on space boats.
With unlimited ressources floating around… maybe with AGI assisted asteroid mining in 200 years (at the current trajectory with capitalism and political drama).
Maybe. We never got far enough to really test the waters that much. I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars, but it would take huge effort, and my opinion is the window of opportunity is all but shut now. But why should we? If for no other reason than because of the “eggs in one basket” metaphor. Even past climate change and impacts, this Sun won’t last forever, and if we don’t find ways to move on, all life that we know of is gone.
Maybe that doesn’t matter in the end, after all the universe also ends some way too. I think even if life is everywhere, it’s all unique, and so are we, good and bad. But we obviously don’t treasure what we have much, and maybe it’s better we don’t spread the same bad we do to Earth and ourselves elsewhere. It’s possible we simply advanced before we were mature enough to understand what we could stand to lose.
I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars.
No. It’s not.
It’d be easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean, or under kilometers of ice, or in an active lava pit. Orders of magnitude easier. As longs as humans are still “flesh and blood” humans, that’s the scale of impracticality we’re talking about.
As much as I love Start Trek and such, it paints a widly inaccurate picture of the sheer difficulty of human space habitation, and spawned the idea that there’s an escape from the “all eggs in one basket” thing. There is not. Until we’re bio-engineered uploads with space elevators or whatever (and the habitation issues we have now are basically irrelevant), Earth is all we got to live on en masse.
Now, can nations come together and keep a few dedicated scientists alive in space for awhile? For a science mission? Absolutely. And they should.
But colonies that can sustain themselves are a whole different animal.
Your list of other places to colonize are easier than a difference of one atmosphere and controllable environment? That’s funny. I never implied it would be easy, I said the opposite, and getting into space is a big part of that. And there are dangers to figure out. But a hull leak in space is far safer than even a few hundred meters under water.
Yes. Dramatically.
You can ship stuff to any place on Earth trivially. Need a new building for a colony? Float it over, drop it in the ocean. Food? Fuel? Medicine? Send it. You get a free mass to pull/dump heat, oxygen is never far away. You have rock and water to process. You have free radiation shielding! You have tons of mass budged to just store supplies and spare parts you might need.
It’s like a paradise, even in hellish Earth conditions.
But space?
You have nothing.
Sending anything to LEO is orders of magnitude more expensive than, say, sinking it into Hawaii’s volcano. Or drilling it a mile into ice. Forget places that are light seconds (or light hours) away.
Heat? Has to be dumped with huge radiators, limiting how much you can produce. Air? Water? Fuel? Parts? You have what’s with you, and that’s it. There’s no mass budget for heavy manufacturing equipment, no easy supply chain for any of the equipment keeping you alive.
As a human, assuming zero G is engineered away, you just have to deal with tons of radiation, and pay a huge price for a shielded core to sleep/hide in. Plants you bring along get irradiated too, though a closed loop food/waste cycle is the easy part. There’s no mass to push against, no place for heat to float away if there’s suddenly a fire or power outage, and you have X amount of fuel before your craft is stuck.
If it’s anything like the Saturn V, the mass:fuel ratio of your craft is something like a full aluminum coke can. Paper-thin metal is all that keeps your 1 atmosphere and explosive fuel in, whereas anywhere on the ground, you can get orders of magnitude more mass and dump it anywhere. Imagine having to build a car or a hospital or whatever out of gold leaf instead of steel and concrete; that’s the kind of engineering challenge you’re dealing with.
…To reiterate, I think Star Trek like shows where people can just walk around the hull, or even (relatively) short term mission like Apollo 11 or the ISS, give people a bad idea what actual colonization in space would involve. There is no Enterprise, there’s not even a Rocinante no matter how advanced civilization gets: transcendent civilizations would still have ships that are basically all engine, and space stations that are just temporary until humans don’t really resemble humans anymore: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bbe204d461e
And I don’t want to sound like I’m against space missions. Space telescopes? Moon bases? Awesome! Fund it. They’re great ideas.
But forget sustainable unaugmented human habitation. Forget ever being able to live offworld without massive support from Earth. Physics simply do not allow it, and we won’t even resemble humans anymore by the time its practical.
You’re including a great list of things we have or do have to look into to solve before space is trivial. You’re omitting a lot of the problems of underwater, or even above water colonies. I do agree that colonization of space comes only if we can make it self-sufficient, as getting all the resources from a gravity well makes it ridiculously costly and limited. I disagree on how any of the problems have no solutions though, as they’ve been discussed even before I was born, and I’m old. 🫤
Will humans change by necessity and by exposure? Of course they will. The Expanse did a good job of suggesting early changes to those living in low gravity conditions (which is probably the biggest thing to solve, not radiation or material sources). And after even longer they will change even more, making the different places become subsets of the species as we diverge.
Thanks for the link, I could not remember where that site was from so long ago, but it’s a great collection of lore and speculative ideas.
We just disagree on what can be done. I can’t imagine the scifi visions of underwater places that ignore how a small crack leads to instant crushing, or the constant corrosion that has to be fought against. On the Moon and Mars we’ve got the dust that is still a questionable thing on how to handle (electrostatic charges were the last I saw that seemed like they may help some). If you don’t have to rely on Earth for most supplies and you find ways to counter radiation (a few meters of slag works, not practical for a ship due to the mass, but a station isn’t a problem). Rotation may solve a lot of the problems with zero G, but we need to do more research on site before we can just accept it’s unsolvable.
It may not matter and we may not be around that long for it to be a factor anyway, but assuming we are, we have to move on from the Earth, as the window of habitability is not that long. Huge for us at human scales, but cosmically we’re way past the halfway point.
We really need to make people more aware of how their data gets from A to B. I think most people think you need internet access for anything connected to a network to communicate. If more people realized that if device A is on your LAN and device B is on your LAN, there’s no reason traffic from A to B has to traverse the internet, they wouldn’t fall for stuff like this.
Bah, there’s a LOT of devices that could talk to my father’s phone over the LAN if they were programmed that way. But, they aren’t. They report to a wall-known “cloud” server, and the app on his phone checks that same server for the latest status or to relay command/control.
Nice advantage: can get status / send commands even when he is not on the LAN. Bad disadvantage: when the rural Internet blinks out (like every time it rains) he can’t tell the robo-vac which rooms to start cleaning.
What’s more, if the device in question is some simple thing like a thermometer, then there’s no reason for it to be networked at all. Just take the temperature and get on with your life!
And people think that your need a phone service to use GPS.
Indeed, a lot of people think it’s an active satellite connection when all it is is a receiver picking up a really accurate time signal.
This has been the predicament for about 75 (or even 175) years… just getting worse, now not just not getting the innovations, but now getting abused and datamined by abusers.
We do have various flying vehicles that have been described as flying cars. But it’s fair to say that the Back to the Future II-style mass adoption hasn’t happened.
I’m happy with those broadly staying science fiction. People already can’t drive in two dimensions. It’s worrying to think how awful it’ll be if they’re ever given a third.
There are a far fewer pedestrians and walls and lamp posts and motorcycles in the air than on the ground, though, so there’s a lot more margin to be awful without endangering anyone other than your own family.
There’s a reason passenger planes’ safety engineering is so much better than passenger cars’: if your car just goes completely dead, you can probably still steer it somewhere safe and get out. If something goes wrong with a plane and there’s no backup system, it’s just become a glider with one chance at landing wherever happens to be available. If your flying car is in the city (and most cars are in urban areas, because most people are) there won’t be anywhere available to land, and it’s going to hit a building. If the pilot fucks up then it might be worse than a glider and just drop out of the air like a stone.
At present it takes considerable effort or lack of skill for someone to crash their car through the roof of your house. Once morons can fly, all bets are off.
Well, a car falling from the sky (car crash or ran out of gas) probably wouldn’t be very safe either. I’m absolutely not trusting the average nitwit who pays more attention to Instagram than to the road to operate something akin to a mini-plane.
Yes, but there are still pedestrians and walls and lampposts and motorcycles on the ground. I would imagine accidents would be far more disastrous and dangerous than in 2D.
~Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).~
Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).
Flying cars costs 10 times as much as a regular car, and are not that great at flying or driving. You need driving and pilot license. Needs to take off from an airport or request special permission. It’s just not as practical and cheap as portrayed.
Helicopters are basically flying cars.
Based. This is what I post every time.
TBF, flying cars in most sci-fi rely on some kind of crazy convenient anti-gravity tech that allows vehicles to hover while still somehow retaining lateral friction so they don’t drift sideways when turning.
A lot of space sci-fi spaceships have basically flown as if they are in an atmosphere, with a more-or-less aerodynamic shape and turning as if there are control surfaces in an atmosphere making them move more-or-less in the direction that the spacecraft is heading.
I got two e-mails just for these type of situations.
One e-mail for the accounts I REALLY need/want/will keep (games, social media…)
While my second one is just used for accounts I’ll only use once and those types of stuff.
I use simplelogin.io plus a cheap throwaway domain, every single service I sign up for has different credentials, so the absolute worst that could happen if this server got hacked is someone could log in as me.
This is the way.
What my sibling does is create a separate email (though an email service that supports it like proton) for every service. If someone sells them out to marketers, the spam will go to “patsdogfoodemail@protonmail.com” or something like that, and they’ll know exactly which company was responsible, and where to block all the spam from.
And keep yet another, totally unrelated email for finances, so there’s less chance it’s ever hacked.
I’m looking for the same but since Proton mail is this popular, i fear enshitification is only a matter of time.
Any secret tip with unlimited adresses?
I don’t trust Proton much, either. The more a company talks about how secure and private they are the more I think they’re a honey pot, but maybe I’m paranoid. But I trust them more than I trust Google.
Not sure what you mean by a secret tip other than don’t use Proton Pass’s suggested email when it asks you if you want to create an alias when signing up for something. It just uses the domain name of the site minus the TLD as the address name. I make an alias using a random word. You can put a note with each alias that says what it goes with.
Not sure what you mean by a secret tip
For a trustworthy mail hoster with unlimited addresses, not in danger of enshitification.
I’d say look at where the money comes from, and especially who the majority stakeholders are. If it’s a publicly traded company, steer clear. Proton is majority owned by a nonprofit, so there aren’t stockholders to maximize value for.
I’m not naive about Proton but you could do a whole lot worse than them.
In a perfect world it would be easy to self host email. It’s easy enough to set up a bare SMTP server but that won’t work outside of a lab.
We gave them different fake names. Now we’re getting ads addressed to Horatio Q. Tilwiwllilsmith and I can’t remember who I gave that name to.
-a personal email
- a bank email
- a school-work email
