As is tradition.

I’m not a fan of people expressing views, even when awful, having machinations of the state used against them.

Welcome to the paradox of tolerance, enjoy your stay.

Search engines should have an off button for ai,

Techbros won’t let that happen, because they’re all terrified that consumers will just shut off all the AI being crammed into everything and all their money will evaporate.

If you’re just simulating the temperature there’s pretty much just three options:

• The thermostat will simply command the HVAC system to maximum cooling, just like with any temperature well above the setpoint.
• The thermostat will treat that value as a faulty sensor, report “error faulty sensor”, and not do much in particular.
• The thermostat will crash due to an overflow of some sort as its software was never tested with inputs like that.

Personally, I’d go with, “error faulty sensor” as the most likely outcome.

(Edit: you can stimulate the temperature by setting your house on fire. Better to just simulate it)

Lots of options here.

You can use a few strands of clean copper wire to clear the hole. Heat the solder with your soldering iron and poke the wire through.

Alternatively , you can heat the solder and then quickly apply a strong puff of air via a straw or ballpoint pen casing to the hole. That will blow the solder out the other side.

You can ALSO just place the new switch on the hole and heat the solder and push the pins through, as long as there are one or two clear holes to get the alignment right.

Somewhere, a grizzled old sub-editor’s eye is twitching over that title.

The gains compound a bit too, 20 percent less weight equals proportionally less battery capacity required to shift the now-lighter vehicle from point A to point B.

So then you can cut the size of the battery while maintaining the same range, and that’s where you start to get significant overall weight and cost savings.

The only extra moon I’m willing to accommodate is a blue moon. All the rest are just social media wankery, especially “supermoons” that are merely a few percent larger than usual due to the minor eccentricity of the moon’s orbit.

Everyone ^bet should get ^bet now!^ onboard with ^$5 free punt with SportsBet™^ online ^bet now!^ gambling ^bet! services, there’s ^bet nothing ^bet wrong ^betbetbet with a ^bet cheeky punt ^bet while ^betbetbet out with ^bet the missus ^betbet, or ^bet when you’re ^bet looking after ^bet the kids, or ^bet whenever, ^bet really. And ^bet their advertising ^betbetbet isn’t really ^bet now!^ THAT ^bet! intrusive.

Hey can you spare $20 for petrol? I’m a bit skint this week.

Personally, I’m holding out for the Electric Twizzler Platinum Edition Supermoon Series 9000, I hear it’s going to be the best one yet.

It’s all fun and games until your (insert vehicle here) crashes , or has a fire, or suffers a mishap, or reaches its destination and explodes as designed, and apart from all the normal problems you have with that, you also now have to contend with a few kilos of fizzed up nuclear fuel and some hot reaction by-products spread all over the place. You also have to contend with the neutron activation of the air passing through your nuclear ramjet, which makes it briefly radioactive, which is fine for a cruise missile that you intend to blow up in a few hours anyway, not so fine for regular transport routes.

Nuclear powered vehicles have some inherent risks with pain-in-the-ass consequences, and if we scale those small per-vehicle risks up across a worldwide fleet we’d see accidents involving them as often as we are aircraft crashes, and that’s not great.

This is entirely the wrong community for this answer, but I’ve used the pro version of Textra for 10 years now. One time payment (10 years ago), updates every few months, lots of features, but they don’t get in your way if you don’t need them.

The main feature I use is “delay send for 5 seconds” to allow me to catch all my spelling and grammatical errors after I hit send , but the rest of the UI is pretty well thought out.

One of the very few commercial Android apps that I’d recommend to someone.

Fossify Messages is your trusted messaging companion

I hate this kind of advertising language.

Don’t sell this as some fait accompli , done deal thing. It’s not anything to me at the moment. It doesn’t need to be my “messaging companion”. It needs to be a program, that I use to send and receive SMS/MMS messages. That’s it.

And “trusted”? I’ll be the judge of that.

Can it be disabled?

Sure! There’ll be a dialog box that comes up every single time that you wake your PC saying:

“Do you want to activate AwesomeAI™ now? 98 percent of the functions of this OS are crippled or unusable until you activate AwesomeAI™ so Microsoft recommends doing so immediately.”

And the two options will be “OMG Yes!” , or “Maybe Later”.

It straight made up a powershell module, and method call. Completely made up, non existent.

Counterpoint 1:

I gave Copilot a couple of XML files that described a map and a route, and told it to make a program in C# that could create artificial maps and routes using those as a guideline.

After about 20 minutes of back and forth, mainly me describing what I wanted in the map (eg walls that were +/- 3m from the routes, points in the routes should be 1m apart, etc) it spat out a program that could successfully build xml files that worked in the real-world device that needed them.

Counterpoint 2: I gave Copilot a python program that I’d written about 8 years ago that connected to a Mikrotik router using its vendor specific API and compiled some data to push out to websocket clients that connected. I told it to make a C# equivalent that could be installed and run as a windows service, and it created something that worked on the very first pass using third party .NET libraries for Mikrotik API access.

Counterpoint 3: I had a SQL query in a PowerShell script that took some reporting data from a database and mangled it heavily to get shift-by-shift reports. Again I asked it to take the query and business logic from the script and create a command line C# application that could populate a new table with the shift report data. It created something that worked immediately and fixed a corner case in the query that was causing me some grumbles as well.

These were things that I’ve done in the past month. Each one would have taken a week for me to do myself, and with some general discussion with this particular LLM each one took about an hour instead, with it giving me a complete zipped up project folder with multiple source files that I could just open in Visual Studio and press “build” to get what I want.

In all these cases however, I was well versed in the area it was working in, and I knew how to phrase things precisely enough that it could generate something useful. It did try and tack on a lot of not-particularly-useful things, particularly options for the command line reporting program.

And I HATE the oh-so-agreeable tone it takes with everything. I’m not “absolutely right” when I correct it or steer it along a different path. I don’t really want all this extra stuff that it’s so happy to tack on, “it won’t take a minute”.

I want the LLM to tell me that’s an awful idea, or that it can’t do it. A constant yes-man agreeing with everything I say doesn’t help me get shit done.

The problem is that the “release a minimum viable product, then update-update-update” software development model has reached cars.

But all other ways cost more and take longer to get to market which makes shareholders unhappy, so we can’t have that.

You can opt out,

You see, the issue I have is that it should be OPT IN. But it can’t be opt in because nobody would and how can they get more free data for the AI grinder then??

you will know when as you get notified

After you have been automatically opted in? I’ll wager that there will be a lovely dark pattern that conveniently hides the opt out below the visible “what’s new” text in a popup, requiring you to scroll down to see it, because I’m a jaded cynic.

What do yanks call thick cut chips? It seems “burger and fries” is burned into their national psyche (leading to memes such as these) but surely they have a word for the non shoestring fry version. Wedges? 🤔

Anyway, the Brits have probably got it right on this occasion, but context definitely helps with the dual usage in Aus. I’m not going to have fish and chips with crisps, and a packet of chips isn’t going to be of the hot variety.

Australian here, this is how our voting system works. My method is literally putting the most repulsive politician last and then working my way up until I get to the least-repulsive.

Politicians dropped from the rounds can nominate another politician of similar views to give their votes to, so eventually the whole thing coalesces into politicians from three or four parties getting elected, but still gives the opportunity for minor parties to become major parties should the standing government of the day really piss people off.

risk post-retirement mortgage pain

Hahahahaha, “retirement”, that’s a good one.

• GenX with a 700k mortgage.