• 32 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Personally I think most of these sorts of things should have a 3 year warranty - but very few offer that. If you can’t handle the 1 year you need to plan on the reality in the US IMHO. This isn’t a Valve thing, its a USA thing. So ranting against Valve feels a little disengenuous. AFAIK there’s no competitior that’s better. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would say the same thing.

    So - in the future buy with a card that extends the warranty by a year or buy an extended offering from the company or square or whatever, if you can’t self insure the 200 repair or 600 ish replacement costs.


  • If you buy your phone unlocked, you can get Red Pocket which is extremely cheap for service compared to most post paid plans. You can get ~5gb data and unlimited everything else for 20 a month on AT&T. And then if you go to Europe you can just buy a cheap Sim while there and pop it in.

    If you’re not picky about the phone, I have gotten sub 300 USD phones for the last 2, first lasted 4 years and I’m about 6 months into the second. Honestly there’s not much I feel like I’m missing, except spending way more money.








  • I have always felt that kids will get out of education what they put in/their interest in actually learning. I also think there is some benefits to learning how to manage technology de jure as it’s likely to come up when they’re out of high school too.

    I kind of disagree with some of the points about learning more just talking to an AI, both because I tend to get wrong answers or important missed context in my AI testing, but also because I think I needed to learn some stuff I wasn’t interested in personally.

    Today I don’t really have much opportunity to interact with classes beyond the great courses and linked in learning, and unfortunately much of the newer content is more like a YouTube curated Playlist than a traditional course. They are mostly superficial overviews more intended for entertainment than learning details.

    YouTube on the other hand is all over the map and you have to know what to search for.

    I think some value of the experiment is the part where it got the kids to review their notification settings to suppress things they weren’t interested in. Personally I think having phones in airplane mode / off during class is probably the best plan. Do the notifications during study hall, lunch, bus ride, and other free time.


  • My sister did that but only netted 30k more not 3x. Still well worth it imo. Of course it’s kinda amazing that more companies aren’t taking this “cheat code” to get cream of the crop “minor league” non major center talent for the discount of amazing wages out in the hinterlands that are 40k or more less than big city prices.


  • Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

    With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

    If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

    The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.





  • It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

    What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

    Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

    You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.





  • Not being chromium is kind of the problem, some sites don’t work right. It’s also quite hacky IME for tab management with lots of extensions fighting to try and get what Vivaldi has out of the box. I tried hard to use Firefox but it can’t really handle the tab loads I have had since 2001 and Original Opera where as Vivaldi does.