MystikIncarnate

I want to say that these trucks do have legitimate use cases, however, if you look at the available features, and compare that against the use case for a truck like these, then you'll probably be confused as to why many of the features are even available at all.

Okay, can we all acknowledge that ICQ died when they nuked pretty much all of the accounts for no good reason?

While it's true it's shutting down, it was effectively dead for years. This is just the death rattle.

Because it's important.

Oh, I'm not saying any of them are any less guilty or innocent.

If memory serves me, they usually do 5 years of extended support after they retire an os, so, I'm just going to wait and see.

Absolutely nothing wrong.

Except that one time she intentionally violated the temporal prime directive, and the plethora of times she violated the prime directive, or....

I mean. You do what you have to do in the Delta quadrant right?

I want to say up front that, I don't feel any sympathy for the company, nor do I have any love for the ewaste they created.

That being said, it's a decent idea, and I would have liked to see where it went. Their implementation was completely wrong on do many points, but it was still a half decent idea. Basically having what Google assistant should have been, pinned to your chest like a comm badge sounds pretty cool. The laser projector for your hand was interesting, but very hokey, the data communication was poorly thought out, far too slow to be useful, the design wasn't the worst, but still not great. The battery life was questionable at best....

But the concept of what it was supposed to be able to do, was not terrible. Possibly the last terrible part of the product.

Personally, I want a personal assistant. Since I'm not rich, I can't exactly hire one. Having an AI assistant, that you talk to through a communications badge seems like a decent idea. I'd want it to basically run from my phone, mostly local to my phone, so my data isn't pushed everywhere, but the tech isn't quite there yet. Not enough TOPS, not enough memory, not enough storage for all the models; and certainly not enough battery to power AI running on your phone.

I can see what they were going for but they fell so far short of the goal that it's not really visible in what was delivered.

I imagine the pitch meeting about this being something along the lines of a guy rushing in after watching Star Trek discovery, when they got the holographic comm badges, and going, I want to make that! With the Zora AI and everything! And then people jumping on the bandwagon, knowing full well that they're not even going to come close.

I hope everyone that works there gets new jobs in sectors that aren't using AI as a parlor trick or buzzword to try to move units.

Good bye, company I don't care enough to remember the name of. We hardly knew you, and even that was probably too much interaction.

Honestly, it seems like the only appropriate "currency" to pay for this.

Oh. I know. I'm just saying that since it heats and cools, it's not a priority.

Where I am there's no legal requirement to provide AC to tenants, so whatever heating system is cheap, that's what landlords will install. Natural gas is usually cheaper per unit of heat output than anything based on electricity, mainly in up front costs. A forced air furnace with no AC which is heated by natural gas is so common and therefore ridiculously cheap by comparison. For larger apartment systems, it's usually a central boiler that heats dozens of units. It's difficult and certainly not cheaper to cool the same amount of space.

Electricity being included is usually for smaller rentals, like rental homes or multi-rental properties, which haven't been outfitted with the required energy meters to individually separate electricity per rental, so, because doing that would require rewiring the property and adding several new service panels/electrical meters, which would easily be thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars (maybe more), most smaller landlords just don't bother. Since they can't differentiate power usage between tenants, they just charge a bit more and include it in the rent.

That was my situation.

I moved to a larger apartment building, that was built from the ground up to be exactly that, and each unit had its own power meter and service panel. I paid my own electricity there. Heat was brought in from a boiler, but air conditioning was up to the renter. No HVAC system was built into the unit. Newer apartment builds and especially condos here can have air handlers installed per unit (though, not always), which may or may not have AC.

It's very hit and miss, but the vast majority of portable AC sales is to renters, since they don't have another option if they want to stay cool.

Presently, I live in a house (we're not renting it), and this house has central AC. I'm planning to move to a heat pump eventually, and hopefully also install solar to offset electricity costs around the same time; probably in a few years when the roofing needs to be redone. Once the roofing is done, install solar, and then, hopefully in the same project, upgrade the forced air furnace to a heat pump system. Right now it's natural gas. I'm not keen on that.

Most places here pay for heating, not cooling. Heating is usually natural gas or similar, cooling by AC is up to the tenant, and there's usually a premium in the summer paid to run AC when electricity is included.

And planned obsolescence isn't a waste of resources? We are basically forced to toss away fully working phones after 3-4 years because the batteries can't be swapped. You have to take it to some shop you've never been to, and have them take it apart in a specific way, in order to get a new battery. Usually the cost isn't worth it and for a little more you can get a brand new device... The sales people always push you that way regardless.

So having the option of a feature phone when the forced upgrade inevitably happens, wouldn't that be better than forcing people to buy an over powered phone with more capabilities than they want?

I'm not saying someone should take their perfectly working iPhone 12 and toss it in the trash for a feature phone just because.

This argument is invalid.

I had a disagreement with my previous landlord. He included power in the rent (not uncommon here) and I have a home lab.

He was not happy with the electrical bill and accused me of mining Bitcoin.

Sir, this hardware is from 2010, and couldn't possibly mine a single Bitcoin in the time it has remaining to run before it dies.

He threatened to evict me, I took his eviction threat documentation to a lawyer who basically told me that "this is not sufficient grounds to evict" (more or less he just laughed at how dumb it was), and I promptly ignored it. Moved out when my lease was up. There were a ton of other problems I won't get into. When he showed it to new potential renters some showed up before the agent who was showing the place and we gave them a warning about the landlord. I'm sure someone rented it eventually, but hopefully we saved a couple of people from going through all that.