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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • Back in February, I took a Waymo for the first time and was at first amazed. But then in the middle of an empty four lane road, it abruptly slammed the brakes, twice. There was literally nothing in the road, no cars and because it was raining, no pedestrians within sight.

    If I had been holding a drink, it would have spelled disaster.

    After the second abrupt stop, I was bracing for more for the remainder of the ride, even though the car generally goes quite slow most of the time. It also made a strange habit of drifting between lanes through intersections and using the turning indicators like it had no idea what it was doing—it kept alternating went from left to right.

    Honestly it felt like being in the car with a first time driver.







  • I had the strangest experience on Reddit that was the final drop for me to leave. In a thread of lousy jokes, I commented something along the lines of “This is all the fault of Leon Trotsky of Mexico City! Let’s find him and get him, boys!”

    It was flagged as doxxing and I was permabanned from the subreddit. I replied to the modmail ever so gently, saying, “Whoops, it looks like my poor sense of humor may have been misinterpreted, because Trotsky was famously assassinated in 1940.”

    The mod came back absolutely lamenting me, riddled with explitives, further calling my username a “racist dog whistle” (my username there is the same as here but suffixed with a number). They then proceeded to attempt to have me banned sitewide for “abusing modmail,” although I was ultimately only suspended for 7 days.

    The whole thing just left me so confused. But boy was that mod upset, holy moly.




  • Connecting a classic (non-Google TV) Chromecast to a new WiFi (or heaven forbid a hotel WiFi with a capture portal) was always such a pain. And casting over networks without mDNS is flaky at best and otherwise downright impossible.

    By contrast, I’ve loved taking along my Chromecast with Google TV to hotels, along with:

    • A VPN client installed it already,
    • An Android phone that can create a WiFi AP while connected to the hotel WiFi,
    • A Bluetooth speaker and my Bluetooth headphones paired to it so I get great audio as well.

    This has been a complete gamechanger and a genuine upgrade over yesteryear’s Chromecasts.





  • It would be better if direct sales were allowed, but unfortunately dealerships are required by law in almost all US states. The shady bit is how Tesla got one of the few exceptions and continues to be exempt despite being among the leading car manufacturers in the USA. All other leading manufacturers are required by state laws to sell their vehicles through dealerships.

    Tesla’s NCAS chargers only began to allow non-Teslas to use it from 2019, so this is kind of recent history in terms of car ownership and network coverage.



  • Regarding the sales process: in Tesla’s early days, they received an exception to the requirement for needing to use dealerships. Generally this is very shady and is outright unfair towards other car manufacturers—even Rivian didn’t get this same special treatment because lawmakers saw how Tesla abused it.

    Tesla’s growing monopoly on charging networks isn’t something to be proud of, in my opinion, and neither is their proprietary charging cable. We need open standards.

    Also, Tesla’s mileage estimates are notoriously exaggerated. Perhaps technically you can get the claimed range if the entire trip is downhill…