billwashere

It might be the most popular but it is utter crap and has been for a while. It has reached peak enshittification. You used to be able to say you absolutely wanted a term in the search or you didn’t want other terms. It ignores all of that now. Google stopped being about able to search years ago and is more about showing you the most relevant ad. I’m either DuckDuckGo or I self-host my own searxng. I’ve also tried using a locally hosted perplexica (running on my own local LLM) which uses searxng underneath the hood I think.

Btw: I’m a yank so I had to look up naff so I learned some cool new slang! Now I’ll admit I was being slightly flippant but serious in the fact that Google really sucks as a search engine now.

People still use Google for search?

I’m confused. Is every app in the UK requiring face scanning? I thought it was just adult content.

How To Build A Better Toaster:

Day 1: My boss, an engineer from the pre-CAD days, has successfully brought a generation of products from Acme Toaster Corp’s engineering labs to market. Bob is a wonder of mechanical ingenuity. All of us in the design department have the utmost respect for him, so I was honored when he appointed me the lead designer on the new Acme 2000 Toaster.

Day 6: We met with the president, head of sales, and the marketing vice president today to hammer out the project’s requirements and specifications. Here at Acme, our market share is eroding to low-cost imports. We agreed to meet a cost of goods of $9.50 (100,000). I’ve identified the critical issue in the new design: a replacement for the timing spring we’ve used since the original 1922 model. Research with the focus groups shows that consumers set high expectations for their breakfast foods. Cafe latte from Starbucks goes best with a precise level of toast browning. The Acme 2000 will give our customers the breakfast experience they desire. I estimated a design budget of $21,590 for this project and final delivery in seven weeks. I’ll need one assistant designer to help with the drawing packages. This is my first chance to supervise!

Day 23: We’ve found the ideal spring material. Best of all, it’s a well-proven technology. Our projected cost of goods is almost $1.50 lower than our goal. Our rough prototype, which was completed just 12 days after we started, has been servicing the employee cafeteria for a week without a single hiccup. Toast quality exceeds projections.

Day 24: A major aerospace company that had run out of defense contractors to acquire has just snapped up that block of Acme stock sold to the Mackenzie family in the ’50s. At a company wide meeting, corporate assured us that this sale was only an investment and that nothing will change.

Day 30: I showed the Acme 2000’s exquisitely crafted toast-timing mechanism to Ms. Primrose, the new engineering auditor. The single spring and four interlocking lever arms are things of beauty to me.

Day 36: The design is complete. We’re starting a prototype run of 500 toasters tomorrow. I’m starting to wrap up the engineering effort. My new assistant did a wonderful job.

Day 38: Suddenly, a major snag happened. Bob called me into his office. He seemed very uneasy as he informed me that those on high feel that the Acme 2000 is obsolete—something about using springs in the silicon age. I reminded Bob that the consultants had looked at using a microprocessor but figured that an electronic design would exceed our cost target by almost 50% with no real benefit in terms of toast quality. “With a computer, our customers can load the bread the night before, program a finish time, and get a perfect slice of toast when they awaken,” Bob intoned, as if reading from a script.

Day 48: Bill Compguy, the new microprocessor whiz, scrapped my idea of using a dedicated 4-bit CPU. “We need some horsepower if we’re gonna program this puppy in C,” he said, while I stared fascinated at the old crumbs stuck in his wild beard. “Time-to-market, you know. Delivery is due in three months. We’ll just pop this cool new 8-bitter I found into it, whip up some code, and ship to the end user.”

Day 120: The good news is that I’m getting to stretch my mechanical-design abilities. Bill convinced management that the old spring-loaded, press-down lever control is obsolete. I’ve designed a “motorized insertion port,” stealing ideas from a CD-ROM drive. Three cross-coupled, safety-interlock micro switches ensure that the heaters won’t come on unless users properly insert the toast. We’re seeing some reliability problems due to the temperature extremes, but I’m sure we can work those out.

Day 132: New schedule: We now expect delivery in three months. We’ve replaced the 8-bitter with a Harvard-architecture, 16-bit, 3-MIPS CPU. Day 172: New schedule: We now expect delivery in three months. Day 194: The auditors convinced management we really need a graphical user interface with a full-screen LCD. “You’re gonna need some horsepower to drive that,” Bill warned us. “I recommend a 386 with a half-meg of RAM.” He went back to design Revision J of the PC board.

Day 268: New schedule: We now expect delivery in three months. We’ve cured most of the electronics’ temperature problems with a pair of fans, though management is complaining about the noise. Bob sits in his office all day, door locked, drinking Jack Daniels. Like clockwork, his wife calls every night around midnight, sobbing. I’m worried about him and mentioned my concern to Chuck. “Wife?” he asked. “Wife? Yeah, I think I’ve got one of those, and two or three kids, too. Now, let’s just stick another meg of RAM in here, OK?”

Day 290: We gave up on the custom GUI and are now installing Windows CE. The auditors applauded Bill’s plan to upgrade to a Pentium with 32 Mbytes of RAM. There’s still no functioning code, but the toaster is genuinely impressive. Four circuit boards, bundles of cables, and a gigabit of hard-disk space. “This sucker has more computer power than the entire world did 20 years ago,” Bill boasted proudly.

Day 384: Toast quality is sub-par. The addition of two more cooling fans keeps the electronics to a reasonable temperature but removes too much heat from the toast. I’m struggling with baffles to vector the air, but the thrust of all these fans spins the toaster around.

Day 410: New schedule: We now expect delivery in three months. We switched from C++ to Java. “That’ll get them pesky memory-allocation bugs, for sure,” Bill told his team of 15 programmers. This approach seems like a good idea to me, because Java is platform-independent, and there are rumors circulating that we’re porting to a SPARC station.

Day 530: New schedule: We now expect delivery in three months. I mastered the temperature problems by removing all of the fans and the heating elements. The Pentium is now thermally bonded to the toast. We found a thermal grease that isn’t too poisonous. Our marketing people feel that the slight degradation in taste from the grease will be more than compensated for by the “toasting experience that can only come from a CISC-based, 32-bit multitasking machine running the latest multi-platform software.”

Day 610: The product ships. It weighs 72 lb and costs $325

Yeah I understand the health issues for sure. First prostate cancer with a radical prostatectomy and then a year later Guillain-Barré Syndrome. I had lots of projects on hold for several years. This was like 5 years ago and I’m good now.

More like dontinsidedeadopen

And air doesn’t leak all over your electronics. Well it does but it doesn’t short anything out.

Best thing I ever did with Tailscale was install pfsense and then Tailscale on that. I use it at work that way. I have three separate data centers (with three pfsense VMs) with advertised routes for the three separate subnets. When I install the client on one machine, I can access all three networks automatically. I did the same thing at home so I can also access that easily as well.

I think what you’re ultimately looking for is the exit node capability. Not sure if the phone can act as an exit node but pfsense definitely can. I have a VPS hosted in NY that I use to get around certain geographical restrictions. I set it as my exit node and it looks like I’m coming from there. The desktop clients can as well.

Here’s what I’d do if I were you. Install Tailscale on a machine in your house. Set it up to advertise routes based on whatever IPs you’re using in your home. In my case it’s 10.0.0.0/24. Now any device you install Tailscale on will be able to connect to that network. Another thing you can do is any machine that is connected to your Tailscale will have a 100.x.x.x address that you can connect to directly.

Hope this helps.

How did you know about my giraffe porn?

I think the idea is that it’s the same amount of light is being used but the actual expensive part of the solar cell is cheaper and designed to take the increased heat. So the same size “solar unit” on the roof collecting the same amount of light and generating the same amount of energy but cheaper overall. At least that was my take. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I have an iPhone since the first one and I wanna try it to.

Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.

In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.

It might have some side effects of affecting more than just the military, but codified right to repair into law is never going to be a bad thing IMO.

This is really going to confuse MAGA. Pro-military but anti-corporate profits…

<grabs popcorn>…

If someone calls themselves an “influencer“ I immediately want to punch them in the face.

Yeah most of the content I watch is still useful years later. Now it may not be super current since tech changes so fast, but still useful. If you have to stay in someone’s face all the time to stay memorable, you’re not memorable or relevant.

Yep totally agree. And I also like boobies.

Ok I have problems with these cutoffs for ages. My wife is 57 (1967) and is very definitely a gen x’er.

I would venture to say a very large portion of Pornhub consumption is on mobile.

Yeah I can definitely see your point.