iwanttocomment

Inflation's been rough. It's been real rough.

But... even accounting for inflation, that's $10.50 today.

These Netflix price increases have gotten really wild and bizarre, from something where you would find a couple of things each month to watch and it would make it worthwhile, to "wow, I'm doing OK, and I can't afford this."

I certainly hope that the transition to NACS and wide availability of DC fast charging can change that.

Until then: you charge at home. You wake up in the morning, and like your phone, your car is charged. You go out, you come back, you plug your phone and your car into the wall. The next morning, all will be well.

I'm a huge proponent of EVs and I would not buy one unless I had a dedicated charging station where I lived.

I can afford a new car, but any car buying on my part is being delayed by these cars being effectively free (with insurance, license and fuel costs, yes) at a point while car prices are high. It's also being delayed by the knowledge that if mainstream cars can be this trouble-free with typical maintenance, I'll need to choose my next car(s) carefully, since I like to buy my cars outright, and will be effectively stuck with it for over a decade, so it has to be something I like much more than these old ones.

I struggled terribly with the newfound need for multifocals for near vision. At the end of the day, after trying several pairs of bifocals, progressives and technology multifocals over a few years, I found that every single pair did not provide an adequate viewing window to display large amounts of clear text on my screen. Quickly scan a config file? Catch the right piece of code? Skim an email? Nope. You're stuck seeing a few sentences, moving your head around to read other parts of the screen. Some people don't mind. I found it really impeded my flow. Just awful, and most of these were very high-end lenses with fresh prescriptions.

What worked in the end? One very aggravating thing, then later, one surprisingly good thing.

I had single-vision prescription screen glasses made - the same thing as the "intermediate" window in technology progressives, but covering the entire lens. This allowed me to clearly see everything on my screens at all times. The downside? The need to switch glasses entirely when getting up and needing distance vision, or vice versa. Still, I was willing to accept this tradeoff at the time to be able to get the productivity I gain by clearly seeing a full screen of text, in an IDE or a terminal or just in email.

The surprisingly good thing? I got a cataract and needed a lens replacement, and got a PanOptix trifocal lens implant. Results vary - some people hate the PanOptix as much as I hated multifocal glasses - but I ended up with 20/20 vision near and far, can transition effortlessly between distance, intermediate and far in my full range of vision, and no longer need to wear glasses. No impact on my productivity, and I feel 20 years younger.

Barbie. Oppenheimer.

Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.

You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.

Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.

It's pretty easy to hang out with drinkers when you drink. Grab a glass, shoot the shit.

But it's hard to hang out with smokers and drinkers when you don't drink or smoke. Those who smoke or drink are the vast majority of the adult US population.

It's especially hard when you're not religious, as most of the teetotalers seem to be religious. Finding non-smoking, non-drinking, religiously tolerant peeps as an adult is so, so tough. It's like, choose one (or more) - drinking, smoking, institutional religion. Those are your options if you want to be a social adult.

It doesn't seem like it should be this way, but it seems to be, across countries and cultures.

Yeah, I've had some isues in the past with pixelated videos but again, almost zero in the past few years. But there are ten billion better places to post videos than via group chats, especially to conserve memory on people's devices, and pretty much everyone knows it at this point. Literally everyone I know has been posting videos via Youtube or Facebook or Instagram or Whatsapp or Discord or Slack or Google Drive or Dropbox for years at this point.

But yes, Apple should absolutely support RCS for encrypted messaging in group chats with other devices. 100% with you on that one.

But I have to tell you. Not a single friend has commented that I'm now on an iPhone. I asked my elderly mom - yes, I previously got her an iPhone before I did, I'm a good son - if I had obtained the magic blue bubbles. She was like "oh yes, I thought something had changed." I am not sexier, thinner or more popular since I suddenly appeared with blue bubbles on iMessage. My own (iPhone-toting) adult daughter didn't mention it. IMO, nobody outside of teenagers care.

Having been on both medications, this same feeling of fullness does not apply to low-calorie drinks like coffee, tea or diet soda, or very low calorie foods (I'm confident I could still tuck into a substantial salad of greens, although likely not with a rich dressing). Surprisingly, small amounts of "keto" alcohols don't trigger the reaction, although beer, wine and mixed drinks with sugary mixes certainly do.

These drugs appear to change the body's regulation of blood sugar, processing of caloric material in the gut, and signalling of those processes to the brain, but almost certainly will not work as a generic psychological or anti-addiction medication. It's just not about compulsion or obsession. It's about feeling full, physically.

[Edit: there have been some articles that state that these medications cut down on "food noise" mentally. My experience is that these medications cut down on thinking about needing to eat food generically due to the substantial reduction of hunger they create, but that thoughts of flavors or specific foods that would be pleasant to eat are unchanged. I still enjoy cooking, I just know I would not be able to eat as much of the resulting meal before being full.]

I have a few SiriusXM stations that I rather like. Every year for the past decade - and I have a calendar event set up for it - I call or chat and politely say "I simply can't spend $40 or more each month across my two cars this next year and would like to cancel unless there is a substantially better promotion available." Within 10-15 minutes I've renewed at an acceptable yearly promotional rate that's around a third of that.

This is very unlike what continually happens booking hotels or AirBnBs or rental cars or phone services or cable TV, where you get to the final page and there's just any number of total nonsense fees that radically inflate the price to ludicrous degrees.

Keeping a decent rate on SiriusXM is a 15m/year negotiation, as opposed to resort fees, cleaning fees, service fees other non-disclosed mandatory fees that other businesses spring on you at the last minute with no recourse.

We absolutely need to get rid of junk fees, but SiriusXM are far from the worst.

X is now account-walled.

I think Musk has become unhinged and I don't want to support his business, and deleted my account a few months ago and never looked back. The people I care about have also moved to Bluesky, which I don't really like much, but I don't have any major issues with. My heart is with Mastodon but after looking into running my own instance, I've come to the conclusion there are major architectural issues.

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Garden-Center-Ponds-Pon... https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Swimming-Bathtub-Collapsible...

I just finally switched to an iPhone Pro after years of Android based primarily on Apples switch to USB-C (finally!) and the titanium build (mocked in the OP). People complain about the 2-3 year Android upgrade cycle, but it's inexpensive and iterative. The iPhone 15 Pro line was the first I've seriously looked at where I've thought "I might be using that phone in 6 years and it will still look and work fine." I saw so many people throughout the '10s with messed-up looking iPhones waiting on their cell phone contracts to upgrade; I've always been a "buy an unlocked phone with cash and upgrade when it's not right" kind of guy.

I own two 10 year old cars. Both require almost no maintenance. When I was a kid, a 10 year old 100k mile car was a beater. Both of these cars look and work fine. I pay almost nothing for them, as they're both very fuel-efficient, and the cost of insuring a 10 year old car can be surprisingly low. In the 80s, a 10 year old 100k car would be considered a beater or a hand-me-down. Today, it's fine.

But still, it's difficult to come up with new developments that I think will radically recontextualize society as we've experienced. The digital T1 line was used for inter-city phone trunking in the '60s. We landed on the moon in 1969, and UNIX was born the same year. C was created in 1972. Ethernet and GPS were proposed in 1973, TCP was created in 1974. For those now middle-aged Gen-X people, it was always possible to see the potential future as children, as the frameworks had been developed before we were born. (Many of us did.)

But we're living in a new era of refinement and decay, as the life-changing things get incrementally better slowly, but while the confusion stemming from the continual growth of the last millennium receding ends up resulting in less opportunity, less wealth, and less excitement and hope.

But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa!

But yes, eventually, we all need to upgrade.

>a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive.

And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What?

Great job. You sure nailed those requirements.

Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable!

... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.

No, nobody understood gas stoves were dangerous. We were all rubes. Nobody had heard about people "sticking their head in an oven" or about houses exploding because an unignited burner had been left on, or "fumes" from the "stove" needing "ventilation". We were all so innocent and naive.

Houses from more than a couple of decades ago literally all had ventilation in the kitchen, via windows or outward-venting fans, to mitigate the fumes. Literally all of us knew about the risks. Anyone with half a brain understands that we were all opening flame in our homes, which is clearly an issue.

Just stop. Please. Yes, induction ranges from the past decade are better than gas. But we all lived with gas - or hell, wood-fired! - stovetops for literally centuries because they were all better than the absolutely terrible resistance-electric ranges. Induction ranges are a recent invention.

Yes, yes, when my gas range dies, I'll get an induction range. Fine. But what is up with this media blitz about something we've literally all known for decades?