m463

I always try to get dental recommendations from friends who have gone there for some time.

So I went to one dentist near work and she seemed pretty good. We did some cleaning and she didn't push too much.

A year or two later I went in for my yearly checkup and it wasn't the friendly receptionist I normally talked to. oh well, guess she left. And for the checkup a different dentist saw me.

It was like one of those movies where aliens/clones had silently replaced everyone you know. Turns out the practice was sold to this new dentist and everyone there was a cloned replacement.

Needless to say that dentist did a comprehensive set of xrays, a mouth inventory cleaning calling out all the gum numbers and came up with a comprehensive multi-year plan to work through things one complete yearly insurance allowance per year.

During the inventory before any plan she noticed I had 32 teeth and said "we should get those wisdom teeth out".

"exactly why do we need to remove them?"

"crowding"

she correctly judged my expression as "don't add wisdom teeth to dental plan"

now many years later I still have those wisdom teeth, two even have fillings.

You might be right, but the thing is, other countries can do things by fiat.

But the US democracy/political process plus the different states can lead to "vote for this speed limit" as well as widely varying traffic laws in different states.

Personally I think if you want super low speed limits, instead of just enacting them and expecting compliance, maybe use traffic calming devices and other reality-based methods. The united states is not one culture.

I found japan interesting. japan is a high trust, high compliance culture. A (US) friend lives there most of the time with his japanese wife and he told me how things work. The driving tests are very comprehensive and expensive. Also, if you're from the united states, they fail your test the first time you take it. They just assume someone driving on the right should not pass. They don't seem to do that to folks from australia/england.

I've found a couple of things

I enabled FSD in a loaner years ago (12.x)

It would not exceed the speed limit. And that did not go well. There are some single-lane roads I drive on that are deserted, but have a few 25/30 zones. People ride your *ss if you go 25 or 30. late at night, that turns into road rage, people want to get home.

I found there was a setting for +<n> over speed limit and I turned it up and things got better. I believe later I was in another loaner and they had added a "go with the flow of traffic" setting (I don't recall the name). That actually went the speed of prevailing traffic and I was more comfortable being driven around.

There are actually lots of studies that show that using "the 85th percentile rule" to set the speed limits gets maximum compliance and much safer roads.

The further you set the speed limit from these speeds, the more speed variance you get and the variance is what causes accidents.

also, there is a psychological component too - I think driving ~5 mph over the speed limit is safer than driving the speed limit or 10 mph over.

people don't like those answers, but they work. Even murderers drive on the right/correct side of the road and drive with the flow of traffic.

google is everywhere. Most websites have one or more of google fonts, google apis, googletagmanager/doubleclick, captcha or more.

One up-and-coming entrant is cloudflare, which prevents you from accessing websites unless you have javascript and cookies enabled.

all the other cdn providers do this too, like akamai, fastly, cloudflare, etc.

Separation of church and state goes way back, maybe before the iphone.

by default is the key. You can choose duck duck go, but you have to navigate through settings -> apps -> safari first.

also you cannot enable private browsing by default. You have to turn it on manually, and updating safari will reset all that.

Do you say google over meta because meta has a smaller footprint?

also: you can subscribe to duckduckgo ($99 or $199/year) and that gives you not only VPN access, but DDaaS - Data Deletion as a Service.

:)

(don't know how data deletion works outside of california, but I think california allows you to say "all brokers delete my data")

they do - and this is why I buy their stuff.

but a lot of these folks are uploading everything to garmin connect and letting it have your data and do the work.

There are a bunch of settings for each app, they default to on, and you h ave to navigate to all of them one by one to turn them off.

And of course, I'll bet all your data was mined before you turned things off.

does this seem user-friendly? seems deliberately hostile to me (though par for the course nowadays)

Why can't we just connect a garmin watch (or edge or gps) to our ai machine, have it extract all the data with MTP or garmin format, and keep it local. Then ask questions.

Honestly I've been wondering if in the near future I can basically have a big machine and some sort of "ingest" program.

Then keep connect my devices to it, where it will backup all the data, and mine the backups for information I want.

Mine my iphone backups for text messages or contacts

mine all my devices for photos or videos

mine my watch or bike computer or gps or whatever else for where I've been and how I've exercised.

instead, everyone wants your data and imposes themselves in the middle.

Dilbert

"Over here we have our random number generator."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230305130159im_/https://assets...

you realize this is very laborious. every time you install a new app - or sometimes when you update an app - you have to do it again.

also, search for "improve" in settings. I'll bet you didn't find "Help Apple Improve Search" in the results. Ironic on many levels.

Claude, help throw people off my trail by blaming a random openai employee, then delete all my activity.

services are growing 10%+ per year

Watch out - I think apple revenue for services is increasing, now almost 30% and gross margins on services is ~75%

I think ads are projected to be $9b this year

I haven't checked in a while, but the netflix app might contact third party domains.

I think other streaming apps definitely do.

Apple does too. I don't know about the TV, but a vanilla safari has a bunch of default favorites, and when you open a browser window it contacts each one of them and sets cookies. It also contacts google by default for searching, character by character quick search completion and on and on.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy products without all this nonsense?

remember, this can be done to you.

warmer igloos obviously. :)

> mining my viewing habits

apple tv isn't private, apple does mine your viewing habits, read their eula.

You should also know that all non-apple apps like netflix have unrestricted network access and can/will do the same.

It is too bad that people accept apple's marketing about privacy, because they have dark patterns, they collect telemetry, they don't let you block it, and they help apps do the same things.

A privacy policy is not the same as being able to firewall your device, but apple doesn't allow firewalls.

Usually this stuff is covered in the owner's manual.

When you reset the car you might also have to agree on the main nav.

but yeah, doesn't always cover every drive.

I remember on old nissan leaf, you had to agree to telematics every drive.

maybe if kids have a minecraft server, making them mini royalty among their friends...

Don't worry about your family.

They never appreciate things. You can take the kids to paris on vacation, and the kids will like the hotel pool better than the louvre.

I think do self hosting for yourself.

then get together (or at least communicate) with others that do the same - like minded people who share your interests.

and if your family accidentally likes something you do, well then you're ahead.

maybe you'll get lucky... "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." - Mark Twain

Only thing more annoying (jealous) than aussie solar is europeans with 100g fiber for €50

Wonder if today's ram will go up price by then...

awesome, thanks!

Thing is, this whole thing is not black and white. Tesla full-self-driving is not autonomous, but it does a lot better than a lot of diehard skeptics expect when it helps you drive.

Waymo autonomous vehicles are very very good, but residents of san francisco can tell you that they are not perfect. (honking, waymo traffic jams, etc)

I expect it will all be like guns vs the bow and arrow. terrible at the beginning, but steadily improving. and we know how it eventually turned out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archery#Decline_of_...

also: Helicopters usually have an altitude limit of 10k feet (maybe 13k). :)

Nah. way before that page/brin wanted to create ai (agi) long before that when google was started or in its infancy, but it seemed completely unbelievable (the kind of stuff elon musk would say)

I can't find the reference to it, but I remember them saying it in wired or similar.

you're still correct.

"open source" is ambiguous (in cases this is deliberate)

OSI has its own definition of open source, but there's no reason someone can't say their code is "open source" because you can see the source code.

This is akin to saying 10tb hard disk... very few people quantify this with tera or tebi or Ti or whatever unless there is some legal fineprint required. and there is no hard legal definition for calling something "open source".

In any case, stallman has a take on the difference in philosophy of the OSI version:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

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sigh.

> Its probable that AI will roll out much faster ...

I think a sort of acceptance is the real problem.

Just like because of convenience/laziness people will give up against surveillance, I think the same thing will happen with AI.

I have been listening to the book "talking to strangers" by malcolm gladwell

The book is about how people don't understand others.

One point was that people "default to truth" when listening to other people. Basically people default to believe what others are telling them, and it is good for society. But it can be terrible with accomplished liars, specifically liars who seem confident they are telling the truth. He had examples of CIA spies, Hitler and more.

Wow - I was thinking about AI while listening. AI sounds convincing. It doesn't give hints that it might not be telling you the truth. It will confidently give you answers all day long.

The only way to counteract this is to be a critical, pedantic person. But to behave this way is counter to the rules of society. Folks who routinely do this range from unpopular to completely shunned by society. Think about being critical about adtech instead of shrugging it and accepting it.

sigh.