I didn’t say voting is pointless. You should go vote too. But if I go vote in the US I’ll be arrested.

Yes, which is why voting is not enough: you have to campaign for the candidates you want to see. The ranked-choice system would fix this but that’s off-limits for now.

The time to vote for someone good is the primaries, which set what the dichotomy of the actual election is going to be like. In the November dichotomy, voting for the lesser evil is kinda the only option unless you want Big Evil to win.

Yes, it would be better to “merge” the main election and primaries into a ranked-choice vote but that’s not happening anytime soon.

No. I like the “ew”.

Universal Grotesk

It’s U+E001 from a Private Use Area. The UnicodePad app renders it as something between 鉮 and 鋁 (separate boxes stricken through; I wasn’t able to find it even with Google Lens)

*even

o1 without Markdown misformatting:

\\id:\\[^]]+\\\\\[^]]+\\\

No idea what the rectangles are supposed to be, I just copy-pasted it

How many is that out of 12? No reason whatsoever, just for divisibility I guess

Yup. My grandpa had 10 MB in his DOS machine back then.

I can’t believe they still made Hot Frosty after this comic came out. At all, really. Even kept the obviously working title.

Edit: Never seen the movie, just the Pitch Meeting video

Aliens are very much not predators. There is a movie I haven’t seen but I imagine it’s all about outlining the differences.

Mobile websites… as in moving, not for touch devices, I suppose.

I imagine lots of people thought the same in 1995.

Thanks but it will take a while before I get my hands on a Raspberry Pi or another computer to install HA on. The bulb may have been fully reverse-engineered or not at all, I have no idea yet. It’s a Tapo device from TP-Link.

We have enough land and material to build a shack for an EV that we wouldn’t care about burning down. His major concern is the repairability: allegedly the service station can quarantine the car if the battery is a little too warm at cost to the owner and potentially never return it. And a lot of them “will just straight-up deny service” in fear of a HVDC electric shock, which is allegedly not deadly but forces the technician to undergo 5 days off work for electrolysis blood testing.

A friendly German family bought a hybrid that isn’t even plug-in… in 2023. It still has incandescent lamps. These people REALLY put very little thought into the real cost of keeping a gas engine running for 15 years, especially with projected gas prices in Germany (already 80% higher than here). At least I don’t feel guilty because I had no say in that.

Yes, my father finds the mechanic he goes to friendly but he needs to realize the EV alternative is not finding another but needing no mechanic for the most part.

I don’t have much money but I can cause some leverage by only allowing loans on my name on a pure EV, no matter the size. Even the mechanic said rental for the road trips is easier than we think, and when my parents travel alone even German trains are cheaper than fuel. The mechanic’s views are certainly outdated, he also said EV owners keep running over cats at night because the cars are too quiet but they have mandatory speakers now.

Don’t worry, every spare module in the cars, regardless of their drivetrain, has a chip that needs to be paired at great cost so they’ll get people buying new cars anyway through cost of ownership alone. This fuckery started with electric cars to create FUD around them and protect legacy motor companies’ decades of investments into engines.

Our family will be buying a new car in 2-4 years. My father has doubts about EVs even though our use case is perfect for them: we drive 15 minutes to town and back, and the once-per-year road trips to Germany can be covered by their charging network; it’s not physiologically feasible for any one of us to safely drive over 3 hours straight anyway. He is critical since the technician absolutely lambasted electric cars for how dangerous they are to work on, and that they are uninsurable in garages because of the fire risk etc. How do I convince him that it makes little sense to still use a gas or hybrid for the next 12-15 years?

Yup, that’s what it’s called

I found a “smart” Wi-Fi bulb in the trash and used a throwaway phone to pair it through its app. It was adjustable white and RGB, so I put it in the bathroom and thought I’d trigger it to be dim red (cicardian rhythm, you know) whenever it was night (using a built-in RTC, NTP or light sensor, whatever it was capable of). Well, nope! It only connects to Wi-Fi when powered on (understandable) and only takes orders from an external server god-knows-where, with limited local functionality (party-light cycling, WB matching, optionally remembering the last setting). It does not notify the server when its power turns on (only when switched via app or smart button) so it cannot be configured as a “smart event”. The closest I could do would be to create a time event every minute:

22:00 turn on 25% red
22:01 turn on 25% red
22:02 turn on 25% red
•••
04:29 turn on 25% red
04:30 turn on 100% warm white
04:31 turn on 100% warm white
•••
21:59 turn on 100% warm white

I’m pretty sure there is a limit to timed actions so I can’t just do it this way. I guess I know why it got trashed while still working as intended.

I’ll be looking into Home Automation *Assistant and see if there is a compatible firmware to flash on this piece of shit. Or I’ll just use my electrical engineering skills to combine red and orange LEDs into another bulb and give it a separate switch. *(Edit)

They did paste it correctly but in Markdown, you have to type three. The first one escapes the second, and the third one escapes the underscore and prevents the pair from becoming an italics flag.

1: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
2: ¯\(ツ)/¯
3: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The examples above are slightly fake: the unescaped right underscores in lines 1 and 3 would mark the start and end of another italics segment, so I escaped them to imitate what happens in a comment with no underscores except this kaomoji.

Yes but I felt the need to include the evil/misguided minority of Germans, and I managed to do it without referencing certain 20th century events.