Yep, EU as usual having reasonable and well-thought out laws, give the US about 5 more years and they’ll make it law here too.

Because there are laws that specify when the brake light has to come on, and it isn’t when the car shows down (slightly).

To be clear, the laws say when it must illuminate. They do not (in the US) prevent illuminating it for other reasons in any way. The law says the light must illuminate/burn if you are actively pressing the brake pedal, but does not prevent it from also illuminating if a certain amount of regenerative braking is applied or a deceleration is detected. Theoretically an automaker could get away with making the brake lights simply always illuminate (and that loophole would be fixed in days, so no one does it).

Gunpowder itself isn’t particularly strong as far as explosives go. Like you can probably make a bomb with enough of it packed tightly but you’re better off with dynamite.

Pretty sure the time is just edited, unless there’s some way to tell Google “Yes have me circle this roundabout a bazillion times”

Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.

Why would Amazon want to hinder the accuracy of the price tracking in that way?

Accurate price tracking leads to people saying “Oh well it was 50% less a year ago. I’ll wait on a sale, not paying full price on that” and waiting on a sale, leading to less conversions. Amazon has pressured Camelcamelcamel into agreeing to not track specific low prices (i.e., Prime Day, if that actually had any good sales). I’m unsure if they track coupons or not, they were not clear about what the criteria for not tracking a price are.

Camelcamelcamel is unfortunately compromised by Amazon, it’s probably mostly accurate but there are price points they do not accurately log at Amazon’s request.

my vision for a peaceful future isn’t a perpetual Mexican standoff. Nor do I like the idea of political power and representation being directly proportional to one’s intent and capability to do violence.

The unfortunate reality is that all political power is derived from one’s capability to do violence, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. I pay my taxes because if I don’t the federal government will forcefully take the money from me, or my other possessions. Yeah, arresting someone is “nonviolent” until that person just says “I’d prefer not to.” Forcing someone to pay a fine is nonviolent until they say “I’d prefer not to.”

It’s the only motivator the government or any body of real power has at the end of the day. It’s a bunch of social norms and agreements all backed by the understanding that you will be made to comply by force otherwise.

I’m not arguing one way or another but I want to clear up some very common misconceptions about US gun laws.

in some states, you can get semi-automatic weapons (which are completely banned in Austria) in a shop in just minutes. And that without any background checks, psychological reports, justifications, approval required, without anything like that

This is just blatantly untrue and I wish people would stop parroting it. If you go to any shop you need to pass a federal background check to buy any non-vintage firearm (pre-1899…not exactly a ton of those floating around). The exception here is private firearm sales, i.e. I go to Craigslist and sell a rifle or handgun. The law states the seller has to have no reasonable cause to believe they would be an unlawful possessor (weak, yes). With that said, almost half of the states (22 per Wikipedia) have implemented state-level laws requiring a background check for private sales.

In many states even convicted criminals can get guns like that.

Again, objectively untrue. You are not buying a firearm from any legal, licensed dealer in the US without going through a background check. And a violent criminal offense will get you barred from purchasing. For the 28 states without laws around private sales, the seller can be federally legally liable if they sell to someone that is not legally allowed to have a gun and they use it to commit crimes.

In the US, guns are sometimes a presents for kids which they can just…own and use (while in Austria everything is obviously 18+).

No, a child cannot legally own a firearm. The parent can purchase and own a firearm that they are allowed to use, but they do not own it. In many states if the child hurts themselves or others with such a firearm the parents will be held liable, many states have laws around safely storing firearms when children are around.

While in the US (in many states), you can just carry any gun around in public whatsoever. So even if the police sees you having weapons in public, they can’t / don’t do anything about that

In most states if you don’t have a license to conceal carry and you do you are breaking the law and can be charged. I’ll say this one isn’t entirely false but heavily depends on your state.

A large part of why this issue gets nowhere is that neither side can even agree on what is true today, rather than what should be true to bring down the issue of violent crime. If one side says “They’re totally unregulated you can just buy one off Amazon and start blasting. We have to do something!” The other side is gonna think “Well they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, no point in listening to what they have to say”

Even if it started out that way, where “surge” pricing is current pricing and “off-surge” pricing is cheaper, leading to consumers paying less overall, it won’t stay that way. It would only be that way to prime consumers mentally to accept that dynamic pricing. After which they’ll slowly increase prices, 10 cents or whatever every month. Soon enough it’ll cost more and the corporation can brag about how it increased profits again this quarter. Remember publicly traded companies are legally obligated to maximize profit - the only time they aren’t doing so is when they’re burning money to prime consumers to accept bullshit or building a captive base, in order to eventually maximize profits.

With guns in general, or with Polymer80 or similar products? I’m guessing he’s intentionally mixing the two to make it sound scarier than it is.

This is what I hate about the rhetoric around gun control, especially “ghost guns”

As a gun owner that thinks guns are fucking cool, I’m happy to have reasonable compromises and regulations around them. Compromises and regulations that do something to stop crime. Almost all cases of 3D printed guns being used in crime are when the crime is having a 3D printed firearm (mostly in Europe). Actual violent crime it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. We should focus on legislation that does something about the problem, not ban things we arbitrarily give scary names like “Ghost guns.” Look at the actual numbers, the actual types of crimes being committed, go after those things. Don’t start background checking people for 3D printer purchases of all things.

Honestly just left it. Debating on putting carpet in the room where it’s pretty bad. But decided if I couldn’t do it well myself I’d just wait until I was ready to fork over money to have it done correctly.

Two monitors and a lot more RGB, also the cheapest desk Amazon/IKEA had.

Usually that affects businesses that either provide an online service, so their costs spike massively

It was reported they were spending half a million USD a month on server costs. A lot of the servers are player-hosted but there are also official servers hosted by PocketPair. Half a million won’t immediately crush them with their current sales numbers but it isn’t great either.

Honestly no idea why they even have official servers.

750ti and 1050ti were pretty well liked since they didn’t need external power (easy to toss into a cheap pre built) and were a reasonable price.

These days they aren’t even a reasonable price though.

Note that isn’t illegal, it just means the company doesn’t get to get out of paying unemployment when it happens. And that’s only if someone is willing to challenge them on it.

Don’t listen to what he said… But SD cards are generally not very reliable. They might be fine they might die on you silently after a week.

Higher quality ones are better of course, but the quality of flash in SD cards varies wildly. I wouldn’t store anything on an SD card that I don’t already have a second copy of somewhere. (If I want to preserve it and it would cause problems for me to lose it)

This is a pretty big overstatement.

DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.

I’ve seen comparisons of the 32GB vs 16GB GPD Win4 and there’s about a 10-15% uplift in performance at the same TDP in a lot of games with the 32GB model.

So it can give an increase in performance, or at the least let you run at a slightly lower TDP for the same performance and a bit better battery life.

Of course this was the 6800U, hard to say if the effects are similar for Intel’s chipset or not.

The not-so-quiet part here is “Homeless or poor people don’t deserve to have their basic need of a toilet met”

They call it a “need” but proudly talk about how they’re taking it away from the less fortunate.

Conveniently I work in this space, but note the following is primarily my own personal opinion.

Primarily there’s a few reasons I prefer Android Auto over native Android on the car:

1. Ever had a phone that’s a few years old slow down in you? Now imagine you buy a car for $60k, and three years down the line the (already sluggish to begin with) Android interface is bogged down by updates and is barely usable. Imagine Spotify drops support for that version of Android Automotive. Android Auto puts all the infotainment into something the customer controls, and something external to the car so you are not dependent upon the OEM to do their own due diligence to ensure functionality and compatibility. If my phone slows down from age/wear/increased software demands, I go buy a new $400 phone. If my car’s infotainment slows down I…buy a new car? (Looking at you GM)

2. Like I said it moves the infotainment to something in the customer’s (and Google/Apple’s) hand. OEMs do not want this. Auto makers want you locked into their proprietary Android skins for two reasons. First, making it more difficult to leave their specific company’s ecosystem. They (will) build in their own apps that you’ll start putting all your settings and private info on. Things like remembering a driver’s preferred seating and mirror arrangement and auto-adjusting, so when your spouse buys a car you go “Oh well if we both have brand X, it’ll be easier to drive each other’s cars.” Etc. Second, they want all of your data. Legitimately the industry is on fire right now figuring out how much consumer data we can scrape and use/sell with these systems. The Android Automotive stack in a car is 300% sending data back to the OEM of literally anything they are legally allowed to collect. Probably more, too. Plug in Android Auto from my phone and yeah they’re still spying on me, but they don’t have my Spotify login info or my specific apps used, they just have what the vehicle can directly measure (still a terrifying amount).

In your specific case with a third party head unit…go ham and use the stock interface if you want. Personally I’d still use Android Auto, to top off my phone and to access my local music library (I don’t stream music), but a third party has a lot less interest in spying on you or locking you in the same way an OEM does.

Also out of curiosity, what head unit did you get? I’ve got a 2012 Cruze I’ve considered installing one of those on but I can almost never find anything that seems actually trustworthy.