skuzz
@skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Cox charges you $25 if your credit card is declined 2 days ago:
It is non-trivial to set a reliable reminder for some, and not due to laziness, just how brains are wired. Set a calendar reminder, you start ignoring it after a few months. Start an alarm, you start snoozing it early. Put a note on the fridge, it eventually becomes invisible. Not impossible to overcome, but also, as I started, non-trivial to solve.
- Comment on No more Bosch for me.. 3 weeks ago:
You should 100% do that. Efficiency gains are less and less, they love baking in “eco” features that are to work around deficiencies in design, and modern home appliances suffer from poor cold solder joints failing causing the whole machine to die frequently. Easy to fix if you have a soldering iron, but should be unacceptable.
Only reason I ended up replacing my old old dishwasher, for example, was that a leak developed in the bottom of the wash pan and it started leaking on the floor, and at that point, 20+ years old, it was likely going to have cascading failures of other parts, and mold mitigation and replacing the subfloor were not worth the risk. Otherwise I’d have kept swapping parts as they failed.
Ended up going with the Bosch 500 due to friends’ personal reviews, as well as Consumer Reports and the like backing up that it does its job. Didn’t buy it for cloud, didn’t buy it for apps, bought it to wash dishes.
The extra price was annoying versus a cheaper model, but better build quality and less noise is what that extra price is paying for. The app/cloud stuff is just silly bonuses that don’t matter.
Definitely keep the old stuff though, it’s generally simpler to repair and maintain and more reliable, unless you hit a critical failure that increases risk too much. (There’s some statistical analysis rule about that, with each new operating mode, each new feature, that adds a multiplicative factor to chance of failure.) Sometimes you get a pleasant surprise too, replaced the main controller in a 20+ year old stove and the modern flavor of the controller cycles the heating coils differently, it actually produces more consistent heat than the old controller board. It was like a free cooking upgrade.
- Comment on No more Bosch for me.. 3 weeks ago:
You could also just pour that into the rinse aid dispenser…
- Comment on No more Bosch for me.. 3 weeks ago:
On the 500 series, it needs a rinse aid refill about once a month using it once a day to once every other day.
- Comment on No more Bosch for me.. 3 weeks ago:
That dishwasher runs perfectly fine without connecting to an app. Been using it that way for half a year.
People are so obsessed for nonsense features. Just set normal mode, auto air, start. Done. You know when it finished because the red light shining on the floor turns off, it beeps at you, and auto air opens the door so it can dry faster.
Guess what? You just had a machine wash dishes for you and you didn’t even hear it running the whole time.
Check the trash filter occasionally, which is a physical part you can pull out from the bottom and wash in the sink. Clean the gaskets occasionally to keep a clean seal like any dishwasher.
I will probably open it up at some point and see if I can damage/remove the radio so it can’t ever connect to anything.
It’s a dishwasher, it doesn’t have to massage your plates’ backs. Nothingburger rant.
- Comment on The landlord special 5 weeks ago:
If I had you and you allowed me to pay you so I don’t have to learn every home repair and maintenance task myself, I’d hand over my life savings. Slight exaggeration, but not by much.
I am learning enough skills that I could eventually quit my day job and become a contractor tho…
- Comment on Red Flag Warning? Neighbor Has Fire 1 month ago:
It’d be a pity if their homeowners insurance company received a date-stamped photo of their actions.
…just a pity.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 1 month ago:
I’ve quite literally drank Flint water. Not for a humble brag (far from it) but I really hate that they became some kind of trope. They have needed help for decades and could have recovered faster if America ever cared about people. Good people there. Shitty America management. It’s like they keep them down for the Internet points.
As for municipal water. Stop by Altoona, Iowa sometime and drink their water. It’s just so terrible. Ground water full of stuff they can’t filter at scale. I don’t hate them for it, it’s what they can suck out of the ground, for maybe a few more years before it becomes brine.
It is hard to produce drinking water that is safe, and also tastes good. Is my global point.
Personal filters can improve that. Otherwise, buying water just leads us to a human future that is by far the worst reality we could ever impose upon ourselves.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 1 month ago:
Have drank tap water across the US for decades. Some municipalities are crappier than others, but a fridge filter tank takes care of those places.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 1 month ago:
How about drinking water from the tap? Much cheaper, not wasting cans, and healthy. If you live in a community with bad tap water, write a letter to your local water board, and buy a filtration tank you can put in your fridge.
If you must really have flavor, buy some of the powdered dehydrated lime or orange powder packets.
- Comment on Gemini wont talk about Bernie Sanders 2 months ago:
Have you seen the web lately?
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 2 months ago:
They likely have an algo running to do this just like how they offer random coupons to entice you to buy items in your cart, and all the other tricks around shipping manipulation.
- Comment on "I know the perfect place for the ESP button! Right in front of the drivers knee!" 2 months ago:
Airbag will likely severely damage you at the distance that puts your face at among other potential reproductive issues.
- Comment on "Please fill out this survey about how we didn't hire you." 2 months ago:
Had a friend’s dead parent receive a text from the ambulance service asking how they did.
KPM surveys need to go away forever.
- Comment on is Chat-GPT refusing this image? 2 months ago:
Some of the models have access to the Internet, and it can process information very fast. As long as it is neutral, it can be “trusted” as far as, it is trying. So you can send it off on a journey to scrape web pages for you and speed a search 30fold. If you’ve used it long enough to know the difference between the hallucinations and mistakes, it can accelerate your work, your learning, your research. You know it’s just regurgitating the Internet and you lens appropriately. You can ask about disparate products and have a table generated to fix the disparate values in their specs. You can have it search large datasets and find errors without having to scroll for 30 minutes. It can regurgitate general learning (that you cross-reference to be sure) and accelerate said learning.
Yes, there is no intelligence to it (neural nets are digital neurons, per se, but that doesn’t mean intelligence), but it is a query-response system that has advantages versus using the current enshittified Internet directly.
Now that it is obviously biased and tainted, no form of it can be trusted. That’s the difference.
- Comment on If you shop by unit prices, double check the math! 2 months ago:
www.walmart.ca/en/ip/…/6000197838147
It’s palm oil with some peanuts.
- Comment on If you shop by unit prices, double check the math! 2 months ago:
Walmart unit price is completely broken in general. They also have glitches in the “did you forget to add?” page where it will show an item as a sale price, but when you add it, you’ll see total price increase by sale price, and a few seconds later, a second price increase to the normal price. Re-checking the cart will show the item as not on sale. There are some other real weird glitches with that e-commerce platform. A rat’s nest of bugs that might not be intentionally nefarious, but also could be.
- Comment on is Chat-GPT refusing this image? 2 months ago:
ChatGPT is already speaking highly of the EO policy statements being put into place, starting on inauguration day. It can no longer be trusted.
- Comment on Steam has the best UI 2 months ago:
Well, how else would the energy vampire recharge? Huh? Random Internet person?! HOW?!¿¡
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 2 months ago:
Corollary: Indiana has no mountains. (Snowstorms in the midwest can trap you in the middle of BFE fairly easily on flat ground, however, with the wet sticky snow they tend to have.)
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 2 months ago:
Local communications being reduced to social media posts is the sign to just dissolve the community, it’s over.
- Comment on We got several more inches of snow last night after getting over seven a few days ago. I went to my local newspaper's website to find out if there was anything I should know. This was their top story. 2 months ago:
Did you know that your newspaper is owned by an Alabama retirement fund?
They own CNHI, which owns that paper.
- Comment on If you save, we will charge you more 2 months ago:
And public utilities commissions just exist so people can think they have a voice while their meetings are just a big circlejerk.
Municipal power is so the way to go, much like everything else, especially because home town service will be run by home town people that care. You think PG&E or Verizon or Comcast cares about your town? Nope.
- Comment on 25 hours of snow. 3 months ago:
That region of Indiana is close enough to the Great Lakes that they do affect the weather there.
- Comment on FedEx has absolutely no clue what 'economy' means. 4 months ago:
Did you check at a FedEx store to see if they had other unlisted rates? Web sites often cater to the lazy for the profits. That being said, I seem to recall an overnight FedEx document envelope across the US costing around $60, so it might not have any advantage.
- Comment on I live in the green part 4 months ago:
21% of the state is also of Hispanic or Latino descent and growing, but yeah, predominantly white.
- Comment on Bug bounty denied? Hmmm ... OK, let's see ... 5 months ago:
Great write-up and great find! You’ll find companies will often try to weasel out of actually honoring ethical programs more than not, but that doesn’t mean give up! If nothing else, the learning will lead to long term education and basically forever employment in various fields.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 6 months ago:
It’s shitfunny because this is a perfect opportunity for apps like this to play into Capitalism and succeed twentyfold.
Open up the app to everyone for free during the hurricane, remove that after hurricane. So many people will go:
- “OMG this app is useful, I’m paying”
- “OMG that company is so kind, I’m paying”
- “OMG I didn’t even know about this but people spread the word, I’m paying!”
So many opportunities for longer-term profits missed by idiocy.
- Comment on Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall 6 months ago:
We know the best ways to suck, even our storms!
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 7 months ago:
I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.
It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.