• 0 Posts
  • 151 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • Well, even a locally controlled bed would have “not worked” (well, it’s still a bed obviously, just not heating/cooling) in a power outage.

    Note our household got it when it was significantly cheaper (still expensive-ish, but not nearly as bad as now) and grandfathered into being able to use it without a monthly subscription. In a bit of bad/good luck, because replacements kept leaking, we got warranty-upgraded to the current offering. So get to know how the new stuff is without having had to pay as much or maintain a monthly subscription. When we bought it, at least, they had good warranty coverage for leaks.

    So I get to see how good the hardware design fundamentally is while also knowing how anti-consumer the business and software side is going.

    Ultimately when/if I lose sane access to the capabilities, I’ll probably start poking around to see about hacking at least the heating and cooling, since we did struggle to find a good comfortable design for such a thing before getting here. They really did at least nail the mattress pad part, and the heating/cooling is pretty good without being obtrusive. The vibration and sensors might be nice, but ultimately I don’t care too much about that.


  • Once that frustrates me greatly is eight sleep. My wife had been trying various products and unfortunately eight sleep was the best executed one. But they are openly hostile to local controls.

    From the time they have released people have been complaining over and over about zero local controls, suggesting buttons on the base, a remote, or even local wifi or Bluetooth controls and their people keep coming online and patronizing by claiming their engineers are working on it, but it’s hard. Truth is they are passing a fucking subscription plan to use your damn bed.

    Finally they came out with their local control “solution”. No, buttons should not be on the base, that would be inconvenient. No, a remote control would be too easy to lose. So they implemented super dodgy earbud type controls, two taps for a tick colder, three taps for a tick warmer. Ok, janky as hell, but finally, local controls. So you get things going and do the tap and long buzz meaning “reject” the request. Turns out the taps will only process if the cloud server says it’s ok, and the bed will usually be “off” and not receptive to taps unless you turn it on via Internet app or you have an Internet arranged schedule that has it on at the time you want to adjust it.

    It’s a shame since they otherwise had fantastic execution, but their monetization through an app strategy is maddening. So my home has one cloud based device and it pisses me off.


  • I have a stove with optional app support, but I tolerate it because the app doesn’t add anything. The local controls can do everything. If you use the app, you have to hit a button on the local controls anyway to confirm you are physically there anyway before it listens to the app for most things.

    The only thing that was somewhat convenient was phone notification when timed cooking was done, because the stoves own chime wasn’t that loud. However ultimately I stopped bothering and just set a phone timer when I set cook timer, because keeping the oven on the network was an active maintenance activity that wasn’t worth it.




  • Maybe for some, but even if you have to keep it up because your work it relatives demand it, Windows ecosystem is essentially impossible to debug when it hits issues and you just have to take guesses as to why the obscure bad behavior is happening.

    Windows is better at not needing to be fixed or the first place by self healing, whereas with Linux distributions you have to know how to fix those issues, but once it goes beyond easy to fix issues, Linux is reparable but windows isn’t.

    If it isn’t blatantly obvious, it didn’t fix itself, and SFC didn’t fix it, then they always say reinstall…



  • Well mine is pretty petty. Every time I start up my system I’m spammed by epic advertisements in the lower right. It’s just so obnoxious, particularly since I’m on my couch and using my controller, so I have to pick up keyboard to dismiss those.

    I’m so lazy I haven’t bothered to investigate options to be fair, but broadly speaking I don’t like how much it screams “look at me, look at me!” when I had no intention of interacting with their store/launcher at all that time.



  • no one’s trying to design a system against their own interests.

    Well, to an extent that can be in a political philosophy.

    Certainly rational self interest is factored in as to “affordability”. E.g. you support some benefit that you, personally, will never ever benefit from but it just seems the right thing to do, even if it may cost you 0.01% of your income, because that seems pretty affordable for someone else to benefit. Generally, people have voted explicitly against their self-interest.

    Now the point can be made about welfare sorts of programs that it is a matter of self interest. That the small amount you lose in contributing is a small price for making everyone else contribute in case you need it. This case can be made for a lot of these scenarios, but the fact remains folks do vote against ‘rational’ self interest in various other ways.



  • Actually, the lower level may likely be less efficient, due to being oblivious about the nature of the data.

    For example, a traditional RAID1 mirror on creation immediately starts a rebuild across all the potential data capacity of the storage, without a single byte of actual data written. So you spend an entire drive wipe making “don’t care” bytes redundant.

    Similarly, for snapshotting, it can only track dirty blocks. So you replace uninitialized data that means nothing with actual data, the snapshot layer is compelled to back up that unitiialized data, because it has no idea whether the blocks replaced were uninialized junk or real stuff.

    There’s some mechanisms in theory and in practice to convey a bit of context to the block layer, but broadly speaking by virtue of being a mostly oblivious block level, you have to resort to the most naive and often inefficient approaches.

    That said, block capacity is cheap, and doing things at the block level can be done in a ‘dumb’ way, which may be easier for an implementation to get right, versus a more clever approach with a bigger surface for mistakes.



  • A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.

    A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.

    Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.

    This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.


  • I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:

    • 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
    • So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.