The opening anecdote was interesting. The author’s overall point seemed to be that eroticism loses out when privacy is lost. Yet they were upset that when they shared their erotic experience with a friend, that friend didn’t find it erotic and instead found it exploitative.

The friend had a point - there’s no particular reason to share our kinks with the masses and expect agreement. It’s totally fine for some people to have issues with others being sexualized at work. Those people deserve respect too.

You don’t know much about cars. All the work they had done on their vehicle was typical for that model generation. Air suspensions are generally problematic because of constant wear mixed with parts issues, and A/C problems are common in that model generation. This is all normal stuff to fix over twelve years.

I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.

The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.

There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Of course I do? Across all my utilitarian devices, e.g. phone, desktop, laptop, I already find updates to be a large net negative except for the vague and nebulus 'security'. If a car 'needs' updates then it isn't doing its job.

I can't imagine the expletives that'll come out of my mouth the day I'm running late for a meeting and my car won't start because its in the middle of an update.

I consider OTA updates to be of negative value, actually. If my car needs fixing, I'll bring it in for servicing. If it's not broken, I don't want my car tampered with.

Come back to me when there's a punitive liability model for OTA updates. If the garage manages to break something during, that's on the garage, not me. It should be the same for OTA updates: the company pushing the update should be liable for any failure and for providing replacement transportation if they manage to break my car with an update.

"Car won't start because the radio failed to update" and "insurance company tracking and other telemetry" are not just zero value, but net-negative.

Hence why folks should be pushing right to repair and similar legislation through to prevent this before it happens. Technical hacks are tactical solutions, good policy implementation is the strategic, long term solution.

For a lot of things, zero value would be a high peak. Often the value is negative. Thus:

You don't update anything if it works and it's not connected to internet.

If it works and is connected to internet, then disconnect it from internet if possible.

For the rest, delay updates for long enough without having heard complaints that there's sufficient confidence on the update not breaking anything.

Do you really think that a dealership would tie up a service bay to keep you captive?

Service is where dealers make their money. You’re convinced that manufacturers will sell data to insurance companies yet believe that dealers will sacrifice hours of profit. That doesn’t work out.

We were not in the service bay. Our Maverick was outside. The Service Guy said they had to download the update to their servers. From there it was a quick trip to the service bay for the updates. That is the reason I had asked in the first place. I could see the Mav outside. Not blaming the SG. I am sure it as not the Dealership, but someone at Ford Corporate??? Not so sure.

Also: I made sure we were the first appointment, arriving at 7:45am for my 8am reservation. Soon another guy was behind me. One thing I have learned it to always schedule "the first time in the AM" if you do not need immediate service.

Edit: In retrospect, they had turned on the OTA system in the Mav. So maybe when the SG said it was downloading, I thought "to a server" but maybe it was directly to the Mav. As I noted, was not a big issue. Still not using the OTA features.

The dealer is paid per job for warrentee work so they still want you out quick.

even for non warrantee service they are generally paid based on how long the job is expected to take not how long it takes them. The only reason to not hurryitoo much is they warrantee their own work and so if you bring it back that costs them.

I guess we’ve reached a point where instead of taking personal responsibility for our backups, we just try to turn the internet into our personal army against products.

It's a lot more efficient to have a central repository for versions of a particular bit of software rather than expect every user to keep a backup of all the versions. It's just a general waste of resources.

Yeah, we subscription price of an FTP client which didn't actually modernize in decades is justified, totally justified.

The economics change when you’re in oil country. My beautiful little province has oil wells drilled between 250 and 2900 metres. Due to corporate ‘issues’ many of these wells are orphaned and remediation becomes a provincial problem. With deep holes and provincially owned electricity and gas companies, geothermal makes more economic sense; it’s robbing a benefit from a big cost centre.

I went to high school with two guys who are working on geothermal as a means to remediate orphan wells. I’m biased in their favour, but the numbers make a lot of sense.

I live in a part of the world that is far below freezing for a significant portion of the year. Thus a large portion of my annual energy usage goes into not freezing to death.

When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my engine. This energy (heat) doesn’t provide any benefit to anyone and just leaks out into the atmosphere (which we’ve already established is trying to kill me).

That’s rejected energy. Or when it’s below -40, rejected motherfucking energy. :)

A IC car’s heating system normally taps into the engine’s cooling system, so that heat is mostly free. In a pinch you can actually turn the heater on full to help cool the radiator.

I had to do that when my radiator sprang a leak on the freeway and the engine heat kept creeping up. Unfortunately it was late summer and not at all pleasant.

I managed to get to a gas station with some stop leak in stock... If they didn't, I was ready to crack an egg in it.

I once rode in a friend's car in a similar situation. Very much not pleasant. His problem was a thermostat problem, so he hadn't lost all cooling but enough we used the same workaround. Running the heat in the summer time resulted in a couple of very sweaty dudes.

"when it’s -40 fucking degrees" Celsius, or Fahrenheit? Oh yeah, it's the same either way :).

I am afraid you will be the first to migrate after the energy crisis escalates. Next will be millions that live even a little below 0 (Celsius).

Do you live out in Siberia or something? Seems like a rough environment for most tech.

Sounds like a very unique experience :)

Not OP, but upper Midwest US and Canada experience this every year, though where I'm at usually only hits -40 if you include the wind chill.

That’s a lot of words to admit that geothermal has its place.

That wasn't the conclusion, though. The conclusion was that dispatchable geothermal is competing against daily cycling batteries, a competition it's likely to lose on cost.

I can’t understand why you’re splitting hairs to this extent. The web is protocols; some are implemented at server side whereas others are implemented at browser side. They’re all still protocols with a big dollop of marketing.

That statement was accurate enough if you’re willing to read actively and provide people with the most minimal benefit of the doubt.

My response is in a chain discussing browsers in response to someone who literally said “The web wasn’t the browser it was the protocols.”

I responded essentially “it was indeed also the browser”, which it seems you agree with so I don’t know what you’re even trying to argue about.

> willing to read actively and provide people with the most minimal benefit of the doubt.

Indeed

My point is, you could write your own server and your own browser to participate in the web, but you have to follow the protocols.

I’ve never heard of servant oriented, but I understand the point. Browsers process and render whatever the server returns. Whether they’re advertisements that download malware or a long rambling page on whatever I’m interested in now, browsers really don’t have much control over what they run.

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

1. As we're seeing here, browser developers determine what content the browser will parse and process. This happens in both directions: tons of what is now common JS/CSS shipped first as browser-specific behavior that was then standardized, and also browsers have dropped support for gopher, for SSLv2, and Flash, among other things.

2. Browsers often explicitly provide a transformation point where users can modify content. Ad blockers work specifically because the browser is not a "servant" of whatever the server returns.

3. Plenty of content can be hosted on servers but not understood or rendered by browsers. I joked about Opera elsewhere on the thread, which notably included a torrent client, but Chrome/Firefox/Safari did not: torrent files served by the server weren't run in those browsers.