Was actually looking at these probe thermometers to give as Christmas presents this year… some brands actually advertise that they connect to nothing and need no phone or account to operate.
Those are strong selling points that we’re all going to be looking out for constantly now.
But we do have flying cars. They’re called planes. You can get a license to fly them and everything.
Planes are not flying cars. They’re flying buses.
You can get tiny planes that seat 1-5, like a car.
Sure. But you need to think lived experience, less technical specifications. Think of how these machines actually interact with everyday life. Car and bus are socially defined categories. We could just classify them all as automobiles, but we have separate classifications for cars and buses because people interact with them in fundamentally different ways.
Right and I’m saying that there is a class of small plane that people, particularly in remote areas, use as personal transportation. Commercial jets are flying buses, the Cessna 172 is not. Your “um actually” is a false generalization.
And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren’t how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn’t “umm actually,” this is you being deliberately obtuse.
We’re talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.
Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, “flying car,” they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:
- Can provide point-to-point transport.
- Can be operated on your schedule.
- Doesn’t require expensive licensing and training (at least no more than a regular drivers license.)
- Can be owned or operated by the typical American family living in a typical American neighborhood.
This is what a flying car is, and it’s why planes are not flying cars.
Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:
And this?:
For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot’s license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you’re no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.
Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.
We also have actual flying cars but they consume so much energy that they can only fly for a few minutes. Turns out rolling wheels is a lot more energy efficient than lifting up a 2000 pound vehicle.
if if
You thought they would research how to make life better, while they researched how to get more value from the customer.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS
“smart”
The “internet of things” sucks.
Smart local devices rock though. Its not the technology but the implementation for many IoT devices that sucks 🙂
I have this pipe dream of a noob friendly router/hypervisor/NAS combo that would trivialize the installation and running of server-side apps like nextcloud or home assistant. The reason it’s also a router is to automagically forward ports so you could have remote access without
someone else’s computerthe cloud.Zigbee has been great, as I know it’s a local device. Finding WiFi devices that don’t phone home is impossible.
Not if you flash them with Tasmota or ESPHome
But we got gaming on Linux!
I had this exact same reaction last week when I bought a new toothbrush.
You had to use your mail for a toothbrush?
Please tell me that you’re joking…
Some electric toothbrushes have these gimmicky features where they can map your mouth while you brush and report on your hygiene habits to tell you how effectively you’re brushing, or even nag you if you don’t brush enough. Guessing that’s the kind they have.
So for the manufacturer, why allow the device to simply use a local account to track that information, when instead they can force you to register an account online and associate your brushing habits with all of the other shadowy telemetry data being collected about us online?
But also, these aren’t hidden features. That info should be on the box. I’m not trying to defend companies demanding your email and an account to use an electric toothbrush, but also at a certain point you gotta look at the consumer and say, you bought that. Electric toothbrushes aren’t exactly a monopoly out there; you can buy one that doesn’t require an email.
I doubt that the packaging could help you find a “smart” toothbrush that doesn’t ask for your email
It’s pretty easy to put something on the box like this can make your phone buzz if you forget to brush your teeth, and people who worry they’re sometimes forgetting to brush your teeth will see that as an advantage without necessarily realising that they need to give the manufacturer their email and the right to associate it with their brushing telemetry.
If it’s not prominently displayed on the box, then it’s not the consumer’s fault.
I agree, but I suspect that info was on the box.
Don’t spent money on that, it’s complete bunk and just a very expensive gimmick.
If you’re going with an electric toothbrush, avoid the absolutely cheapest ones because the parts tend to be rubbish. Get the first tier up that has a pressure sensor. That’s all you need. They don’t need different brushing modes, they don’t need a masturbation setting, they don’t need bluetooth connectivity, or 3D scanning or whatever.
You want a pressure sensor, and a motor that lasts more than a couple of months. When I bought my toothbrush some four years back you got two for ~$80.
I had to look closely to not get a “smart” electric toothbrush.
LMAOOOOOO
Friendly reminder that mechanical toothbrushes still cost a buck and require no account signups. This should really be a non-issue lol. Are people really this lazy about just brushing their teeth?
- Flying cars - impractical
- Jetpacks - do exist, but limited to trained operators in special locations
- Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)
Robot butler - robot waiters already exist, so it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to repurpose one (although they’re only sold to businesses as far as I could tell)
There’s an Asian AI lab that’s demoed an early version of an AI-driven humanoid robot domestic servant. There are suggestions in might hit market within a few years and cost about as much as a decent used car. Figure those estimates are always too optimistic and something like 2035 and $15k is a possibly realistic estimate assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong.
The amount of times I’ve thought about liberating one of those sushi waiter bots you see sometimes is more than zero.
I hate that anything smart needs my location to be enabled before it will work even if it’s use is unrelated to location. Like my smart light bulbs. Why do they need to know a location ever
As a rule of thumb those device go straight back for a refund.
I always download the app first before buying. If it requires an account (and they usually do) I don’t buy.
Take it a step further and don’t use anything that requires a proprietary app. Even if they don’t require sign-in they’re still hoarding an egregious amount of data on you. I’ve been free of those shackles for years now.
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If your bulbs use Bluetooth and your phone is an android, that’s because on Android you need location permission to scan for Bluetooth devices (as known Bluetooth beacons in range could give away your location). It’s still bad, because you can’t know if the app uses that permission for anything else.
They really don’t. Look into home assistant, there’s no reason the network packet controlling your light bulb needs to go across the internet at all!
And stop buying from vendors that don’t allow full free local control (Google, etc.)
That verifying email for everything shit is something else all together. And yes it is true. Like what the fuck man? I am glad my fridge and stove and microwaves are all low-end crap that do the one basic job they are required to do (and they do it very well mind you).
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it. What would be a more rational “this was predicted and never came about” would be social constructs like safety nets and betterment of society for all, as well as improving our management and use of the Earth. That should make us mad, not that we don’t have flying cars buzzing (and falling) in the sky.
It just hit me that we did for flying what we should have done for ground. Make it almost all mass transit.
Yeah, screw flying cars and parts falling off them due to disrepair.
The real sci-fi future is trains. Numerous and fast.
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it.
Same with living in space. Especially on space boats.
With unlimited ressources floating around… maybe with AGI assisted asteroid mining in 200 years (at the current trajectory with capitalism and political drama).
Maybe. We never got far enough to really test the waters that much. I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars, but it would take huge effort, and my opinion is the window of opportunity is all but shut now. But why should we? If for no other reason than because of the “eggs in one basket” metaphor. Even past climate change and impacts, this Sun won’t last forever, and if we don’t find ways to move on, all life that we know of is gone.
Maybe that doesn’t matter in the end, after all the universe also ends some way too. I think even if life is everywhere, it’s all unique, and so are we, good and bad. But we obviously don’t treasure what we have much, and maybe it’s better we don’t spread the same bad we do to Earth and ourselves elsewhere. It’s possible we simply advanced before we were mature enough to understand what we could stand to lose.
I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars.
No. It’s not.
It’d be easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean, or under kilometers of ice, or in an active lava pit. Orders of magnitude easier. As longs as humans are still “flesh and blood” humans, that’s the scale of impracticality we’re talking about.
As much as I love Start Trek and such, it paints a widly inaccurate picture of the sheer difficulty of human space habitation, and spawned the idea that there’s an escape from the “all eggs in one basket” thing. There is not. Until we’re bio-engineered uploads with space elevators or whatever (and the habitation issues we have now are basically irrelevant), Earth is all we got to live on en masse.
Now, can nations come together and keep a few dedicated scientists alive in space for awhile? For a science mission? Absolutely. And they should.
But colonies that can sustain themselves are a whole different animal.
Your list of other places to colonize are easier than a difference of one atmosphere and controllable environment? That’s funny. I never implied it would be easy, I said the opposite, and getting into space is a big part of that. And there are dangers to figure out. But a hull leak in space is far safer than even a few hundred meters under water.
Yes. Dramatically.
You can ship stuff to any place on Earth trivially. Need a new building for a colony? Float it over, drop it in the ocean. Food? Fuel? Medicine? Send it. You get a free mass to pull/dump heat, oxygen is never far away. You have rock and water to process. You have free radiation shielding! You have tons of mass budged to just store supplies and spare parts you might need.
It’s like a paradise, even in hellish Earth conditions.
But space?
You have nothing.
Sending anything to LEO is orders of magnitude more expensive than, say, sinking it into Hawaii’s volcano. Or drilling it a mile into ice. Forget places that are light seconds (or light hours) away.
Heat? Has to be dumped with huge radiators, limiting how much you can produce. Air? Water? Fuel? Parts? You have what’s with you, and that’s it. There’s no mass budget for heavy manufacturing equipment, no easy supply chain for any of the equipment keeping you alive.
As a human, assuming zero G is engineered away, you just have to deal with tons of radiation, and pay a huge price for a shielded core to sleep/hide in. Plants you bring along get irradiated too, though a closed loop food/waste cycle is the easy part. There’s no mass to push against, no place for heat to float away if there’s suddenly a fire or power outage, and you have X amount of fuel before your craft is stuck.
If it’s anything like the Saturn V, the mass:fuel ratio of your craft is something like a full aluminum coke can. Paper-thin metal is all that keeps your 1 atmosphere and explosive fuel in, whereas anywhere on the ground, you can get orders of magnitude more mass and dump it anywhere. Imagine having to build a car or a hospital or whatever out of gold leaf instead of steel and concrete; that’s the kind of engineering challenge you’re dealing with.
…To reiterate, I think Star Trek like shows where people can just walk around the hull, or even (relatively) short term mission like Apollo 11 or the ISS, give people a bad idea what actual colonization in space would involve. There is no Enterprise, there’s not even a Rocinante no matter how advanced civilization gets: transcendent civilizations would still have ships that are basically all engine, and space stations that are just temporary until humans don’t really resemble humans anymore: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bbe204d461e
And I don’t want to sound like I’m against space missions. Space telescopes? Moon bases? Awesome! Fund it. They’re great ideas.
But forget sustainable unaugmented human habitation. Forget ever being able to live offworld without massive support from Earth. Physics simply do not allow it, and we won’t even resemble humans anymore by the time its practical.
You’re including a great list of things we have or do have to look into to solve before space is trivial. You’re omitting a lot of the problems of underwater, or even above water colonies. I do agree that colonization of space comes only if we can make it self-sufficient, as getting all the resources from a gravity well makes it ridiculously costly and limited. I disagree on how any of the problems have no solutions though, as they’ve been discussed even before I was born, and I’m old. 🫤
Will humans change by necessity and by exposure? Of course they will. The Expanse did a good job of suggesting early changes to those living in low gravity conditions (which is probably the biggest thing to solve, not radiation or material sources). And after even longer they will change even more, making the different places become subsets of the species as we diverge.
Thanks for the link, I could not remember where that site was from so long ago, but it’s a great collection of lore and speculative ideas.
We just disagree on what can be done. I can’t imagine the scifi visions of underwater places that ignore how a small crack leads to instant crushing, or the constant corrosion that has to be fought against. On the Moon and Mars we’ve got the dust that is still a questionable thing on how to handle (electrostatic charges were the last I saw that seemed like they may help some). If you don’t have to rely on Earth for most supplies and you find ways to counter radiation (a few meters of slag works, not practical for a ship due to the mass, but a station isn’t a problem). Rotation may solve a lot of the problems with zero G, but we need to do more research on site before we can just accept it’s unsolvable.
It may not matter and we may not be around that long for it to be a factor anyway, but assuming we are, we have to move on from the Earth, as the window of habitability is not that long. Huge for us at human scales, but cosmically we’re way past the halfway point.
It’s a scientific fact that dads become 69% hotter when they wear a dadbod T-shirt.
Source: my crotch
You sure you’re not just a furry?
Absolutely fucking not. LOL. I appreciate and respect the furry community, but I want human dads with human moobs.
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To gauge internet consensus on these kinds of questions, I check if the character is on R34 and/or CivitAI.
The answer is a resounding: ‘oh yes’
Didn’t this guy get banned? Or was that a slightly different username?
Unbanned 14 hours ago, per the modlog.
