It might help.

I’m not familiar with Google Matter, but you may find google alternatives for home assistant integrations at !homeassistant@lemmy.world

I’ve been pleasantly surprised before.

I have 2. One has broken twice from over use, so I reprinted the broken piece and swapped it.

Yes

I spent 20 minutes (I timed it) on the phone diagnosing a tech support issue and instructing the user on how to fix it. It took about 10 seconds for me to realise that number lock was turned off.

The rest of the 20 minutes was trying to get the user to find and press “Num lock” on the keyboard.

About 10 minutes in, they actually found and pressed it. Apon noticing that nothing had appeared on the screen, they tried pressing it again, then announced it didn’t work.

Somehow, just getting them to press the button one more time was not simple, as they now had to begin their logical left-to-right scan of the keyboard again to find this mysterious new “Num lock” button they’d never heard of before.

This person (on another call) would say the name of each key as they pressed it. They would say “Caps lock, A, Caps lock, Enter” when typing a single “A” on a line, but didn’t know what “Caps lock” was and couldn’t find it on the keyboard when asked to press it immediately after having said and pressed it.

It’s not as good as Google from 20 years ago, but much better than Google today.

I didn’t choose it for the privacy, I chose it because I wanted to actually get results for my searches.

Google gets me answers about 20% of the time,
Kagi about 50%,
and (generic - not Kagi) AI about 80% of the time.

The problem with AI as search is that the other 20% is when it will confidently give me wrong answers and waste hours of my time, so I guess Kagi is still useful to me.

Stand it up on one end?

My local grid frequently hits 100% renewable power, and has even exceeded 100% of demand from only rooftop solar with commercial solar and wind also producing at that time.

The grid needed a few modifications, and there was some brief instability, but everyone survived it and the grid has been stable for over a year.

I think we’ll be fine.

Gambling destroys lives. Making gambling illegal may be controversial, but I can’t see any reason to allow gambling ads.

If you want to gamble, then it’s your own life to ruin. If you advertise gambling, then you are ruining other people’s lives.

Ban gambling ads.

Oil refineries use so much energy that they quite often have a dedicated power plant. The energy required to refine enough fuel to drive 100km could instead be used to drive an EV more than 50km.

Switching to EVs will have much less of an impact on the grid than it initially appears. With overnight or midday charging, EVs can even help spread the load throughout the day and help reduce the evening peak.

V2G/V2H can reduce this peak even further, while only using a tiny amount from each car battery.

Air-conditioning is also a big concern for the energy grid, but as with all new technologies, the grid will be upgraded to handle it. Unless you are employed by a grid operator to plan for the future, you don’t need to worry about it.

https://xkcd.com/3214/

Yes, the higher range ones are quite expensive. Hopefully the second hand market will have a few reasonably priced in a few years.

Just not feeling mentally 100%, decided to go for a walk around some quiet streets. I found a spot in sunlight and decided to pause for a moment to enjoy it.

A driver stopped to check on me and ask if I was OK. It made me realise that most people really do care.

Multiple independent braking systems and adequate maintenance.

A single failure may cause the escalator to stop working, but it takes 3 failures in a row to make it catastrophic. Regular maintenance catches this failures before 3 in a row can occur.

If any of the stairs are damaged and cannot stay attached correctly, there is a chance of falling into the machinery below, which will not stop just because a human is in the way.

If the failure is in the braking system, it can quickly turn into rapidly moving stairs, which can be very lethal.
Most escalators have multiple independent braking systems so that this doesn’t happen, but some poorly maintained escalators have been discovered with 2 or even all 3 systems disabled.

I often do something else on the phone that takes minimal effort and can be stopped at any time.

My normal choices are sudoku, crossword, 2048, or an idle game.

These hold systems (except the ones with a callback option) are absolutely not designed for disabilities, and I doubt they were even designed for human interaction. Forcing someone to actively wait is either a terrible oversight, or intentionally harmful design (i.e. to reduce the number of calls they need to handle).

Pinning the CPU clock can have certain uses.

What about showing the result that exactly matches the search query instead of a bunch of similar items?

Not too many people will tell you about the time they got coronavirus and died.

Physics Girl has another story though.

I’m in Australia. I don’t get below 200 ping. 150 would be nice.

Yeah, tell that wall to get out of your way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_urban_legend#Example