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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.




  • 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.

    Edit: TL;DR: bad tasting municipal water isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just the reality you have to work with at the time.









  • 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.



  • 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.