> But where I live, winters could be a big issue. These vehicles could coat the roads with thin black ice.
I never even considered this as a problem. Is the exhaust liquid water though? Because my understanding of the process is such that is still creates an appreciable amount of heat, causing the exhaust to leave as a vapour (much in the same way water vapour is already expelled from catalyzed ICE exhaust, or people breathing).
I was thinking the same thing; the city I'm in isn't even that large (approx 450k pop.) but I could probably go through my list of contacts that live in-town and rattle off at least two-dozen area codes that aren't native to the area (on top of the dozen or so that are), with at least half of those being out-of-province. The slow death of long-distance billing, which also finds itself competing with the likes of FaceTime et. al., coupled with the highly-mobile nature of cell phones, have just made it a hassle to go through the process of changing your phone number for anything other than moving to another country (or a wicked discount).
Isn't that regulated? In many places the operators are required to let you take the number with you when you change provider to obtain a better/ cheaper service. Everybody's numbers in practice go via some LUT that's mapping a human "telephone number" which people dial to an actual service endpoint which might move (after all, cell phones already move, so this indirection was necessary to make that work) and so the rule only needs to say that there's some means by which company A gets to change the LUT for your phone instead of company B.
Not necessarily my own use, but I built a few tools (that I volunteer free for use on a perpetual license) for my day job to make life a little easier in a few departments. Nothing impressive imho, they're mostly 'basic' calculators for various parts of the wiredraw process, from basic reduction-of-area to full-blown multi-pass die calculators (all fairly basic math and algorithms). In all honesty they're the kinds of semi-basic tools that the company should already have after >50 years of continuous operation, but stubborn blue-collar workplaces can be set in their old-fashioned ways, no matter how inefficient (honestly it's somewhat nice seeing others using and appreciating something I built).
Realistically, it's been possible on and off for quite some time. Chrysler's UConnect system received quite a bit of flak some years back over just how easy it was to take over full control of a vehicle[0]; not just locking/unlocking doors, but full control over the climate system and wipers, all the way up to starting and stopping the engine or changing gear in the transmission.
That is why steer by wire steering is terrifying. If your car turn full left due to some hack or bug at some speed trigger you are dead. And the industry push it as cost cutting.
Given GM's commitment to actively removing the most popular and asked-for feature in the automotive world from their own infotainment systems, I'm not even surprised. This is a company that has proven before and continues to prove that they simply don't give a fuck about technology, they've realized they can keep throwing gimmicks or buzzwords at consumers and maintain just enough mind-share to stay relevant. It's no shock to me that a company with that sort of culture willingly bought into the same kind of flashy demos and mosaics of buzzwords that they themselves take part in.
GM does not make cars for the consumers, GM makes cars for the investors. And the investors loved the idea of additional revenue from apps&subscriptions on the entertainment system
In many cases the coils were integrated into the casing of the battery, and the back panel of the phone was thin enough to transfer sufficient power through.
Being one of those weirdos still using a proper receiver and 5.1 speaker setup on our main TV, but a stereo pair on our other TV, it's incredible the difference the lack of a discrete center-channel can make. It seems like Netflix et. al are more interested in pushing a 5.1 Dolby mix to everyone instead of detecting whether or not they have hardware capable of playing it properly. My more unpopular opinion is that they (the streaming services) should all be pushing a stereo track by default and have a/the surround mix as a selectable option, because it's become obvious that down-mixing on user's devices doesn't work as intended.
For what it's worth, we keep subtitles on for the stereo TV nearly permanently, while the main TV rarely is a problem - nothing a small boost to the center channel can't fix anyways.
I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it. My friends can't hear the tv, my family can't, but I can and my hearing is very average. I've commented more in depth on a discussion of this phenomenon.
The Netflix show model is highly formulaic. Same cameras and mics, 8 episode budget contract, sent to the same post houses. If you want to work with Netflix, you don't mull over choices or do auteur film, you have an expedient, generic pipeline for mixing, color, etc that produces consistent results.
It's 98% business, just a race to see how much they can make using their method before Amazon or HBO can catch up.
Now I'm peeved about what a low effort crapshoot their mixing is is. I've made a few profiles for my receiver to help with levels and clarity, and we still end up needing subtitles. Oh, this is an action scene? I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't compressed the range out of it and then flat amplified it 12db. An intimate scene follows? Good thing you again compressed the shit out of that hot ass mic mix so we're fighting to pick out words over every rustle of fabric and hair right after we had to turn down the volume. It's atrocious.
No worries, I'm sure the next generation of shows will sprinkle some AI pixie dust over their pipeline to artificially "uncompress" the range again at the end (and generically sort everything that sounds like a voice into one channel, everything that sounds like background noise in another, etc, without context-awareness)
> I'm nearly entirely convinced that this is just us millennials and generations adjacent getting old and not wanting to admit it.
No, I have seen an audio engineer with golden ears claim that the industry has changed. He has increasingly been directed to mix with cinema sound systems in mind and in accordance with a current quiet-dialogue fad that filmmakers are following. The broad public that watches the content through streaming with a low-consumer-grade sound system is an afterthought in this process.
Exactly. It's much like the music industry (though kinda the opposite), where a bunch of people claim "you're just getting old, music today isn't any worse than in the 1970s". It's not true: the commercial music industry these days is completely different, and part of it is the sound engineering. Back then, they mixed music to be played on Hi-Fi systems at home, and music had very wide dynamic range; these days, they mix music to be played through earbuds in a noisy environment, and music is highly compressed (and the production process is just the tip of the iceberg).
It's not just the hearing capability, I have better than average hearing for someone who is 30 but I still struggle with movies without subtitles since English is not my primary language.
Its hard to understand what someone is saying even if I can hear the sounds, when it just sounds like mumbled gibberish.
Add on top rather arbitrary restrictions on subtitles based on region (on Netflix I cannot use English subs because of where I live), which is even more infuriating.
This seems pretty easy to test right? Put on The West Wing (early 2000s) and see if you can keep up. Put on any reality show from the last 5 years and see if you can keep up. I can do TWW, I can't do Bachelor in Paradise. Case closed IMO.
It's become wildly prevalent the past few years in Canada, to the point where co-workers whom I've thought were decent people for the past ~10 years are actually inhuman pieces of shit, they've just never felt 'free' to air their grievances in public. But you don't only see this ignorance in the way people talk, it's extended to everything, from the way they drive, to the way they navigate a store, it's almost like nobody exists in their world except themselves, you're simply an obstacle in their day-to-day,
IME, COVID was a real turning point that pushed a *lot* of people into a more selfish mindset, and the "trucker" convoy/occupation of Ottawa really seemed to shed any remaining social decency that still existed in many of these people. Now that cost of living is spiraling way out of control (housing is a prime example, my $100k income virtually assures I will never be a homeowner), it's really galvanizing that selfishness in many while fosting in many more.
I'm not sure free speech is really causative. It might be a catalyst, but people have to be self absorbed and hold those beliefs before voicing them. They might just feel emboldened to voice them since others are too.
Is it that you can't afford a house anywhere, or that you can't afford one in the area you currently are? If relocating (remote work) is an option, my understanding is there are more affordable areas of Canada that have lower average home prices that someone making $100k could potentially afford one on the cheaper end.
I think, for me, it satisfies some kind of hoarding instinct. I have a hard time keeping 'random junk' laying around my apartment, but I have absolutely no problem keeping a copy of a DVD I ripped 15 years ago that I will probably never watch again, and would probably be upset if it disappeared for some reason.
A friend and I were able to phish passwords from nearly the entire school we went to with VB6 - the school (board) used active directory for logins on a shoddy network where some switches would often just drop all traffic to a random port for any length of time, meaning a PC would lose connection to the AD server at random. The kicker was that attempting a login after the connection was dropped greeted you with a "could not connect to //SCHOOL_BOARD//SCHOOL_NAME/PC_NAME" to which the solution was reboot the PC and it would work again (99% of the time, anyways). The other kicker was the background image and login domain were the same for every single computer at a single school. We exploited this; we created a full-screen/un-exitable UI with the same background image behind a form simulating the normal login screen. We would first login to our own account and run the program (there were no login limits either), at which point someone else later through the day would sit down and try to login. The credentials that got typed in were added to a .txt in my own user folder before the user rebooted the "non-functional" system. Of all the dumb shit we did, that's probably the only thing we never got caught doing, and probably because we never did anything nefarious with them.
Ha - did the same phishing thing with our RM Nimbuses in the school computer lab. Wrote a turbo pascal program that showed the same login UI as the Nimbus. Logged into my own account on all machines and ran the program. When someone "logged in", it wrote their username and pw to a text file, and rebooted the machine (which got the user to the real login screen). Never got caught for that either, but also don't remember doing anything malicious with the info - I think it was more about the fun of the challenge :)
I never even considered this as a problem. Is the exhaust liquid water though? Because my understanding of the process is such that is still creates an appreciable amount of heat, causing the exhaust to leave as a vapour (much in the same way water vapour is already expelled from catalyzed ICE exhaust, or people breathing).
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