• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • While editing my comment I deleted it by mistake lol. Here is what I was trying to post:

    Don’t buy a Tesla or BMW. Done.

    Edit: im joking, but you can just not connect your car to any internet. Most casual brands have literally zero outgoing connections if you don’t add or connect them to a network. Androd Auto and Apple Carplay are just displaying what your phone sends to the screen, the car itself doesn’t access the internet through those. Think of android auto and carplay like “HDMI monitors for your phone that have touch too”. Your phone does everything the car just displays it.

    Connecting via bluetooth should also not be any problem since bluetooth doesn’t include internet access (unless you activate that ok your phone but Im sure the car will not use it). Bluetooth only sends and receives small bits of data that your phone chooses to send, not what the car chooses. Contacts names, phone numbers, audio and microphone are the only few data that gets sent to your car and only during phone calls or audio listening.

    In the end, just avoid cars that have always connected systems like Teslas or modern BMWs or similar cars. Most Volkswagen, Audi, etc etc are 100% offline cars when you don’t connect them to a network. Most now can do it, but most its a subscription service that you can just not buy, and some even need SIM cards to work, that you just not use. Unless its a Tesla, those are connected even if you don’t pay the subscription.

    Test drive the car. Disconnect it from all networks or don’t turn them on. Try to use all features. If the car constantly complains that it has no internet access for all of them, thats good.

    Note that GPS access is always on and doesn’t require any subscription, so maps and navigation will still work. However that is not really a privacy violation by itself because GPS on cars and phones only receives signal, doesn’t transmit anything. You wont have traffic information or weather or anything tho. If you have traffic info, the car is connecting to some network, find how to deactivate that.

    Many modern cars are too connected, thats true, but with the exception of a few brands, most cars go 100% offline the moment you disconnect them from their data services or don’t pay for that upgrade/subscription. So you will be fine even with a modern car.









  • Being a developer I slowly noticed that 99% if the people in this world don’t even think for a single milisec how anything in tech came to be. They use extremely advanced smartphones, apps, huge servers, games, everything. And no one ever thinks “huh, how did they made this?” They literally think making a whole OS is like making a pancake, 5 steps and 5 minutes and you are done. Or heck, they don’t even think that, they don’t think anything at all about it. They just… use it. Like it magically appeared there and they can now use it. They have absolutely zero idea how much effort the simplest things they use daily took. Some don’t even think about the fact that stuff like Facebook is a company and needs to make money. They just know that Facebook is magically there and works. How does it work? “Well, you open the app and click buttons”. But they never think about how the app and buttons came to be.

    Stuff like “what is a cloud? What happens when you put something on the cloud, like Google drive?” They get absolutely broken and cant answer because they can’t even understand what a cloud is and why the files are accesible from everywhere.

    It gets to a point where people get “shocked” when you tell them that Android or macOS has hundreds or thousands of developers working on it daily. They literally think Android just happened to appear out there and brands just decided to pre-install it on the phone they sell, like it was something that you “just install”.

    Well, long story short, this eventually comes back to bite devs in the ass when we try but fail to explain to a client that “creating an AI that takes stuff from a database and magically creates new stuff” takes more than 2 days. Client gets mad when we say something is impossible in the hours budget that we got.

    Simon Riggs like many other people literally make our world turn but people will never know who they are or why they are needed. This world biggest heroes often go unnoticed.









  • Everytime I buy something from a local shop or a western brand, it comes packaged with minimal plastic, and a lot of well thought out materials. Even if they use plastic, its always a very thin plastic and very “soft”. Can’t describe. But when I buy ANYTHING from aliexpress you can tell it came from china just by looking at the packaging. It has SO MANY LAYERS of plastic, and very hard and thick plastic. If you buy for example a single keychain comes with 20x the weight of it in plastic. They smell so much to plastic chemicals too, something that “western plastic” doesn’t smell like. Every time I have to drink from a paper straw I remind myself that a 10x10cm sticker I bought came with 5kg of plastic and still arrived damaged from shipping.

    We don’t need to reduce even more. We need to somehow force china to reduce it. I am againt taxes for everything, but maybe tax the amount/weight of plastic that comes on stuff you get from china. And find a way to tax the sender, not the buyer. Maybe that will make chinese companies to actually think about reducing they 50 tons of useless plastic waste they make each second.


  • The problem with AVP is that it constantly feels extremely lonely. The fun part about VR is playing stuff together, games, being in the same room even if others are in different countries, have funny full size avatars, interact in a “vr-chat” kind of way. VR is supposed to be a fun version of our world. AVP is extremely serious, too “professional” focused, and especially b o r i n g. All you do on AVP is exactly the same that you would do by yourself with your current devices already. Just even more isolated from the world. And even the most enthusiastic Apple users eventually get this feeling when using AVP. While stuff like Quest 3, Valve Index, PSVR2 all might look “cheap” and “not polished” at first, while using them all you get is “wooow” factor and fun. AVP, yes its well crafted and polished, but it does basically nothing and feels lonely inside it.



  • The bigger the screen, the more you notice because it covers more of your field of view. I would say 240Hz is the sweet spot. You can definitely feel the improvement from lower rates, but rates above it start to be barely noticeable. However I am fine with 144-165Hz if I wanted to save money and still get a great experience. Bellow 120Hz is unusable for me. Once you go high refresh, you cannot go back, ever. 60Hz feels like a slideshow. For gaming 60 is fine, but for work use and scrolling around I can’t have 60. Yes people, high refresh rate is useful even outside of gaming.

    Funny thing is, while gaming, even if my monitor and PC can do it, I rarely let my fps go above 120-140. I limit them in the game. PC gets much quieter, uses less power, heats up less and its smooth enough to enjoy a great gameplay. I will never understand people who get a 4090 and play with unlocked fps just to get 2000 fps on minecraft while their pc is screaming for air. Limit your fps at least to your Hz people, have some care for your hardware. I know you get less input lag but you are not Shroud, those less 0.000001ms of input lag will not make a difference.