Hey folks of tildes,

I wanted to see if anyone has similar experiences as mine and if they know the reason for this. I've purchased a few items which came with AAA battery pre-installed (Chromecast from Google, Weighing scale from Xiaomi). These batteries lasted for an incredibly long time, Chromecast lasted over 1.5 years and Xiaomi's scale lasted for a similar time. Any third party battery I've purchased (Energizer, Duracell, Panasonic, Eveready and few others which I can't recall) last for a couple months at best.

I've now switched to rechargeable batteries, to reduce the waste I was creating. Still, I was really curious if anyone has a similar experience, and if they know the reason for it.

So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect his work and maybe that's the perfect setup for watching this because... I'm honestly blown away. I planned on listening to 3 minutes of it to make fun of stupid AI but ended up letting it run for the entire hour and actually laughed quite a bit. It all makes sense. It does sound like him. I don't know how much editing went into it, how much prompting and discarded material. I especially don't know if it just dug up old jokes somewhere else and copied them. But still.

It feels like we just had awkward AI-wordsalad experiments and things like the infinite Seinfeld stream which was fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way but... I mean, it obviously was bad. The funny part was that it was unpredictably bad.

But only a year later we're having some uncanny valley shit. I looked it up and apparently this started with a comedy podcast with an AI co-host which produced a clip for a fictional Tom Brady standup routine which turned out popular enough to get them sued, apparently.

There's this part in the fake Carlin special where he talks about the future of entertainment being 24-hour streams where an AI comedian comments on daily news events in real time or something and I can't say I wouldn't watch that. Just to see what it's like. But I also get people calling it disgusting. It kinda is. I get [his daughter says "machine will ever replace his genius"](machine will ever replace his genius), she's right of course. But that video got close IMO.

You can still point at little flaws here and there with AI generated content but with this trend, it will be 3 or 5 years before we get perfectly polished content machines that don't trip over any of the easy and obvious stuff. What place would such content have in the entertainment industry?

What do you guys think?

Teams is down or was down for pretty much everyone I know (work context).

Thinking in terms of business continuity, what is your fallback plan. Is your fallback a managed, enterprise class service?

Might get everyone internally to install Signal since it's end-to-end encrypted, has a desktop client and can handle file transfers. That's just off the cuff.

Thoughts?

I do not like using mouse. I feel it disturbs the flow of things I am doing. Moreover, I like quickly pressing through a bunch of keystrokes that results in what I want. There is a sense of satisfaction in that.

For starters, I use Vim and love it. I liked it so much that all my browsers have Vim-like keybindings (through Vimium or Tridactyl). But that is as far as I have gone in making my life easier (apart from switching windows via Command+Tab, but for all else I need to use mouse).

I recently bought a MacBook and it is kind of disappointing that the keybindings are not so intuitive or don't exist natively as they do in Windows. For example, resizing the window was easier on Windows with Win+arrow. There are many such things I find lacking on Mac. Broadly, I am asking for what other improvements can I bring into better my keyboard-centric workflow.

After one too many blackouts for the past few years, we're in the market for a backup power solution.

Guidelines include:

• Would rather have multiple smaller units than one large one.
• Should be enough to charge phones, watch a television, run the Keurig. If it can spike up enough to run a heater or keep the fridge from spoiling, that's a bonus.
• Would like to keep it at ~$300 a unit.

We're looking into a whole home generac as well, but this is more of a bandaid trial solution for now.

I have looked at various editors, but those I came across all had their own build-in file navigator which they insisted you'd use. I always hate that; it's the one thing I dislike about Godot. So is there one where you can simply open your .md files directly from Windows?

Edit: What I'm after is WYSIWYG, not just synstax highlighting.

I'm curious how you tech oriented people handle this and whether you react in the same way to tech frustrations as I do. Advice is welcome.

I hate hate hate the black box aspect of dealing with computer technology. When I try to do something and it fails to work for reasons that are opaque or inscrutable it causes me to react with rage. I haven't quite thrown my computer out the window when something fails to work as expected, but I want to and it ruins my mood and makes me irritable and difficult to deal with until the problem is solved.

Do other people react the same way? How do you mitigate this? I'm currently needing to learn and use more tech skills and interact with more programs than I have in the recent past. What advice do you have?

Thanks

Sometime this year, probably around the middle of the year or later depending on my welfare, I want to replace my two monitors with an ultra wide.

I do have some preferences, such as:

• OLED Preferably
• Built in KVM
• 120hz or above refresh
• Has the ability to show two separate computers screens at once. Just in case I'm not being clear, two separate computers are plugged in as inputs and it can output the display for both on the same screen by dividing the screen in half. I've only seen this feature on one monitor, an ultrawide ASUS one but that was roughly $2000. This is probably the most 'nice to have' feature.

Would appreciate any suggestions or recommendations. Thanks.

Also, I have two monitors I would like to sell when I replace them, these being an ASUS VG27AQ, and a Dell S2721QS. Both of them are in perfect condition, other than being slightly dusty. What would be a fair price to list them for when selling?

Hey! So I used to be fairly warm to MS Teams but I utterly despise its call handling. I have three Bluetooth audio devices that I used regularly - a set of Edifier earbuds, my expensive Sony WH-1000XM5 pair, my CX-5 audio, and my Bluebus that integrates into my old BMW's hands free system. All of these work perfectly fine when I call someone via regular-ass phone calls. When I use Teams, all hell breaks loose. The edifiers work perfectly fine, so I know Teams is QUITE capable of handling these all ok. My CX-5 system won't do microphone audio when Android Auto is connected, but works fine on Mazda's infotainment call handling. In my BMW it won't handle the microphone but plays audio. On my Sony pair of headphones, it works great... And then about every ten minutes it disconnects, consistently, so I can't use them.

In theme with the other ongoing thread, nothing gets my gears moving like tech not doing what I'm asking it to. Teams barely has any options on Android for audio, so there isn't much of anything to tweak. Does anyone have any ideas of where to start? Is there something similar to Windows solutions like Virtual Audio Cable which could set up a virtual BT device to pipe audio through and simulate it being something else for Teams? Thanks all!

I have been a frequent visitor of the various websites that are now under the Fandom.com umbrella, going back to when it was called Wikia. And if there's one thing that's been a consistent irritation with the platform, it's just how intrusive and annoying the advertising is. (For a sense of how long this has been a problem, see here.)

But worse than the intrusiveness of the sites' ads, their biggest problem is their performance. They can bring Firefox to a crawl.

For a while, it seemed like Fandom had been making some improvements. I could visit, say, Memory Alpha without the CPU on my computer spiking like crazy. But I just tried to look something up on the Forgotten Realms Wiki and, good god, it was terrible.

(And before anyone says anything, no, I have no intention of using an ad blocker to deal with it.)

Am I imagining it or is the platform actually getting worse again?