The “internet of things” sucks.
Smart local devices rock though. Its not the technology but the implementation for many IoT devices that sucks 🙂
I hate that anything smart needs my location to be enabled before it will work even if it’s use is unrelated to location. Like my smart light bulbs. Why do they need to know a location ever
They really don’t. Look into home assistant, there’s no reason the network packet controlling your light bulb needs to go across the internet at all!
And stop buying from vendors that don’t allow full free local control (Google, etc.)
This has been the predicament for about 75 (or even 175) years… just getting worse, now not just not getting the innovations, but now getting abused and datamined by abusers.
That verifying email for everything shit is something else all together. And yes it is true. Like what the fuck man? I am glad my fridge and stove and microwaves are all low-end crap that do the one basic job they are required to do (and they do it very well mind you).
It’s a scientific fact that dads become 69% hotter when they wear a dadbod T-shirt.
Source: my crotch
You sure you’re not just a furry?
Absolutely fucking not. LOL. I appreciate and respect the furry community, but I want human dads with human moobs.
To gauge internet consensus on these kinds of questions, I check if the character is on R34 and/or CivitAI.
The answer is a resounding: ‘oh yes’
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it. What would be a more rational “this was predicted and never came about” would be social constructs like safety nets and betterment of society for all, as well as improving our management and use of the Earth. That should make us mad, not that we don’t have flying cars buzzing (and falling) in the sky.
It just hit me that we did for flying what we should have done for ground. Make it almost all mass transit.
Yeah, screw flying cars and parts falling off them due to disrepair.
The real sci-fi future is trains. Numerous and fast.
Flying cars was a scifi delusion that didn’t consider all the problems that come with it.
Same with living in space. Especially on space boats.
Maybe. We never got far enough to really test the waters that much. I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars, but it would take huge effort, and my opinion is the window of opportunity is all but shut now. But why should we? If for no other reason than because of the “eggs in one basket” metaphor. Even past climate change and impacts, this Sun won’t last forever, and if we don’t find ways to move on, all life that we know of is gone.
Maybe that doesn’t matter in the end, after all the universe also ends some way too. I think even if life is everywhere, it’s all unique, and so are we, good and bad. But we obviously don’t treasure what we have much, and maybe it’s better we don’t spread the same bad we do to Earth and ourselves elsewhere. It’s possible we simply advanced before we were mature enough to understand what we could stand to lose.
I think that it’s more possible than flying cars or living on Mars.
No. It’s not.
It’d be easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean, or under kilometers of ice, or in an active lava pit. Orders of magnitude easier. As longs as humans are still “flesh and blood” humans, that’s the scale of impracticality we’re talking about.
As much as I love Start Trek and such, it paints a widly inaccurate picture of the sheer difficulty of human space habitation, and spawned the idea that there’s an escape from the “all eggs in one basket” thing. There is not. Until we’re bio-engineered uploads with space elevators or whatever (and the habitation issues we have now are basically irrelevant), Earth is all we got to live on en masse.
Now, can nations come together and keep a few dedicated scientists alive in space for awhile? For a science mission? Absolutely. And they should.
But colonies that can sustain themselves are a whole different animal.
Your list of other places to colonize are easier than a difference of one atmosphere and controllable environment? That’s funny. I never implied it would be easy, I said the opposite, and getting into space is a big part of that. And there are dangers to figure out. But a hull leak in space is far safer than even a few hundred meters under water.
Yes. Dramatically.
You can ship stuff to any place on Earth trivially. Need a new building for a colony? Float it over, drop it in the ocean. Food? Fuel? Medicine? Send it. You get a free mass to pull/dump heat, oxygen is never far away. You have rock and water to process. You have free radiation shielding! You have tons of mass budged to just store supplies and spare parts you might need.
It’s like a paradise, even in hellish Earth conditions.
But space?
You have nothing.
Sending anything to LEO is orders of magnitude more expensive than, say, sinking it into Hawaii’s volcano. Or drilling it a mile into ice. Forget places that are light seconds (or light hours) away.
Heat? Has to be dumped with huge radiators, limiting how much you can produce. Air? Water? Fuel? Parts? You have what’s with you, and that’s it. There’s no mass budget for heavy manufacturing equipment, no easy supply chain for any of the equipment keeping you alive.
As a human, assuming zero G is engineered away, you just have to deal with tons of radiation, and pay a huge price for a shielded core to sleep/hide in. Plants you bring along get irradiated too, though a closed loop food/waste cycle is the easy part. There’s no mass to push against, no place for heat to float away if there’s suddenly a fire or power outage, and you have X amount of fuel before your craft is stuck.
If it’s anything like the Saturn V, the mass:fuel ratio of your craft is something like a full aluminum coke can. Paper-thin metal is all that keeps your 1 atmosphere and explosive fuel in, whereas anywhere on the ground, you can get orders of magnitude more mass and dump it anywhere. Imagine having to build a car or a hospital or whatever out of gold leaf instead of steel and concrete; that’s the kind of engineering challenge you’re dealing with.
…To reiterate, I think Star Trek like shows where people can just walk around the hull, or even (relatively) short term mission like Apollo 11 or the ISS, give people a bad idea what actual colonization in space would involve. There is no Enterprise, there’s not even a Rocinante no matter how advanced civilization gets: transcendent civilizations would still have ships that are basically all engine, and space stations that are just temporary until humans don’t really resemble humans anymore: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bbe204d461e
And I don’t want to sound like I’m against space missions. Space telescopes? Moon bases? Awesome! Fund it. They’re great ideas.
But forget sustainable unaugmented human habitation. Forget ever being able to live offworld without massive support from Earth. Physics simply do not allow it, and we won’t even resemble humans anymore by the time its practical.
I got two e-mails just for these type of situations.
One e-mail for the accounts I REALLY need/want/will keep (games, social media…)
While my second one is just used for accounts I’ll only use once and those types of stuff.
We really need to make people more aware of how their data gets from A to B. I think most people think you need internet access for anything connected to a network to communicate. If more people realized that if device A is on your LAN and device B is on your LAN, there’s no reason traffic from A to B has to traverse the internet, they wouldn’t fall for stuff like this.
What’s more, if the device in question is some simple thing like a thermometer, then there’s no reason for it to be networked at all. Just take the temperature and get on with your life!
And people think that your need a phone service to use GPS.
Indeed, a lot of people think it’s an active satellite connection when all it is is a receiver picking up a really accurate time signal.
I had this exact same reaction last week when I bought a new toothbrush.
You had to use your mail for a toothbrush?
Please tell me that you’re joking…
Some electric toothbrushes have these gimmicky features where they can map your mouth while you brush and report on your hygiene habits to tell you how effectively you’re brushing, or even nag you if you don’t brush enough. Guessing that’s the kind they have.
So for the manufacturer, why allow the device to simply use a local account to track that information, when instead they can force you to register an account online and associate your brushing habits with all of the other shadowy telemetry data being collected about us online?
But also, these aren’t hidden features. That info should be on the box. I’m not trying to defend companies demanding your email and an account to use an electric toothbrush, but also at a certain point you gotta look at the consumer and say, you bought that. Electric toothbrushes aren’t exactly a monopoly out there; you can buy one that doesn’t require an email.
If it’s not prominently displayed on the box, then it’s not the consumer’s fault.
I agree, but I suspect that info was on the box.
It’s pretty easy to put something on the box like this can make your phone buzz if you forget to brush your teeth, and people who worry they’re sometimes forgetting to brush your teeth will see that as an advantage without necessarily realising that they need to give the manufacturer their email and the right to associate it with their brushing telemetry.
Fucking FR
and the best is when the servers the use to send verification emails are crazy slow so you make a throwaway email (because fuck giving them your email, also handy to track who sells it and who they sell it to), go through their bullshit registration, then nothing. You checked spam even. You think you fucked up, and click resend email, still nothing. You give up and you can’t really use your new thing. Maybe you return it, if you’re smart. Then the next day you finally get the email, which indicates they clearly care about the user experience since they put so many resources into onboarding
I purposely bought the Typhur Thermometer probe for Christmas because it has its own base. It can connect to an app, but you don’t need one.
I resorted to fuckin’ building my own thermometer because I was so fed up with proprietary crap.
https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter/wiki (not my design)
Found my first new project of the year! Cheers for the link.
We do have various flying vehicles that have been described as flying cars. But it’s fair to say that the Back to the Future II-style mass adoption hasn’t happened.
Flying cars costs 10 times as much as a regular car, and are not that great at flying or driving. You need driving and pilot license. Needs to take off from an airport or request special permission. It’s just not as practical and cheap as portrayed.
I’m happy with those broadly staying science fiction. People already can’t drive in two dimensions. It’s worrying to think how awful it’ll be if they’re ever given a third.
There are a far fewer pedestrians and walls and lamp posts and motorcycles in the air than on the ground, though, so there’s a lot more margin to be awful without endangering anyone other than your own family.
Well, a car falling from the sky (car crash or ran out of gas) probably wouldn’t be very safe either. I’m absolutely not trusting the average nitwit who pays more attention to Instagram than to the road to operate something akin to a mini-plane.
At present it takes considerable effort or lack of skill for someone to crash their car through the roof of your house. Once morons can fly, all bets are off.
Yes, but there are still pedestrians and walls and lampposts and motorcycles on the ground. I would imagine accidents would be far more disastrous and dangerous than in 2D.
~Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).~
Add in people in convertibles who aren’t wearing safety restraints (or a failure of said restraints) if/when the vehicle does a 180° flip (for any reason).

Helicopters are basically flying cars.
Based. This is what I post every time.
TBF, flying cars in most sci-fi rely on some kind of crazy convenient anti-gravity tech that allows vehicles to hover while still somehow retaining lateral friction so they don’t drift sideways when turning.
A lot of space sci-fi spaceships have basically flown as if they are in an atmosphere, with a more-or-less aerodynamic shape and turning as if there are control surfaces in an atmosphere making them move more-or-less in the direction that the spacecraft is heading.
FYI: Kardia Mobile wants you to create an account just to use the damn thing.
Will not use it
Why do you keep creating new accounts just to spam these awful comics?
















