Alpha Centauri was awesome, but so were a lot of the other games. Colonization was a lot of fun. Call to Power is the civ game I want a real sequel to. Going way into the future tech was a lot of fun, and being able to build cities at the bottom of the ocean.

Of course, I think the whole franchise has gone downhill since Civ IV, so take my opinion as you will.

I have an anecdote that says the opposite. I got the same fridge, washer, and dryer from LG when we moved in our house 10 years ago and have had no problems with any one of them. My wife hates that we got a model with the freezer as a drawer on the bottom and would have preferred a side by side but no problems with anything breaking.

Our Bosch dishwasher on the other hand had a gasket start leaking during the pandemic and it took the repair people 4 or 5 months to get a replacement in. I think they were redesigning a faulty part at the same time as all the supply chain issues so we had a really bad time with that. It was only a couple years old at the time and has worked ever since.

You have a point that it will be hard to explain this to everyone on why it is better.

From my understanding, when you use a password manager, the user will enter a pw into it that they remember and the vault will unlock. Then when they go to log into a website, a different, longer, and impossible to remember password will be sent to the site at login. (Assuming they are using the manager well). A week later when they go to log in again, the same long password will be delivered.

The problem is that if a bad actor gets involved, whether it is the website is attacked or they send the user a phishing url or something and the password from the manager is exposed, it will have to be changed. That scammer can now log into that website as the user whenever they want, and possibly any other website that user used the same password for. Hopefully they didn’t if they are using a manager.

With passkeys, a user will log into their manager with a password they remember, but when they go to log into a website, a different token will be sent, based on their key, every time. So if a scammer is listening at the router they still can’t log in again because it has expired.

It is still not a perfect thing, I would imagine that phishing sites could still get a scammer in, who could possibly do bad things or change the login credentials but it is still much more secure than sending a password to the site for the user.

Good luck proving that your data came from meta sources after you paid.

How about if you have a destination, find me a rest area/restaurant/whatever that is on the route. Not just around somewhere.

Now we have murderers who just spent the last 1000 years reading philosophy books.

Tell that to my (nonexistent) off-site backup.

I’m mad that they did their broken implementation of sending control codes between devices that never works. I have to disable it on everything so that the correct input gets set.

And then they are killing the universal remote industry so there is nothing to replace it with.

I think my oven/stove can be connected. I have never tried because I don’t see the need to preheat my oven when I am not home.

This is what I do as well. I always have Firefox running and can easily search the extension for whatever password I need and it is just as easy to copy from there as opening another tool.

That being said the iOS app is great for when I am away from my laptop.

So…just a normal Friday then.

It is 2.445 kilomiles from Los Angeles to New York.

I watched Wall-E last weekend. They didn’t mention in the Buy-N-Large advertisement that the Morlock worker group was left on earth to starve when the upper class was sent to live on a luxury liner.

Yeah, I have that at home but never bothered to set that up when outside the house. This just lets me do whatever while waiting at the doctors office or whatnot.

It works great as a poor man’s ad blocker.

I believe it was invented by accident. They were sending over samples of some tea in individual silk bags and the people thought of putting the whole thing in the cup.

I still have my WRT54G around somewhere. Loved that thing. What I found interesting was that when the firmware went open demand for that model went through the roof. Wish more companies would realize that there is a demand for that market.

Honestly, the problem is that “AI” is a dumb term that is way over used in these situations. Outside of Science Fiction, AI has generally been used to describe what “the next big thing” computers can do.

Using a term like “Large Language Model” to refer to ChatGPT explains what it actually does. Or Deep-Learning Text to image models for the image generation.

I remember playing around with TTS on a Apple ][ plus as a kid, there is nothing new about that, but using statistical models to have them imitate a voice is new, but just lumping them all in with Artificial Intelligence, is just dumb.

Yeah, but matching TTS to a character’s voice is where you would need it.

This is one sector where I am actually happy for AI to be available. I want to play a game where the NPC’s can say my character name.

That being said, I also want the voice actors to be compensated fairly. Maybe the guilds can set up a deal where using someone’s voice for training data is included.