Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then. WD is pretty much all good, Seagate has some good models that are comparable to WD, but they have some absolutely unforgivable ones as well.

Not every Seagate drive is bad, but nearly every chronically unreliable drive in their reports is a Seagate.

Personally, I’ve managed hundreds of drives in the last couple of decades. I won’t touch Seagate anymore due to their inconsistent reliability from model to model (and when it’s bad, it’s bad).

Also most people who have only used Windows, bought their computers with Windows pre-installed, where the manufacturer loaded a custom Windows image that already has all of their drivers installed and configured. So it’s not just that they’ve never used Linux before, they’ve often never actually installed any operating system from scratch on any computer and had to deal with the setup process.

Not too long ago I was messaging with someone who kept complaining that Linux was taking HoUrS to get drivers configured and how it clearly wasn’t for them because Windows “just works”. Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking of the last time I installed a Linux distro on a machine it took a few minutes to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and I was done, while the last time I installed Windows on a machine it took ~4 hours to get all of the drivers loaded properly, including blacklisting the f*****g Windows Update utility so it would stop trying to replace my network driver with a broken version that kept taking down the network connection on the machine, and the insanity of having to update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot over and over again for half a day until finally all the updates are actually installed and running.

Yes it’s a common phrase. If an apple costs $2, and you have 10 apples, then you have $20 worth of apples.

I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction…

Really? Because every new Windows version is even worse than the one before it. There are now 3? 4? different places to change network settings, but only one of them actually works correctly, if you modify the wrong one it will act like it worked but will silently break all networking on the machine instead.

If they can charge 30% less without Apple’s fees, then why are their prices the same whether you buy on their iOS app or direct on their website? Why have they been overcharging users who don’t buy through the iOS app by 30% all this time?

Yeah that’s about 2 and a half round-trips between Dallas and Houston, that’s…not a lot to be calling this thing ready to go and pulling out the safety drivers.

I wonder how these handle accidents, traffic stops, bad lane markings from road construction, mechanical failure, bad weather (heavy rain making it difficult/impossible to see lane markings), etc.

You’d think they would be keeping the safety drivers in place for at least 6+ months of regular long-haul drives and upwards of 100k miles to cover all bases.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned yet - if you’re in the US, lock down your credit at all 3 agencies. It takes 10-15 minutes and is free, it’s easy to do.

The issue is that many of these leaks include things like your your full legal name, phone number, parents’ full legal names, your social security number, and your entire address history. This makes it trivially easy for somebody to steal your identity and start opening up credit accounts in your name. You need to lock down your credit before that happens. If you need your credit run in the future (opening a bank account, getting a credit card or loan), just ask them which agency they pull the report from and temporarily unfreeze it so they can run the report, then re-freeze it when they’re done. It adds 5 minutes of work once or twice a decade, but could be priceless later on when someone tries to steal your identity.

Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues

That’s the point. They want to set themselves up so that when the issues are shed and it becomes a realistic product, they’re already in a place where their product can be the one that takes over the market. If you wait until a product is viable before starting on development, you’re too late.

I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.

Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.

They won’t. Musk has a hard-on for doing everything with visible cameras for some stupid reason.

Pretty sure the country of origin for Apple products isn’t the US anyway. They’d be coming from China, India, etc. Reciprocal tariffs on the US should have no effect on Apple products sold in other countries.

I mean, you’re not wrong, but the same applies to all phone manufacturers. Samsung, Pixel, etc. are going to see similar price hikes due to tariffs in the US, and a similar drop in demand in China as the population there moves to Chinese manufacturers. I’m not sure why you’re singling out Apple.

Yes at a cursory glance that’s true. AI generated images don’t involve the abuse of children, that’s great. The problem is what the follow-on effects of this is. What’s to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it’s AI generated?

AI image generation is getting absurdly good now, nearly indistinguishable from actual pictures. By the end of the year I suspect they will be truly indistinguishable. When that happens, how do you tell which images are AI generated and which are real? How do you know who is peddling real CP and who isn’t if AI-generated CP is legal?

It wouldn’t matter. The public doesn’t listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won’t show it to them.

I don’t understand why everything isn’t just rated in Wh or mWh. It gives them a bigger number to advertise and it’s voltage-independent. Sure there are load-dependent conversion efficiencies that complicate things a bit, but nobody is going to get up in arms about a 5% deviation from the advertised spec due to less than ideal conversion efficiency. Compared to trying to figure out how many recharge cycles I’ll get on my 5000mAh laptop battery from my 20000mAh power bank (what voltage is that laptop battery running at again?) a 5% efficiency drop is a big nothing burger.