Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we’ve put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it’s parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

As for performance, it moves well enough. It’s a mini-van, so you’re not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I’ll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I’ve been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I’d also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I’d take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

So ya, we’ve been happy with it and I’d give it a recommendation.

American made car? Ya, I own a Toyota Sienna. And ya, I don’t think I’d buy an American brand again.

One issue you have glossed over is the closed ecosystem of Bambu Labs. Maybe this won’t come back to bite owners in the future, but it’s a risk you take on when you buy a Bambu printer. There were recent concerns that they are moving in this direction. And that you may end up with a very expensive paperweight, if you don’t pay a subscription fee. Most of the other systems are far more open, and don’t put you behind that eight ball. That may not be a risk you care about, but it’s one of the reasons Bambu wasn’t even in the running when I bought a new printer recently. I’ve seen too much enshitification of good products to want to run that risk.

Mmm, feel that nice astroturf.

How you gonna teach English without being able to teach nouns words which describe people, places or things?

FTFY, you dirty n-word user you.

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

That actually sounds like a reasonable response. Driving assist means that a human is supposed to be attentive to take control. If the system detects a situation where it’s unable to make a good decision, dumping that decision on the human in control seems like the closest they have to a “fail safe” option. Of course, there should probably also be an understanding that people are stupid and will almost certainly have stopped paying attention a long time ago. So, maybe a “human take the wheel” followed by a “slam the brakes” if no input is detected in 2-3 seconds. While an emergency stop isn’t always the right choice, it probably beats leaving a several ton metal object hurtling along uncontrolled in nearly every circumstance.

do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

Same. I had gotten the paid version because the dev deserved something for such a great app. RIF died and I did a hard cutover to Lemmy. Deleted my Reddit account and probably caused some confusion for the cordcutters subreddit. I had a post which was part of the sidebar for about a decade.

Ya, sadly there is still a lot of useful content in the technical subreddits. So I find myself ending up there via search engines on a fairly regular basis. But, I specifically use the Redirector plugin for Firefox to auto-magically force the use of old Reddit. If I hit the site on my work computer, I’m quickly reminded about why I quit the site.

I work for a fairly large company, and we’re hearing about “AI” constantly. CoPilot is available and its use encouraged. Also, in the cybersecurity space, AI is fucking everywhere. Vendors won’t shut up about their “AI Enabled” products. And the new hotness is “Agentic AI”, which is basically automation, but we’re going to let AI hallucinations fire off the automated process which could bring production systems down.
Good times are surely coming. /s

It looks like archive.org is capturing some of lemm.ee. So, it’s possible that most of the images are there and could be referenced.

An Operating System is a tool. Would you be annoyed because you had to use a hex key on a bolt with a hex socket, when what you really like using is a robertson drive? If the work you are doing is dependent on a particular OS choice, then use that OS and get over yourself.

That said, if this is for work and you want to avoid the crapware in Windows 11, talk with your IT team. By default, Recall is removed on commercially managed devices. I’m not 100% sure, and can’t be arsed to look it up at the moment, but this likely refers to devices managed via Intune. Assuming your IT team isn’t stuck in the 90’s, they are probably doing this already. Telemetry can also be mostly disabled via Group Policy, and many IT organizations will already be doing this. Or, as you have arrived at, use a Mac and disable the telemetry.

On the other side of that coin, if you expect privacy on a work owned device, I have bad news for you. More and more organizations are using Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) products on all endpoint devices. Yes, this includes Mac and Linux devices. So, your organization is watching you browse porn on your work device. If you are doing something and you don’t want someone watching over your shoulder, don’t use a work device. Keep your work device for work and your personal device for everything else.

But, we’ll know where the aircraft is. It’s a built in, instant location flare. No more aircraft disappearing and not being found.

Imagine the flight envelope as a graph. Going further to the right means going faster. Going further up means going higher. The goal of test flights is to push against the upper-right hand corner of that envelope. Unfortunately, that’s also where your postage gets stamped.

Um yay, I guess. I’m always for more options. And maybe there is a market out there for the “game from the cloud” idea. Personally though, I’d rather just play a game on the Steam Deck directly. Or, if that’s somehow not an option, stream the game from my own PC to my TV via SteamLink. In no world do I want to pay for a subscription to play games on a device where I can just play that game locally.

Never mind recent motherboards, I’m still salty about the era of boards from 2004-2010 or so which had USB ports but the BIOS would refuse to accept inputs from them until after POST so you’d have to dredge up a separate PS/2 keyboard and jack it in to be able to configure the damn thing or use the boot menu.

Had one of these in a server rack. Which was all kinds of fun because the rack KVM was USB. We ultimately just left the PS/2 keyboard plugged in and sitting on top of the server in the rack. Given the shitshow which was cable management in those racks (we shared them with several departments), that keyboard was hardly the worst sin.

While an interesting idea, this sounds like an organization designed to separate some doofus investment manager with a lot of capital before inevitably folding because companies won’t give a damn. Sure, if we were to pass laws allowing us to hunt down anyone responsible for using blue LEDs on devices which did not specifically need blue light, and burn their eyes out with a hot poker. Then, such a certification might make sense. But, so long as there are no repercussions for companies making horrible design decisions, why would any company pay for a certification like this.

Not terribly surprising, Google would often direct me to StackOverflow threads as I was googling for an answer to a question. And as often as not, either the question was closed; or, instead of anyone providing an answer, the commenters would spiral off into questioning everything about the original question asker’s life choices. While I do get the whole XY Problem, this sort of thing seemed to be over-used on SO.

Granted, I don’t know if AI answers are any better. Sure, they can answer a lot of the simple questions, but I’ve not seen them be useful on hard, more obscure questions. Probably because those questions don’t have ready answers on SO.

If someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!