They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

I think it’s more about manager capability. A person who manages IT, for example, but has little idea what that entails will want people in the office. They have no idea if a given ticket should take 3 hours or 3 days to resolve, so it’s easier to just have their people in the office where they can look at them and verify that they are, in fact, sitting at a computer.

The ideal work environment for me, and I think most people, is one where you’re judged based on what you do and how well you do it, while details like when you do it and where you are when you do it get left to your discretion. Managing someone like that requires skill and knowledge in what they’re doing though.

Beaches are tougher but I believe there’s a nudist resort in every state in the US. You can visit the AANR website and find the closest one. If it’s a “family resort” that means it’s probably very welcoming, if a little boring depending on location.

It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.

Robert Heinlein. His works were all over the place, and it would be a mistake to assume that he believed in something just because he wrote it in a fiction novel, so on that front I think he gets a fair amount of undeserved heat. He was pushing the limits of progressivism for his time, tossing out and seemingly defending everything on all sides from fascism to anarchy to direct democracy.

If we discount his fiction, though, since it can be hard to tell from that what he actually believed, then he still falls pretty short by modern standards. A homophobe, almost certainly racist, and although he was practically a feminist by the standards of his time I would have to admit that he’s pretty misogynistic by our standards.

I got in to Dilbert Young, too. I don’t know why it appealed to me exactly, but I started reading his comic strips around 8 or so, and even got some compilation books. I also read some of his non-comic books… They were largely hippy woowoo bullshit, but still good reads. Then he came out with God’s Debris which I thought was genuinely interesting.

So I don’t think he was always this way, or maybe he hid it better. To teenage me, at least, he seemed pretty logical and fairly progressive. A bit of a hippie at times, a bit of a look at times, fairly anti-corporate and pro-little guy, overall his writing made him seem like a decent person. Maybe some vaguely problematic takes here and there, but nothing all that bad.

It was like some combination of success and wealth and Twitter access broke his mind. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t recognize it and I’m blinded by nostalgia. It was just a wild rollercoaster ride watching him melt down.

Doesn’t the truth still remain through that it’s not an unlimited resource, it’s absolutely crucial for modern life, but also we use large quantities of it on absolutely mundane bullshit?

So many things are unnecessarily wrapped in plastic. We use bubble wrap in situations where paper would be a perfectly fine buffer for shipping. We use plastic bags when paper and reusable bags work perfectly well.

I get so frustrated about it not even because I’m scared of the environmental impact of all this plastic floating around, although that does suck, but because plastic is currently absolutely crucial for modern medicine. One day maybe we’ll find alternatives but until then I think a rational society would be preserving the limited life-saving miracle material for uses that aren’t as basic as “use it to take home groceries, then throw it away.”

I thought I was pretty left til I started browsing Lemmy and watching all the pro-Russia communists arguing with the pro-China communists arguing with the anti-Russia and anti-China communists…

I always thought machine learning was descriptive and made sense. I guess it just didn’t get investors erect enough.

I got it because it’s fun to drive, because I hate cars but have to have one, I figure even if it’s not much better for the planet it’s at least better for my health and my family’s health to spend less time at gas stations and breathing exhaust, and because I was finally at a point in my life I could afford an expensive car.

I didn’t realize that I was making a public political decision that would make everyone hate me. It’s weird the way some pickup trucks just decide to go fucking nuts around me. It’s weird that my mother is in a constant state of fear that my car will suddenly come to life, drive itself off a cliff, and then catch fire. It’s weird that random people will be like “It’s not actually better for the planet.”

I looked it up and apparently this ISN’T the actress from IT Crowd. However, even after IMDB confirmed it I’m having trouble believing they aren’t the same person.