That fucking sucks, and as someone who wears hearing aids it’s very relatable. Hearing aids are an investment that last about 5-10 years. As a teenager I got some demo units, then when I absolutely couldn’t keep them working anymore about a decade later and had the money I upgraded them.

In practical terms this is about 15 years of advancement, and it shows. Gone are the days of molds of your ear, replaced by little domes that rest in the canal. But more relevant to the story, you used to have about a week per battery, and very little tech beyond some computation, volume adjustment, phone mode, etc. To turn them off you’d take out the battery.

My current ones didn’t have options for removable batteries, only rechargeable, nor for if you have Bluetooth. You can control volume on the device and that’s it, the rest is in an app. Now overall this has been better than I thought it would be. Tv gets beamed into my ears, as do phone calls. My batteries never die unexpectedly.

However, I hate that app. Partly it’s having to pull out my personal phone at my desk to turn my ears off (open offices are the root problem but sometimes I just can’t do sound at the moment, a common experience for the hard of hearing). I also dislike how there’s no custom naming for modes (meeting mode is called church mode because hearing aid manufacturers don’t understand that not all deaf people are elderly).

But mostly it’s the damn Bluetooth, that wonderful terrible Bluetooth. There is no “search for new devices” option, it happens automatically when removing from the dock/charger as part of turning on. But worse than that there’s no “forget device” option. And any time a device sends messages to the hearing aids it prioritizes most recent. This is a dangerous combination with apartment living. It’s unlikely to go bad, but for me it did and holy hell it was frustrating to have less control over my medical devices than headphones. I couldn’t wear my hearing aids at home until my audiologist got in contact with the manufacturer and reset the devices because randomly my tv, audiobook, or amplification of my wife’s voice would cut to my neighbors device where they were clearly frustrated because they’d be turning it off and on and I’d be swapping my device in app and it’d get switched back as new device tries talking… It was clear that the designers were too afraid of the users breaking things by having control to allow us to fix things that “just worked” their way into a real problem. And if I weren’t a technologically skilled young woman I probably wouldn’t have been able to sufficiently describe the problem to get it solved

This is extremely dangerous and also something I feel must be considered a natural and obvious extension of a right I believe to be fundamental: bodily autonomy.

Would I do this? Probably not, maybe for some medicines, that are easily made administrable from bulk chemicals but likely not. But behind all rights stands bodily autonomy. It is your flesh and not mine. If we don’t want people doing this themselves the lever we should use is easing access to expert made medicines. Desperate people do stupid things.

Also this is cyberpunk as hell and aesthetically I’m so here for it

More of “you don’t get to profit off violating it and act like you’re better than a dude selling burned DVDs”

That sounds like a manic episode

Jeez, Texas losing to Mississippi is embarrassing considering that by any measure it’s a failed state. The Jackson water crisis alone should have them scrambling on par with Michigan post Flint.

Rich people really seem to think that them just having shitloads of money in a location makes that place better. I’m a midwesterner and even I know San Francisco has serious issues from how in about a generation or two it went from a working class industrial and military city to home of several of the wealthiest companies and filled with enough upper working class people to skyrocket cost of living.

So to Elon, don’t bring X to my city either

Leaders tend towards evil. Early in a technology there’s space for innovators to wind up on top, that allows for some morality agnostic advancement. But as time goes on you find yourself led by those who sought leadership, those whose ruthlessness enabled leadership, and those who’ve been in leadership long enough to have had it damage their morality.

Tech is no longer new and fancy, it’s no longer a space where a few people with an idea can wind up in charge of something valuable. It’s an established industry led by investors and businesspeople, their concerns are not for your benefit and even if they are your experiences are so alien to them that they will try to assist using the frameworks they think in, ones of hierarchy, investment, and other capitalistic and paternalistic world views. But most don’t care, they think they do, they think competition raises everyone, and in the off chance they feel a twinge of guilt about their victims that’s what they tell themselves.

Nice I could use a laptop

And even better! All this got rid of those pesky winters

Welcome to Lemmy. Go fuck yourself /s

Yes, because one is saying positives and the other is saying negatives. “Trump promises project 2025” isn’t a trump ad even if “Harris promises a fucking break from whatever weird bullshit trump said today” wouldn’t be allowed on truth social

Yeah it’s not like Australia can stop them, only force the sale of their Austrian branches. And while that may affect neighboring countries like Croatia and Antarctica it won’t stop the fact that the majority of the company is in one of the Unions of States of America

The stock market is the least stupid way to be addicted to gambling but it’s still one of the dumber addictions to develop.

And are those use cases common and publicized? Because I see it being advertised as “improves productivity” for a novel tool with myriad uses I expect those trying to sell it to me to give me some vignettes and not to just tell my boss it’ll improve my productivity. And if I was in management I’d want to know how it’ll do that beyond just saying “it’ll assist in easy and menial tasks”. Will it be easier than doing them? Many tools can improve efficiency on a task at a similar time and energy investment to the return. Are those tasks really so common? Will other tools be worse?

Exactly, it’s entirely about extra monetization. They all think in terms of hype and money, never in terms of life improvement.

I’d actually love AI to control something like a home assistant setup by learning how I like things and predicting change (mind you I still need to get it set up at all). But most people don’t even want a smart home.

Make something that makes the unpleasant parts of life easier and people will be happy with it

I think car play is a wonderful feature. My car should absolutely allow syncing up to my phone. I don’t think it should telemetry or anything like that though. But I think internal process monitoring should also be a thing. Display error codes, show me that a tire is low, monitor a battery, etc. but the manufacturer shouldn’t get that info. My car shouldn’t know my sex life, and the manufacturer definitely shouldn’t

They use machine learning these days in the nice kind, but I misinterpreted you. I interpreted you as saying that robots were an example of hype like AI is, not that using AI in robots is hype. The ML in robots is stuff like computer vision to sort defects, detect expected variations, and other similar tasks. It’s definitely far more advanced than back in the day, but it’s still not what people think.

Idk robots are absolutely here and used. They’re just more Honda than Jetsons. I work in manufacturing and even in a shithole plant there are dozens of robots at minimum unless everything is skilled labor.

deleted by creator

Yeah in retrospect I wish I’d gone civil. It wasn’t offered at my school but I went industrial because I loved both engineering and psychology. Civil would’ve meant I did more good and got less poisoned by my career