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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Video games. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

    • The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
    • Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
    • Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
    • Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland… If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don’t want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

    The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don’t want to downplay those. I’m just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.




  • 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.


  • There can be other servers and apps, for example Samsung has their own app. It’s hard for me to track down details about how they interoperate but it appears that the various services need to agree to work with one another, so I don’t think just anyone can create an RCS app and infrastructure and have it work with Google’s and Samsung’s. However, I imagine Apple is fully capable of it and would be surprised if iPhone RCS wasn’t going through Apples network.



  • In theory, I’m centrist. In subjective terms, the right thinks I’m a commie and the left would think I’m basically a Nazi. In practical terms, I think that the rights of individuals should be maximized, while the rights of groups (like companies, organizations, churches, etc) should be restricted, and I don’t think that taxation is theft but I do think we should be getting a better return on our investment.

    The thing is, I pretty much only hang out in leftish spaces because the things I disagree with the left on are also less important to me. It’s easier to get along.


  • Both can be true. A lot of the bad is business getting what it wants in pursuit of getting All of the money. A lot of the bad is incompetent government officials legislating things they don’t understand, often after “seminars” by lobbyists to “teach” them. And a lot of the bad is government officials with bad ideas doing bad things maliciously.

    For example, even businesses don’t want to kill off encryption but every once in a while here comes some Representative to try and do it anyway.