The idea for an analprint, in particular, came from Salvador Dalí, who discovered that “the anus has 35 or 37 creases, which are as unique as fingerprints,”

WTF Salvador…

There is no way I’m spending money on something that takes pictures of my b-hole, uniquely identifies me, and has telecommunications capabilities.

The market for his has to be, what, 8 people?

They started out worthless. That never changed.

That’s all well and good for someone in a house. It doesn’t work for someone living in an apartment complex where they don’t have outlets they can simply plug into, and running an extension cord outside would likely violate some rules, or simply be impossible.

I’ve lived in places where my apartment was 3 floors up and my car was at least 100 yards from my door. I lived in another place where I was 21 floors up and my car was in a parking structure down the street. Another place has garage under the building with controlled access. I’ve lived in about 20 different apartments of all kinds, and I can’t think of a single one where I would have been able to charge a car.

Access is a problem for many people. I don’t know why I’m getting so much push back on this. Has no one lived in an apartment?

I’m on the early adopter professional plan, because I signed up before they changed their plans. There was only 1 option when I signed up. At the time they would show what was paid vs what it cost. I tossed them some extra money once, because they were basically breaking even on me. It looks like they removed that now that they have a more solid pricing model backed by some data. I pay $10/month for 1,500 searches, 500 extra search over the normal professional plan for being an early adopter.

I don’t try and limit myself at all. It’s my default search engine for work, home, and on my phone. At work I’m a software engineer, so I’m searching a lot (though I do spend most of my time in meetings these days). Looking at the last 7 months, my peak was around 1050, with the lowest being 455. If I go over 1,500 it’s 1.5 cents per search, so not a big deal, plus warnings and limits can be set around that.

If you’re interested you can start with one of the lower plans and see what your actual usage is (it shows you by month and by day). If you end up needing unlimited and feel it’s worth it, you can upgrade. It looks like if you’re going over 2,000/month it’s worth the upgrade.

They have some AI offerings too, like page summaries and things. I think those have their own quotas. I should probably try those out more, but really haven’t. They’re making a privacy focused browser as well (currently just on iOS and macOS). They have a maps beta as well. I haven’t used that too much, but I’m all for another Google Maps competitor, they also pull from Apple Maps, so there are options. It has !bang support as well, like DuckDuckGo, but I find I don’t use it that much (but like the option).

I prefer to be the customer, not the product. When I do a search I get actual search results instead of a page full of ads. I want to support a business model that goes against the idea that being ads supported is the only way to exist on the internet. I found with Kagi I don’t really need other search engines, while DuckDuckGo had me constantly going to Google.

A few months ago my browser reverted to Google for some reason. I did a search, got some results and recoiled a bit, saying, “wtf is all this bull shit.” Then I looked up at the top of the page and I was on Google. After spending several months with Kagi, I don’t know how people put with Google. It’s like the whole world were like the frogs who were cooked my raising the water temp 1 degree at a time. Everyone is overrun with ads, but don’t realize it, because it’s all they know. There’s another away.

I’d give up all my streaming services before I gave up Kagi.

Kagi

This will be the final nail in the coffin. If it was already $1 and they made it $5, that would be less of a problem than free moving to $0.01. As soon as they start charging people need to be OK with giving Twitter their credit card number. Even if they trust them with that, there is still the issue of getting people to actually go through the process.

While I pay for a search engine, when there are free options, I’m not sure what Twitter is offering here to make people care enough.

Maybe. I think it will depend on each individual’s travel patterns, as well as the car they end up getting. A Honda Civic gets 31mpg in the city and 40 on the highway, and that’s just the first car I looked at. Looking at a hybrid, like the Prius, it’s in the 50-mpg range with only a 1-mpg difference between city and highway.

I think we can at least say that fuel savings should not factor in as a buying decision for those who won’t be charging at home. It isn’t a big enough difference to matter one way or the other, and the technical winner depends on the options on the table and the lifestyle of the buyer.

Thanks! It’s probably the single greatest accomplishment of my life and it still hasn’t totally sunk in.

My first post may have been misleading in terms of the overall timeline. I’m not 22 pulling this off, I’m closer to your age (xennial). The mortgage was paid off in 2.5 years, but there was 16 years of renting and saving that came before that… not to mention a house I sold after owning it less than a year, because I was drowning (shit got dark). I learned a lot from that and rented for several more years as a result. I kept my emergency fund, but pretty much liquidated all my non-retirement funds to knock it out, then used about 70% of my income for 2.5 years to finish it off. People can argue if liquidating those funds for the mortgage was smart or stupid, but it felt right for me.

I think by this age most of us have fucked up in one area or another. I sure have, and still am. I’m hoping I can shift focus and it’s not too late to right the ship on some key areas of life I’ve completely ignored.

In Louisiana, for a Bolt EV, 100 miles of home charging is $2.81, and 100 miles of EVgo fast-charging is $11.82; 100 miles in a 33-mpg small SUV would cost about $10.

So anyone not living in a home that allows them to setup home charging is better off (financially) with an ICE car. And anyone buying an electric car with long road trips as the justification, has been mislead.

So much for Tesla’s “Probably Savings” pricing they advertise everywhere.

Is anyone thinking AI has made human writing pointless? I think anyone who thinks that isn’t being rational. They probably also bought into NFTs and thought they’d change the world. There is a lot of naive optimism around AI at the moment and I’m waiting for the monkey paw. I think AI has its application, but it’s not the solution to all problems, as it’s being billed.

I just bought a home in 2021 and paid it off a couple weeks ago. It took 2.5 years. It still happens. Working from home helps, as I don’t feel the pressure to be in an area with insane home prices in the name of job opportunities.

Yep. It’s called the Beer Exchange. It looks like there are two of them now. One in Kalamazoo and another in Detroit.

https://thebeerexchange.com/

A bar I used to live near made a whole theme around this to get more people to the bar. All the prices were on a big screen, and it kind of worked like the stock market. Beers selling well would go up in price, beers selling poorly would go down in price, all in real-time. So as a customer you could pretty much name your price, if you were cool drinking whatever or trying new stuff. If the beer you wanted was more than you wanted to pay, simply wait a bit for the price to cool down and then go get it.

It was a bit of a gimmick, but kind of fun.

The public transit system near me offers an Uber-like service. From what I read, it’s cheaper than Uber, but wait time are really long (a couple hours), and you can’t use it to move between cities, even though the service is available in a metro area which spans many cities.

It’s a option, but doesn’t seem like a great option.

The only thing that will help traffic is reducing the need for cars… the things that cause traffic.

Actually good trains and bus systems, actually good bike infrastructure, mixed use spaces that allow people to walk to stuff.

Reduce the need for cars, reduce the volume of traffic. It’s not easy politically, but probably easier than making a robotaxi.

Maybe this is what the article said, it was behind some kind of paywall, so I don’t know.

Evolution can lead to significant change over time.

If people could easily point to what the future innovations would be, they wouldn’t be innovations.

I want the iPhone mini back, that’s really it. Everything else is pretty minor at this point.

The last real innovation in phones was the first iPhone in 2007. Android was an evolution of what the iPhone started, not a revolution.