I’ve had limited experience with slack, but the whole way conversations map to workspaces at least got to be confusing to me, and I would have liked an experience based on me as a user, rather than having my user span workspaces and have to juggle them to figure out how to talk to whoever I’m supposed to talk to at the time.

For me “it just works” doesn’t ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won’t let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.

Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.

The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn’t important and it’s the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of ‘Teams’ conversations.

In my company, I’ve been added to about 70 Teams and it’s pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that’s the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.

When going cross-organization, it’s a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company ‘security’ policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).

Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it’s own annoyances.

I would say LLMs specifically are in that ball park. Things like machine vision have been boringly productive and relatively un hyped.

There’s certainly some utility to LLMs, but it’s hard to see through all the crazy over estimations and being shoved everywhere by grifters.

Well, Trump specifically may not try because the risk/reward isn’t really good for him.

As it stands, he gets to declare an unambiguous “victory” where he won at life. He got to be president with ultimately a clean sweep of the swing states and the popular vote and served as many terms as he is allowed to serve. Thanks to the rules, he doesn’t need to compete again, and he can stop even pretending to work after 4 years.

Meanwhile, a push to establish him as “dictator for life” might at best buy him another few years in office before his health will fail. Such an effort comes with high risk, of him going down in history as more of a “bad man”, of personal risk for being targeted by violence.

Now JD Vance might be game to make a go of it, he’s got decades left in the tank. Of course broadly speaking there’s a balance of power, with those currently in power relatively comfortable knowing that the vote serves as a nice way to get pushed out of office before people get pissed enough to put you in real physical danger. Plenty of opportunities to be self-serving with a pretty safe retirement should things start going awry. Fanaticism can drive people to go further, but I would like to think a pragmatic person with a sense of self-interest can see the value in a peaceful voting out versus having those same millions of people losing their political voice.

Trump and his cult have plowed millions into “47” merch that would suddenly become worthless to them.

No, His followers have plowed millions into it and Trump received those millions.

So while funny, you just have Trump get millions more for his “48” merch.

A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.

A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.

Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.

This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.

Also now he’s convinced that God specifically saved him from a bullet and chose him…

I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:

• 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
• So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.

Yeah but the point was about what turnout was. We know who won but it’s a bit early to discuss relative turnout compared to 2020. It is likely lower, but the specifics will be a while.

I find it insane that with modern computing and displays, they still just render a vague check engine light despite being able to easily display the specifics.

They mostly didn’t have OSDs, they instead had indecipherable 7-segment and some fixed elements like ‘Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa’, with 2 or 3 buttons. The younger Gen-X/older Millennials got their reputation as ‘whiz kids’ in part by handling those interfaces on behalf of their mystified parents.

While true, I was thinking more about how the person you replying to probably was reacting to the trend of people talking about saving and waiting until they had a reasonable downpayment before they would consider entering the market, and how the market keeps running away from their downpayment savings.

The ‘never make a downpayment regardless of context’ would be bad advice, but I just presume there is a context in mind about not even having the downpayment to start with and being stuck on the rental treadmill as a result.

One, the volume knob is far quicker to respond than the usual ‘up/down’ slow volume adjustment on the wheel. The turn down the overly loud sound from the last driver immediately is nicer with a volume knob.

But with my car with hard A/C controls, I just reach down to the little ‘up/down’ toggle and tug it down a bit if I feel a little warm or bump it up a little if I feel too cold, or hit the big old button if I need to toggle it off to talk on speaker.

There are a fairly well known set of very common controls that will never be better and need an update. Coarse A/C adjustments, vent direction volume, and next-track are all no-brainers (unless you are Tesla…)

For example, here’s a layout that obviously has room and depends on touch for a lot of features, but preserves a reasonably sane set of audio and climate controls (and four miscellaneous functions)

With that you don’t look, you know pretty much immediately for the functions you would use.

There’s still plenty of room for touch/voice controls for those more nuanced/complicated things that don’t fit into button land well. Entering a navigation destination, managing any software updates, setting parameters like "should the car adjust cruise control based on speed limit signs, and if so, what adjustment to the limit should be applied?’

Particularly given the trend of ‘glue a tablet to the middle of the dashboard’. If you are going to do that anyway, bring up a modern successor to the DIN/Double DIN standard, where the mounting is standard and update to also include USB-C for standard power, audio, and data. Add some network profiles for standardized exchange of useful information (Car speedometer, car model, fuel/battery amount and efficiency profile, navigation information to drive dash/HUD, etc).

Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.

To the extent you are able to (particularly if trying to stay legal).

So for streaming content, much of that isn’t available to ‘buy’ at all. Even for the stuff you can “buy”, technically speaking in many jurisdictions it’s not legal to be able to rip your DVD or Blu Rays or remove DRM from a digital download.

For certain software, on-premise editions have been abolished or priced into the stratosphere because they don’t want that market to exist anymore. Some of that software has competent alternatives, but sometimes your choice is dictated by your clients and partners, and opting for a less compatible or merely perceived as less compatible option is a non starter. Even among on-premise editions, a lot of software vendors have switched to still having it by subscription as the only legal way to keep using it. Again, maybe for those software you can get away by breaking the law as a workaround, but legally…

This is of course assuming the conversation narrowly applies to software type things. Everyone is also rebranding ‘leasing’ as ‘as a service’ and are copying much of the software playbook, for the same reasons, including making purchase of equipment more expensive to steer people toward the ‘as a service’ revenue strategy.

Then going beyond the ‘tech’ industry, it’s getting really hard to buy a house rather than rent it from some company that has been pouring money into acquiring all the available real estate.

This presumes you can elect to either just spend the 100k now, that you may not have.

If you declare you want 100k, but let’s say that would take you 10 years (and the goalposts wil move). That’s likely 120 months of rent you will have to pay, so while you’ll end up saving on interest, you’ll more than lose out on rent.

Paying down aggressively and going with as big a down payment as you can reasonably afford makes sense. However waiting to save up for that downpayment may cost more in rental expenses than you’d save.

WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.

This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.

Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.

So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.

I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.

I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).

Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.