Did a 4000 mile round trip this summer and barely any bugs. Wild.

I have a memory of a road trip in the 90s where we must have driven through a whole swarm, probably somewhere in western Montana, because it almost sounded like hail as they were splatting on the windshield. Sorry, maybe I killed them all that day.

Wire is pretty much never removed once it’s laid out and I’m sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.

But you’re probably right that there’s a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.

I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma’s AOL internet connection up until this month haha

I pay for it, also no ads except the sponsor plugs, which are pretty easy to skip. Overall a better experience than the non premium. I don’t live in the USA so my cost is like $5/month.

On the other hand, have you ever seen a government authored operating system?

Thanks for posting this take. The topic of AI taking jobs seems to garner a lot of emotional response but not much of a technology discussion.

There were people who were negative about using websites to place orders in the 90s in part because e-commerce killed order processing jobs and the need for phone reps at mail order catalogs.

In this case AI is being used as just another e-commerce UX, so it’s really just a continuation of what’s happening already.

People used to do things like put 18,000, or -1 and all kinds of other garbage in the fields on website order forms as well. That’s just a programmers job to fix with reasonable input validation.

It wouldn’t surprise me if drive-thru like Taco Bell started doing license plate recognition and reputation checking. So if you order and dash more than a couple times they might not take your order from outside in that car anymore.

On the upside they might be able to greet you by name and recall your last order:

Hello Mr Smith… Nice to see you today, would you like 10 cheesy gordita crunch tacos and 1 large diet Pepsi again?

I wish we’d have a similar moment when it came to China and infrastructure

It’s a shame that the culture in mainland China is so isolated because otherwise some Americans might have bit of an existential crisis about this right now if they knew.

In the top tier Chinese cities, people board the train by scanning a qr code on their phone, which is linked to a wallet in their chat app. The subway system is extensive, well though out, clean and fast. Most of the private cars are electric, and when a car isn’t the right choice, the sidewalks are often smooth and suitable for an electric scooter or bicycle. Food and transportation is cheap, even when ordering food to your apartment or house. 5G mobile internet is smoking fast and cheap. The local equivalent to Amazon.com delivers just about anything in a day or two. Over the course of a year I watched the city building an entirely new subway line - they just decided it was needed and bam! They built it and it didn’t take 10 years. Most importantly, the younger generations have a real chance to do better than mom and dad, which is what every generation needs, and the last couple American generations seem to have been robbed of.

I’m an American and was surprised and impressed on my first few trips. Why don’t American’s have anything like this yet? Why is the US so bogged down in the little things that it can’t dream anymore? It can hardly solve it’s most basic problems at the moment. I wish more Americans could see how far it’s slipped.

(Just because this is Lemmy, no, I’m no Chinese shill. There are other issues there and I wouldn’t wish their system of control or surveillance on anybody.)