off-topic but that reminds me of the “Twitch plays $someGame” phenomenon of about a decade or so ago. I remember some games being nearly impossible to play because the next control came through by chat and basically cancelled out the previous due to how messy that all was. No thanks!
I travel in Japan a lot and quite frankly Booking/Agoda have been comparable in most cases and extremely accessible for making reservations and even communicating with hotel staff.
I used to use sites like Expedia for flights but lately i just book those directly through the carriers and i think the experience on that end is better.
On a previous trip to Japan I used my CC travel portal (can’t remember if it was Chase or Amex) to book one of the hotels. It took several days of back and forth with the CC company acting as a middleman to clarify whether “twin bed” meant a single bed sized for a child, or two beds which could be pushed together to approximate a U.S. queen size bed. (Japan seems to translate “two beds” as “twin room”, but it was unclear whether that had been re-translated when shown on the CC company’s whitelabeled Expedia instance.)
At my first job almost 10 years ago we had the concept of "X-in-a-box" using Vagrant + VMs and I miss that pattern so much ever since (multiple job skips later).
None of my jobs since have had any semblance of a better way to set up a local dev environment easily.
It was just way easier to encapsulate services or other things in a quickly reproducible state.
As someone who’s spent their entire life in california near these types of fires and someone who recently visited the Hiroshima memorial museum, this take is pretty disingenuous.
Something similar happened to me. i wanted to learn guitar, so my sister’s friend lent me his fairly cheap Stratocaster IIRC, and after some months we were going to move pretty far away. we tried contacting the friend to give him back the guitar but could never connect. it’s been 18 years and i still have it. heh.
I believe my new car has a fuse you can pull to disable the remote telemetry. However, it disables some useful features, like being able to set valet mode from the Toyota app (useful because some dealer service departments will take cars joy riding) and track the car usage. it also tracks tire pressures. sure the tire pressure can easily be checked manually with my Slime gauge but having it on the phone is handy.
I pulled the DCM fuse on my GR Corolla. I can confirm that it disabled the microphone. One of these days I might get around to pulling the car apart and popping in a resistor in place of the antenna.
I'll never trust some rando working at a valet to treat my GRC right. I've seen too many dashcam horror videos of even people working at dealerships failing at manual and safe rev temps.
Beyond any reasonable doubt any verbal conversation you have in your Toyota is being parsed by one or more LLMs. Anyone who believes otherwise is either room temp IQ or severely autistic.
