Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

Also why the seemingly arbitrary graduations, 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. If it was say 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute, seconds would be close to the same amount of time. Same with latitude and longitude, why 360 degrees in a circle with 60 minutes in a degree and 60 seconds in a minute.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

Yes female action heroes are a trope now. They’ve over-played it, but of course anything from Marvel or DC is going to be shit. These days they’re just movie mills pumping out the same old rehash.

The Alien movies made a female action hero seem natural. They did it right. There’s been a few others that have done it right. More have done it wrong.

I don’t know anything about the Barbie move since I haven’t seen it. I would like to see it but will wait until it comes to streaming. My wife saw it with a group of her friends and said it was cute and weird, but definitely worth the watch. So evidently it’s not in the same caliber as Legally Blonde.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I don’t see that either. People have disagreed with me politely and intelligently here which is just good conversation.

Can always tell when a show is 4:3 aspect. Recently I’ve noticed some modern TV shows adopting the theater aspects of flat (1.85:1) or scope (2.4:1) which I think is pretty cool. The last episode of Strange New Worlds I watched was in scope, that’s some high end filming.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

Dogs were instrumental in early human survival and they’ve benefited for it. There’s almost a billion dogs in the world, but only a quarter million wolves. So in a natural selective sense that was a good move wolves made by becoming companions with humans.

Behavior has been bred into dogs going way back to the beginning. Fetch is one of those behaviors. I recently watched a documentary that showed the unique interaction of dogs with humans. Dogs are really good at understanding human body language. For example you can point at something and a dog will cue on it. No other animals reliably respond to that gesture, even chimpanzees which are genetically closest to us.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.

Strange new Worlds. I think it’s the best Star Trek series since the original. I don’t think the casting is particularly great, but Anson Mount makes up for it. Like William Shatner was born to be Captain Kirk, Anson Mount was born to be Captain Pike.

I watched the whole series recently, it’s on YouTube.

Some years ago I had the whole collection on VHS, tells you how long ago that was. Haven’t seen it anywhere since, I’ll rewatch it if I do.

As you mentioned chip lithography is hitting a wall. They’re not going to be able to make things much smaller with current technology. People have been working on new ways to build these mechanisms. They’re researching ways to do things at the quantum level, that’s some seriously sci-fi tech.

Yes compression will always be required. The raw video they work with in production takes up enormous amounts of drive space. As things become less restricted it only means we’ll be able to use less compression and higher bitrates. Though you can use fairly liberal bitrates with local storage already. I have zero issue with local videos, but I can run into compression artifacts when streaming from sites with less than optimal bitrates.

I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.