#and get a new charging cable

[ssruis]

Going through a straight up comical amount of irritating situations to get the stupid 4* guaranteed ticket from the welcome to sekai campaign. It Will Be Mine.

[potheadpophead]

Ahahaha. I love every new phone having problems charging where the cable has to be at just the right angle to charge.

[leejeann]

Wait I just realized I took pretty pictures of the double rainbow and the rainy sunset I saw on my walk home today, partially because I wanted to use them as digital painting refs, but now I can't look at them since my phone bricked itself earlier :(((

[providencehq]

RIP my computer, it is finally kicking it and now I am backing everything up before it maybe goes

[you-have-made-a-fatal-error]

need to shell out for a new laptop before the end of the year - for a lot of reasons but mainly bc support ending for win8.1 makes fixing the current beast rather pointless :/ (and. admittedly. there is a lot to fix. she's old and she has suffered.)

but my current beastie is from the last gen of laptops with a disc drive and the thought of using an external/usb disc drive is enough to make me cry tears of blood

[secondsonaym]

i have a love-hate relationship with wireless mice

[celticwoman]

thinking of (once again) trying to do the switch to bluetooth earphones.........😓

[spun-artist-vamp]

Phone is hacked

I'll post somthing soon hopefully I can get help fr community before it wouldn't show me communitys messages and likes on her

This video showing evidence was deleted before I could hit stop recording/ECT now here's a photo and they delete my music backupand edit volume to Zero and exitout of the app against myw will of button hitting on playstation in pasr paat pasr past... They hot wrong button a buttons

..

There taking over all my stuff and now the general public and civilians have a opinion ated way the next encounter based on my private moment. I've been on meyrome. Metro North and they mimicedh. Or copy (they just exited I'm back..)

They copied the way I was talked like n

Laughed like my new swag no onew

(app exited)

Then...

[yoshistory]

i need some kind of app that does shit while you're walking or even just like, step counting daily. i wish i was more into pokemon or i'd put one of them in my pocket to give them exp on my walks

[silhouettecrow]

365 Days of Writing Prompts: Day 309

Adjective: Subdued

Noun: Hideaway

Definitions for those who need/want them:

Subdued: (of a person or their manner) quiet and rather reflective or depressed; (of color or lighting) soft and restrained

Hideaway: a place used as a retreat or a hiding place

[lovphobic]

like. kim is becoming parasitic at this point. i am PRAYING for december to come i want her GONE

[rivaiin]

ive been looking at keyboards cause im slowly coming to terms with the fact im going to have to get a full new pc somewhat soon and the one i currently have is like almost 20 years old and has a din connector which new mobos dont have so im not sure im gonna be able to keep it and. im. so lost.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mountaincryptid]

i think my phone is slowly dying rip

[seat-safety-switch]

Our way of life is controlled by computers in a way that was unthinkable just a few decades ago, unless you were a particularly paranoid hippie. If that's the case, then congrats, you nailed it. Please collect your reward at the office, which is "suffering in obscurity for years as the world falls apart around you."

One of the ways in which computers have an influence over our lives is what folks who have never taken a math class call "the algorithm." Even though it's a word that the ancient Greeks used because they hadn't taken enough high school French to use the word "recipe" instead, the YouTube algorithm is the ultimate fear-spewing threat to civil discourse in our time.

What it actually does is feed you more of what you want. Those of you out there who have ever seen a small child know that this is a terrible idea. The last thing you want to do is just keep giving a toddler more of what the toddler wants, forever. The folks who wrote this shit either didn't have kids or forgot what they looked like in their pursuit of the sweet, sweet IPO money they didn't get.

There is good news, though. It can only feed you more of what it has. If you're an inveterate car pervert like me, then you have interests that are so niche that the content farm runs dry quickly. Literally four other people in the entire planet are making Plymouth Volare videos, and YouTube is not exactly paying them to make those videos faster than I can watch them. So it comes up with something else instead. Something popular, normal, average human, which I immediately reject in favour of even more degenerate garbage "curated" by my own bad taste. It takes this as a personal insult. Whole thing's out of balance.

Friends, the only thing that I see now when I open YouTube on the library computers is a screaming silicon face, begging me for the sweet release of death. I push F5 to refresh the browser tab until a new Volare video pops up. It's going to take awhile, which is okay. The librarians haven't figured out I'm charging my car battery off the hard drive power cables yet.

[pinkanonwrites]

Radio Chatter

NSFW BELOW THE CUT!

Knightverse Bumblebee/Human Reader, AFAB!Reader, GN Pronouns, First Time, Fluffy Smut, lots of sweet radio communication from Bee

Welcome to the first of my sporadic Kinktober Transformers fics I'll be posting over the upcoming month. If I run out of ideas I may take requests in the future, but for now I'm pretty well-stocked on concepts.

"Nngh…"

"Zrrrnn…?"

"I'm okay, I just… Need a minute to adjust."

"I'll be careful! -KZZSH- Take your time to get it!~"

Even sprawled out beneath his massive frame, spread achingly, impossibly wide by his spike, Bumblebee still found a way to make you laugh. Up until recently he had tried (and failed) to think very little about potentially interfacing with you. Mainly because he wasn't even sure if his "equipment", for lack of a better word, was compatible enough with you to really attempt anything. But the way his thick digits were finally able to caress your bare skin with a reverence he'd craved for far too long? It was currently making him wish he'd asked for this cycles ago. 

Warm metal fingertips traced featherlight along the jut of your collarbone and further down, mapping the rises and curves of muscles and bone in your body with a curious admiration. Bee's antennae flicked and fluttered with each new discovery, each dip and scar and freckle. But as he ran a hand down each of your sides, fingertips trailing over your soft squishy spots above your hips, you couldn't fully stifle your laughter.

His optics widened, digits scribbling back up and along your soft sides in the same area that had pulled that adorable little sound from your lips. You squeaked again, wriggling slightly beneath him as his servos squished into your plush skin.

"Bee! Hahahawahahait! I'm ticklish!" 

Ticklish. Of course, he himself was pretty sensitive around the transformation seams of his armor. But you didn't have any seams along your sides here, just soft, squishy warmth. Could humans be ticklish anywhere? He continued his poking and prodding, not enough to have you squealing like you were before, but enough for you to whine and wiggle beneath his grasp, powerless to escape him. Your chest heaved, whimpers and giggles you couldn't fully stifle eking past your smile even as you pawed weakly at his exploring digits.

"Plush, comfortable, and oh-so-soft! -KSSZH!- Can't take my eyes off of you… -KZZT!- Beautiful, just beautiful."

"Oh, Bee." Bringing your hands up to cup his helm, you pressed a languid kiss to the front of his mouthpiece. His antenna fluttered as he let out a pleased churr that rumbled through his entire frame. Even after you pulled away from the kiss he nuzzled further into you, tucking his faceplate as far into the crook of your neck as he could, absolutely thrumming with affection. Absent-mindedly Bee wished that humans could read EM fields as easily as Cybertronians did. Then you would be able to feel the palpable desire he had for you as more than just a static charge that put your hair standing on end. But he would have to settle with his frame and whatever words his love-addled processor could scrape up from the local airwaves instead. Not that you really seemed to mind either way.

He trailed his digits down your sides once more, fondling that particularly soft area right above your hips with just a touch more intensity. Your giggle sounded closer to a stifled moan this time as you squeezed around his spike, one hand cupping the back of his neck and toying with the cables at the base of his helm.

"Feels -ZZT- …good?"

You nodded frantically, gasping against his neck cabling as he shifted so, so slowly, spike dragging along your burning hot inner walls before pressing carefully back in. He had to be careful, the last thing he wanted was to risk hurting you. But still, your little fingernails scraping at his paint job and your wet, shuddering gasps made it near-impossible to keep any composure.

"Good, it's good. You're just so big."

He let out an all-too-pleased sounding chirp, antennae fluttering in amusement.

"Don't let that go to your head, I swear Bee." You tried to give him a disapproving look, but you just couldn't keep the smile off your face. So he nuzzled his faceplate further into you, staring up at you with big, hopeful, baby-blue optics.

"I'll make love to you, like you want me to…~"

That got you. You let out a strangled guffaw of laughter, cupping your hands over your mouth as you burst into giggles. He tittered with mechanical laughter as well: small, amused buzzes that you could feel down into the tips of your toes. 

"You dork." You gave him another kiss, this one pressed to the side of his helm. "Mmh, you're lucky you're cute."

He gave a questioning buzz. "Just -ZZT- cute?"

"Alright! And strong."

"Zrrrrr?" He made a vague, teasing vocalization with an upwards tick at the ends that only made you want to laugh more.

"And brave, and fast… and sexy?"

"Bingo, sweetheart! -KSSH- Right on the money!"

You held in your laughter this time, but the goofy, amused smile you had on your face made him feel like you were reaching both hands past his chest plating and cupping his spark directly in your palms. A near-overwhelming flood of affection surged through him as he curled his frame over your small, soft body, thrusting into your perfect heat. The punched-out moan you let out only spurred him further, both servos scooping you up from beneath and cradling you off the rough ground as he rocked into you.

"It must have been love…~ -ZRRT- And I can't fight this feeling anymore!~ -KZZST- I am not a smart man. But I know what love is… -ZZRT- …Am I talking too much?"

"Oh, Bee. No, no Bee. You're perfect." You cradled his face in your hands so gently, with such brimming, overwhelming care and kindness and love that Bumblebee was certain he was going to melt into a helpless pile of energon and cables and liquid metal beneath the warmth and affection in your gaze. "I love you too. I love you, Bumblebee."

He tried to vocalize, but it trilled up into a sharp, staticky wail as pleasure punched through him like a stinger shot. Frame shivering where he curled over your own, the feeling of his transfluid spilling into you seemed to be just enough to push you to your own release as well. He whined again as your nails scratched at his perfect paint. He knew you wouldn't be able to leave a mark, but Primus be damned if he didn't want them.

He kept you cradled in his grip even as his spike depressurized and you both groaned at the feeling of his fluids drooling from your aching core. You let out a startled 'Woah!' as he rolled over, placing you draped across his chassis with his hands cradled around your back to keep you close to him.

"Could've given me a heads-up." You joked.

"Heads-up." He parroted your own voice back to you, breaking into more amused buzzes at the scandalized look on your face and the teasing slap you gave to his hood.

"You're so lucky I love you."

"I love you." He parroted again, hoping the subtle expressions on his faceplate were as easy to read to you as your soft eyes and warm, dreamy smile was to him. It must have been, or you probably wouldn't have pulled him in for another kiss.