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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Ford is kinda doing it. The Mustang MachE and the f150 lightning both have physical keys, but the MachE and higher trim lightnings are very touch screen dependent. They have all the driving stalks and such, but to even turn the ac settings requires touch screen and worse menus. The lightning lower trims (XLT and pro) have a smaller screen and a lot more physical controls. There are still a couple things that are buried in the touch screen, but most anything you need while driving has a physical button. Pull a fuse to disable modems and it can’t even phone home to Ford anymore.

    If you can find a 23 XLT you might even be able to get the extended range battery. 24 and later all ER batteries were tied to trim packages that included the big screen and fewer buttons.

    If you can fleet order, you can get Pro trims with ERs, but they’re really hard to find in the wild.



  • I mean why are we still asking why? We know why. The American dream involved a house and a car. The great American road trip. The lack of high speed rail. All of that got us here. The real question is what’s keeping us stuck here? And the answer is politics. Solve the oligarchy issue and you might be able to take on the projects we’re need to do away with car centric culture. Get people in office that value infrastructure over military might, and will stop subsidizing car and gas companies. A small thing any of us can do is, when job searching, require companies to justify why a job must be in office instead of remote and unless it makes sense, don’t accept in office requirements. That last one is arguable more difficult if you’re in desperate need of a job, but in other conditions, try it.



  • So one night we’re playing a modern era game and the BBEG and her husband are “holding court” at a very expensive night club. So all the PCs get dressed fancy, rent a limo, and bribe the bouncer heftily to let us in. A quick persuasion check and we’re in and snooping around. The GM wads up about a whole notebook. “I had plans for you to come in through the skylight, sneak through the kitchen, break in through the fire exit, even find a secret door to the basement. I never thought you’d just go in through the front door.”

    So sometimes it’s the GM that fails to plan the simple solution.









  • I’ve seen a few classic cars retro fitted with Tesla batteries and engines from junkyard teslas. A common thread in that space is that you don’t get high speed charging. There weren’t really alternatives to super chargers at that time, so maybe they can use the other high speed chargers these days. Anyway, that’s tells me it’s possible, but that’s an extreme end of it. Just removing software probably requires a lot of specialized knowledge.




  • So I’m sure how we conceive of being the dominant species is biased. But if we talk about civilizations and their ability to eventually propagate beyond earth, I don’t think dolphins have it. Their ancestry tried out land and said “nah, back to the water”. Not to mention anything we do that takes humans out of the equation entirely is going to probably kill off the dolphins, apes, elephants, basically most of the mammalians. It’ll be so long before something evolves to take our place as “earthlings” all our works will be fossils at best