I’ll reply without knowing your situation fully. If you don’t have an emergency fund that would cover several months worth of expenses that is probably the single most impactful thing you can do with $10k. A few high yield savings account offer rates around 4%, some of them have strings attached, so read how it works carefully. Think of this as insurance against unforseen expenses that you might otherwise have to put on a card and consequently pay interest for. Pick a number and always make sure you keep that account at that number.

If you already have an emergency fund, you have lots of options. Personally, I am onboard with the folks recommending index funds. I have an ETF that tracks the DOW and it has outperformed most of my individual stocks significantly over time.

Most importantly, strangers on the internet are likely not financial advisors and may not even know what they are doing. Take everything with a grain of salt and if you talk to any investment companies make sure you understand the difference and overlap between a financial advisor and a fiduciary.

So I already responded, but I’m seeing here that you are also a cyclist! I have tried a number of watches over the years and Garmin is absolutely the gold standard for fitness focused smartwatches. Some of them, like mine, only have buttons, no touchscreen, which sounds bad, but is actually amazing. Sure I can only choose from prewritten SMS responses, but I can get there with a few button clicks while riding (even on gravel). With my touchscreen watches, I used to have to stop to reply. The TFT screens also look better in direct sunlight than an LCD or OLED. So now, whenever my wife texts “where are you?” I can send a “out riding, love you” with only a few clicks. I also send her my GPS location when I ride in the road so she can have some peace of mind. I hear Wahoo also released a watch, haven’t heard much about it.

Cons are a weak app ecosystem and not quite as “smart” (meaning it is not as filled with tech gimmicks and an endless stream of notification chum). The stat analysis of your health data is best done via Garmin Connect app or even better, the desktop website. They let you download some of the reports as a CSV, but I’ve found that more often than that, the formatting and how the data is broken up in the csvs needs some work.

Do remember, while not a Google or an Apple, Garmin is still a big evil corporation trying to make money off chumps like you and me. You likely won’t get these features and keep your privacy 100% intact

Someone close to me had positive things to say about the Wyze watch as well. If apple and android are tier A, wyze is below that, but above all the F tier temu and amazon junk.

As someone who has bought a fair number of smartwatches and fitness trackers and always over-researches every decision I make:

• See the rest of the replies for info on cheap smart watches. They’re basically a cereal box toy.
• Depending on what you need, the MiBand or Amazfit bands had excellent battery life and there used to be 3rd party apps for your phone that did a much better job collecting and displaying your stats than Zepp or MiFit (the official apps) did. I miss my 1.5 month battery life. Its also possible to use gadget bridge so it’s all 100% offline though I understand its still a bit more rudimentary than a corporate cloud-based solution. I remember the bands I got from them running $25-50 USD
• Used Garmin devices or previous gen garmin devices can be had MUCH cheaper than list price on Amazon or so. I picked up a Fenix 6 a few years ago for less than half of the $600 list price. I love the lack of touchscreen because the button navigation is absurdly fast and no mistouches! This suits how I use a watch much better than trying to put a tiny a 2x2cm touchscreen on my wrist. These are fitness watches, but some have a few smart features. Depends on what you plan to use it for I guess.
• If you are a nerd (a good thing) and want to contribute to a cool project, Pine Computers, which makes the pinebook, pinetab, pinephone, etc. makes a device called the pinetime that is basically a smartwatch that is open to the community’s hacks and modifications. I haven’t bought one because my biking depends on my Garmin stats, but I am tempted to grab one to mess with it.

None of these are fancy “smarts first” watches like an Apple Watch or an Android Watch. I found I needed less smarts than I thought as I usually carry my phone at all times anyway. It is nice to have the doorbell ring on my wrist and to reply to texts by choosing from a few pre-written responses while biking, or otherwise unavailable to text. If you really want a bunch of apps and integration with your phones OS, Apple and Android are the big two and its not really feasible to go 3rd party for the same experience.

$ wget kiasorrento. sh

…looks like it’s my car now. 😈😆

This is my car, I have a stereo with entertainment features. My mileage, drive time, fuel economy, and anything related to the systems of the car, shows up on a separate display strip. To the best of my knowledge, the stereo cannot control the car in any way. Its just there to play music for me. I dread the day I have to replace this car. I may just buy an old pre-telemetry 4x4. The roads around here have gotten too bad for a hatchback anyway.

I live in a suburban part of a medium sized US city. There is a school nearby that has similar problems.

• situated on a 2 lane collector road with bike lanes
• lots of no parking signs -they set up a bunch of cones and have crossing guards all around
• there are school zone flashers

Despite All This

• people park in doubled up bike lane/no parking area all the time and the way the cones are set up encourages it
• people swing their doors open into traffic and cross wherever they want
• during off times, the school has a sign forbidding use of their parking lot so people park in the bike lanes

Luckily, the speed limit is only 30 so when school is in letting out I take the lane and anyone that doesn’t like it can choke on a bottle of tire sealant.

My city is generally responsive when enough people comment on something and in general, you are likely to get a sentence or two back no matter what you comment on. I’m afraid to comment on this because the people picking up their kids in cars outnumber the cyclists and I forsee the school holding firm on closing their lot and they’ll probably quote something stupid like liability or security. Is it not also a liability if a kid steps out from behind a parked car and gets squished by an F350 Crew Cab Mega Hemi Coal Roaler? In any case, I think the more likely outcome would be accommodating the cars and moving the bikes into the road with sharrows or doing something like that.

If I was in charge, I’d put a speed table at each end of the school zone, narrow all crosswalks to the minimum acceptable distance and put the bike lanes behind a 6inch wide curb to make it more obvious that you cannot park there. I also want these lifted Ford Excursion drivers to watch us casually pedal past the traffic jam they create every single day. I’d force the school to open their lot where capacity permits and I’d start ticketing the shit out of anyone who stows up traffic in the area or parks where it is not allowed. There is a trail just south of the school that leads to a grocery store maybe 1/4 mile away. That’s where the car drivers could best pick up their kids. All the tickets should easily pay for the speed tables and upgrading the bike lanes and walking paths.

My wife balked when I bought a Ducky keyboard to replace the solar UN-powered, Bluetooth DIS-connected, keys popping everywhere garbage I got from work. Once she typed on it, she never had another complaint.

The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought “oh yeah, I have been using Wayland”. I don’t mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.

Agree. I appreciate that banks offer 2FA, but do I really need to be forced to give up a real phone number to access a forum, news site, etc.? No.

Whose job is security? Mine, the user, and if I decide one of my accounts is a throwaway or I just mash some keys to get access to something, I shouldn’t have to sign up for 2FA to do it.

A +1 for older 1+ devices. I have a 9 and unlocking and rooting was simple. I also have a 10 that I recently acquired and it looks like things got more sketchy, e.g. I’m not sure quite how risky this is. Like you, I cannot settle for stock, and I find myself in the similar situation of picking my next phone based primarily off of user freedom and only secondarily based on specs.

If we can’t put the cat back in the bag, then the stolen data should be open-sourced and they should be regulated out of the AI space for a few years to allow companies not stealing data (I assume there are some) to catch up.

Your point about the small companies is valid, and it used to be better. When Glassdoor was at its peak, you could find smaller companies more frequently and I would read up on the companies I did business with to get an employee’s perspective on whether they were functioning effectively. If your employees hate your guts or think their job is pointless, that’s also a bit of a red flag for me as a consumer. This Glassdoor research worked well for renovation contractors, larger service providers like electrical or plumbing, commercial real estate management companies. Sometime you could also find info that made it easier to navigate call centers designed to frustrate you into giving up. It looks like someone posted a few alternatives and glass door stopped being useful for company research almost as dramatically as google became ineffective for other research. Someday soon, all we’ll have is the company’s marketing slop and any honest opinion will be buried and hidden into non-existance.

With regard to review manipulation, I knew a company with an abysmal rating, a real w2 farm. The people I knew spanned entry level to the c-suite. Said company would have bootlickers in HR and elsewhere post 5 star reviews to try to move the needle. They also asked people to rate them well after training had completed and everyone still had “new-job glasses” on. Despite their efforts, I think they were still sitting at a measly 2.7 stars, which is still way higher than the 1.5 they deserved. The 0.5 is mostly based on the bottomless supply of decent coffee in the break room :D

I don’t have interactions with many people from this company anymore, but what I have heard is basically “different people; same shit”.

Thanks, levels looks really useful. This will help me fill some of the gap that was left after glass door enshittified and started data mining everyone’s real names and attaching them to their profile as well as pushing their “fishbowl” thing.

I’m out of the loop on the meta despite being active on the platform. What’s the deal with those other two servers? I can see they have strong “personalities”.

Welcome.

It’s like a human centipede where only the first person is a human and everyone else is an AI. It’s all shit, but it gets a bit worse every step.

Shiiiiit, those managers should be bowing at your feet every day for you allowing them to be in your forklift certified presence.

This is why I have dozens, if not hundreds of tabs open. Usually I open links in a new tab so I can easily tab back to where I came from. Using a hierarchical tab manager makes this work better because when you’re done with the topic, you close the whole branch… theoretically.

This tactic also seems targeted at mobile users where it’s harder to break the loop.

Millennial here. In high school we used to tape the latest proxy URLs to the bottom of the computer lab keyboards… allegedly. Organized resistance. I remember almost getting in trouble for making IT cry because I made fun of them for accidentally blocking their own website.