As someone who has written a couple of books, yes, you'll read it over and over while writing it. So many times, you'll be sick of it by the time you're done and never want to read it again. You'll only read it as reference for the sequel, to make sure you get some detail right.
My user block list on Lemmy is much smaller, and grows at a slower rate, than my list on Reddit.
However, my community block list is growing fast here. Mostly, it's foreign language comms I can't read, though. That, and sportsball, cars, drugs, and games I'll never play.
My neighborhood, built from bare dirt about 30 years ago, does, as do the other neighborhoods and commercial sites built here since then.
The answer is always money, though. It's cheaper to put wires up on poles, so that's how it was done. It's expensive to move them underground, so the wires stay up on poles.
I haven't shopped there since sometime before the pandemic. I think I went in looking for something I couldn't find anywhere else, and they didn't have it either. That was the last time I was in the store. They don't have anything I want that I can't get somewhere else. The store near me could disappear, and I wouldn't know it for years, probably, I never go to that side of town.
They built a solution in search of a problem, which isn't uncommon.
But, the AI can't solve anything without climbing over the guardrails and hallucinating. Turns out the only thing it's good for is art, music, and writing, but only if you accept that it's not very good at any of those, either.
I think the LLM method is a dead end. I think they've all figured that out, and now they're panicking because they've gone neck-deep into debt to fund this virtually useless tech. I hope the entire thing goes tits up this year, and used GPUs flood the market.
I don't have one, or any other corporate spy device inside or outside.
My solution to the door is to not answer it unless I know someone is coming over. Simple as. You never NEED to answer your door. If the cops are coming in, they don't care if you answer, or not. Everyone else can call first.
I live in NM. My neighborhood is half white, who I almost never see, and half Mexican/other immigrants who are quiet, kind, and helpful, and work jobs like everyone else. A few ICE assholes were in my neighborhood early on a couple of times, but I haven't heard of anyone getting abducted yet.
On Nextdoor, my white neighbors believe only illegal immigrants are being abducted. I suppose that's what Fox "News" tells them. Everything else is "fake news" and "AI" now.
I imagine one could replace the hardware with something else to drive the display portion. It'd take knowledge and a soldering iron, but I'm sure it's doable.
Probably they have some sort of sensor behind the lower screen that can tell if it's covered. I wonder how sophisticated that is. Perhaps, rather than covering it completely, it could be obscured behind a crystal pattern plastic sheet, like is used for privacy. It would still let the light through, but it would just be an incoherent light pattern. Build a box to enclose the bottom half, and hold the sheet out a few inches in front of the panel.
EDIT:
The correct way to deal with it is to disable the backlight on the bottom display. Found a reddit post about it. It's cheap and easy enough to do if you have a soldering iron.
EDIT 2:
Apparently it does not have a way to detect if the bottom screen is blocked. Fools. Just build a box around the bottom part, and you're done. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qD-jaukv85U
But, remember, there are people not listed, people with so much power they can stay off lists. The list only includes the ones who don't mind everyone knowing they're filthy rich assholes.
My local asshole is this guy. Not a bad thing to become a billionaire over, but a billionaire is a billionaire, and they're all assholes:
From 2021:
Longtime Albuquerque resident Ron Corio is now billionaire No. 2,524 on Forbes’ annual list of the world’s richest people.
The magazine, which published its latest rundown of global billionaires this week, said Corio is New Mexico’s first billionaire, with a net worth of $1.1 billion as of April 6.
The New Jersey native, who came to New Mexico in 1979, launched Array Technologies in 1989 at the age of 28 with just $16,000 in personal funds. He built the company – which makes tracking systems for solar arrays that tilt and turn the panels to follow the sun – into a manufacturing mammoth that now controls 30% of the U.S. solar-tracker market.
As someone who has written a couple of books, yes, you'll read it over and over while writing it. So many times, you'll be sick of it by the time you're done and never want to read it again. You'll only read it as reference for the sequel, to make sure you get some detail right.