Let’s just say this happens a lot in my house.

I need to get on that, I guess.

125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.

Oh, absolutely. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.”

An app for a toilet is a stupid idea, full stop.

They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.

Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.

I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.

I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).

In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.

Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.

Ask me how I know.

That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?

Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.

Ask me how I know.

more sanitary

Foot pedal flush really needs to become a thing.

At 11:00 in the evening, there are two options for what they’re dealing with. Either:

1. They have made precisely no headway whatsoever in actually solving the bug, or
2. They have fixed the bug, but the debugging made them go “—wait, how did that ever work in the first place?!”

If it’s #1, odds are pretty good that there’s a random debug step they put in at 9:08 in the morning that’s screwing everything up now. If it’s #2, odds are pretty good that it actually didn’t work before, and now they’ve got to go back through the last six months of data and rectify it to fix that bug.

“ugh I know exactly why this is happening” is such a frustrating feeling. Especially when it’s stuff that should’ve been found in testing, or that you know probably was found in testing, but they deprioritized the fix.

I’m currently mid-migration from Windows to Linux, so I have to wait until the Windows release or until I finish migrating (I’m not really up for building a beta at this point), but I’m very excited.

You are probably correct. I mean, in reality neither is true until and unless the SCOTUS were to weigh in (so, just take a wild guess at what they’d choose?), but I would bet that’s the justification they would use.

I’m keeping an eye on Zed: https://zed.dev/

Yeah, AI, whatever. It’s written in Rust and looks pretty great.

Indeed; it definitely would show some promise. At that point, you’d run into the problem of needing to continually update its weighting and models to account for evolving language, but that’s probably not a completely unsolvable problem.

So maybe “never” is an exaggeration. As currently expressed, though, I think I can probably stand by my assertion.

Proven? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s a way to devise a formal proof around it. But there’s a lot of evidence that, even if it’s technically solvable, we’re nowhere close.

We will never solve the Scunthorpe Problem.

Trying to be the change I want to see in the world.

Whoops, I just assumed that since I used the web version on Windows, that was the only version available for windows. I had never even checked. Thanks!