I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.
I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.
My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.
This is what I expect to happen to truck drivers first. Automating driving still needs help in the last mile conditions but can navigate distances easily. I foresee fleets of automated trucks which are remotely connected to pilot centers where truck “drivers” sit at simulated driving stations and connect from truck to truck as they enter or leave warehouses or transfer stations. Instead of a small percentage of high-stress driving separated with stretches of monotony, it will be 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of high stress operating.
I remember back in the 80s (middle school career days) commercial pilots were near the top of paid professions, topping 100k on average.
Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.
More importantly, how long until I can guarantee a 51% chance of solving every bitcoin block?
It’s not code. It’s a matrix of associative conditions. And, specifically, it’s not a fixed set of associations but a sort of n-dimensional surface of probabilities. Your prompt is a starting vector that intersects that n-dimensional surface with a complex path which can then be altered by the data it intersects. It’s like trying to predict or undo the rainbow of colors created by an oil film on water, but in thousands or millions of directions more in complexity.
The complexity isn’t in understanding it, it’s in the inherent randomness of association. Because the “code” can interact and change based on this quasi-randomness (essentially random for a large enough learned library) there is no 1:1 output to input. It’s been trained somewhat how humans learn. You can take two humans with the same base level of knowledge and get two slightly different answers to identical questions. In fact, for most humans, you’ll never get exactly the same answer to anything from a single human more than simplest of questions. Now realize that this fake human has been trained not just on Rembrandt and Banksy, Jane Austin and Isaac Asimov, but PoopyButtLice on 4chan and the Daily Record and you can see how it’s not possible to wrangle some sort of input:output logic as if it were “code”.
It’s a weird dynamic. I feel no remorse eating pork or beef. I know the process, I raised farm animals as a kid. BUT, I know someone working on genetically modified pigs for human organ transplants and that makes me somehow uneasy.
Don’t you be doing Jen and Kira dirty like that.
Mine was a trade up from std pro to max, plus a longer tele (and maybe 1/3 of a battery). DD went from the 12 to the 13 for $28 on the same trade promo.
Even ignoring the battery value, from a residual value basis a years’ newer phone is worth about $50-75 even on the 3rd or 4th year out, so the bare resale value for both was a wash or better. If I’m getting upgraded for almost nothing out-of-pocket, long term, I’m going to take it.
I’ll trade when the money is right. iPhone 12 Pro-13 ProMax cost me $60. Yes it was a year old, but for a fresh battery and better tele lens it was worth it. This year I upgraded to a 15 Pro. I get nothing but a new battery and a C charging port (faster processor means little to me), but it cost me only $95 net - less than a battery replacement. For all the limitation of the Apple ecosystem and over-priced hardware, it gets exceptionally favorable trade-in pricing.
Iirc, iPhones reset / overwrite the encryption key so it would take substantial effort for someone to see how many steps I take in a day or to find my vacation photos. It’s probably easier to steal info from my iCloud backup at Apple.
It’s not insane if you’re on the consumer side. If you’re in the corporate bonus structure, or receiving campaign donations from a corporate sponsor that are necessary to keep your position of power it makes complete sense.
TBF, we were promised death panels. They’re just more efficiently run than we expected.
It may depend on your politics or maybe just where you hang out. I know that Beehaw gets a lot of shit for their pre-emptive defederation but it may be the nicest general online community I’ve encountered in a long time.
Sorry, $204/yr is not enough for me to keep tabs on someone else’s festishes. Especially not those of a Republican congressman.
I’m just curious if there’s been any verifiable accounts that he has stopped beating his wife.
You know what needs to be added to this? Cars. The amount of body damage needed to “total” most cars is almost trivial these days.
The reply should be, “Who should we be working with to draw equitable borders to ensure security? We’re not just asking for supplies, we’re forging local alliances to work on future solutions. “
I missed mine by 2 months and now it’s part of an expensive your@name.com email service so I’ll never get it (but google reminds me to check every year). I settled for my surname.org; I still had to scoop it up in the early 90s to get it.
I really want the .inc for my personal non-profit, but not for the $2500/yr the registrar wants for it.
This is a NoahGetTheBoat moment.
(Yes, of course I laughed - I’m going to hell and I expect to see you all there, too)