>I'm guessing that they are using the screens and
>some novel and clever way to make the puzzle
>more interesting and complex.

hmm.

high voltage electrodes and needles on recessed solenoids would go farther than screens for this.

!

the only think that doesn't "work" as vivo claims, at least that I can remember at the moment, is that season passes got sloppy on rescheduled programs--sometines it catches the reschedule, and other times it doesn't.

The rest are dropped features--some outright, like suggestions and continuous recording, and others hidden behind an "upgrade", like the ability to record all series premiers.

They've dropped everything that distinguishes a tiro from any other dvd--well, except for needing to pay them for s subscription, I suppose. And their rf remote control is nice; hopefully I can get it to talk to the pi for mythic (although realistically, I'd usually run it through my appletv and that remote)

They abandoned everything *in* the software that mad a Tivo desirable well before this. It had been just another DVR for some time.

Season passes that worked? Gone.

Subscribing to things like series premieres? Gone.

Suggestions? Gone.

We had a roamio with a lifetime subscription, and dumped it at yet another cox cable price increase.

By that time, we realized that pretty much everything we watched was on broadcast.

We got an orange pi (what a disaster! don't!), an hdhomerun quattro, and a terabyte disk.

we've been using the Quattro's dvd functions, and they've been "good enough" that other projects are ahead of getting the raspberry pi running.

they need to go further.

As I drive off to dutifully buy the wondrous stuff from the last commercial, the current commercial should jump to my phone so I don't miss it!

Music & Sound effects shouldn't even be on the same channel as voice!

Adding channels on a digital distribution isn't as complicated as what it takes to broadcast & decode stereo audio, whether AM or FM.

And then add a "relative volume" slider so that regular volume controls both (or even let the user choose a curve so that music doesn't increase as much as speech [or more, if the user prefers])

>ah i forgot another surprisingly common failure mode: cats peeing on the screen.

fluufffyyy!

it seems to me that removing such jobs would actually be a task well fitted to an AI . . .

Correct.

If you are not a tech person, right now from all the hype and news and bullshit, you would rightly assume that AI is an amazing revolution and you would barely have heard about its shortcomings.

Though that might've just been him thinking "stupid Europeans know only Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. I'll just say Moscow, close enough."

This. I've had to descend a mountain as the sun was going down once (got stuck at the top due to weather for some time, and when it let up enough for a safe descent, it was late). It's absolutely not fun, even when there's still some light. Had it been dark, I think I would've taken my chances staying at the top rather than going down.

That said, anyone not a complete idiot checks things like "time of last cable car" a) in person, b) at the day, c) at the location. Because even there is an official website that is well-maintained (and that's already two big if's) things might change at the location due to weather, workers being ill, no tourists that day or whatever.

Also, checking in person means at least one other person knows that you're up there.

AI is a tool. And like any tool its introduction creates proponents and enemies.

Some might say I'm a semi-professional writer. As in: I make money with things I write. From that perspective, I see both the AI slop and the benefits. I love that AI gives me an on-demand proof-reader. I don't expect it to be anywhere near a professional in that field. But if I want to quickly check a text I wrote for specific things, AI is great, because unlike me it hasn't been over that sentence 20 times already and still parses it completely.

As for AI writing - for the moment it's still pretty obvious, and it's mostly low-quality (unless some human has added their own editing).

The same way that the car, the computer, e-mail and thousands of other innovations have made some jobs obsolete, some jobs easier, and some jobs completely new, I don't see AI as a threat. And definitely not to my writing. Though good luck Amazon with the flood of AI-written garbage now clogging up your print-on-demand service.

Now, now.

You can't really say that you wren't warned about going hunting with Dick Cheney . . . :)

hawk

>If you have a hankering for murdering parking cops you don't need an app.

I think the motivation is more *avoiding* them than harming them!

If you wanted to harm them, you'd just tell their mothers that they weren't really hookers . . .

!

hawk

>In my state, the cops are legally required (and so) post public
>notices about where DUI checkpoints will be.

Speaking as an attorney who was still handling DUIs when checkpoints were in common use . . . announcing and pbulsihign ahead of time will make at most a marginal difference in the number of drunks heading through them.

You'll get a slight decrease in sober drivers who don't want the hassle, but drunk drivers just don't plan that well.

I recall my Criminal Procedure professor in law school commenting that he *really* wanted to get stopped in one and just sit there not speaking, staring straight ahead. Just to see what happened, as they couldn't possibly develop probable cause under the circumstances.

[*checks beard in mirror*]

oh, crap!

anyway, I both leaned unix on a pdp-11 at work and bought my first Mac in 1984.

Various Macs until I switched to a combination of unix and *nix as a graduate student, largel over LyX (largely a graphical front end to LaTeX at the time, as I was editing plenty of matrices full of integrals and such, so keyboard navigation was critical.

Then in 2008, back to a Mac laptop when it mugged me on clearance in Frys. I figured I could put FreeBSD (or maybe linux) on it, but it was a good enough *nix box, and it's battery management beat the daylights out of what I could get from FreeBSD or linux on a laptop.

And it's been Macs, largely used as *nix boxes, ever since, whether legal writing or developing software.

The bit on lower maintenance, less frequent replacement, and lower support costs goes back thirty years and more. And with some notable exceptions, the general quality of Apple hardware has been top tier, dating to when it was somewhat (but not hugely) better than #2 IBM.