No one mentions the hellish security nightmare QR codes are. Hell, the articles I’ve read pretty much can be summed up with the advice “Never scan a QR code.”
The fact it is so trivial to print out a custom QR code with god knows what encoded in it, and slap it over any public facing QR code should be enough to make anyone second guess scanning one.

Sure seems like these “AI” companies sure spend an awful lot of money, and then charge a lot of money, just to help students badly cheat at their homework.

I still believe the costs of this crap will eternally outweigh any potential future benefit.

Not just coal and bunker fuel emissions, our capability to do *anything* about wildfires has dramatically increased. We actively work to put out most wildfires, whereas, less than 150 years ago, any forest fire that started pretty much burned until the weather put it out, or it burned into a sparse enough area that it ran out of fuel. I’m guessing that the planet has the cleanest air, particulate wise, it has had since the last extinction level event cleared up.

Look up “Solar Constant”, so I don’t have to re-post an entire Wikipedia page here. That’ll explain as much as we know about the power from the sun.

No more than 1370 watts per square meter, +/- 3%

By hilarious happenstance, I happen to know that it is *really difficult* to tranquilize ostriches, a problem I expect extends to emus. Years ago, a local bar kept a pair of ostriches in a big pen in the empty lot next door as a kind of tourist attraction/sideshow. One day, one of them escaped. We were in town that day visiting our good friend, the local veterinarian, so we got a front row seat to the show when the bar owner showed up asking the vet to use his tranquilizer gun to capture the ostrich. Turns out, those big feathers make a dandy dart-proof vest; and a good number of doses of tranquilizer were wasted, you could see the dart hit, and bounce off spraying its payload in the air, rather than sticking in the bird.
Eventually, the ostrich got bored of his freedom and returned to his pen on his own, much to everyones relief.
Anyways, I suspect that one would have the same trouble darting an emu.

I looked it up:

Yeah, they could not come up with a better name?

911 call analysis is another psudoscience that is being used to fuck over innocent citizens.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Fart...

I think he was more pointing out the sad societal phenomenon that is the inverse relationship between wages and how destructive the job is to the body.
I did 10 years in retail, and am glad I got out when I did, my joints are already half trashed. 10-12 hour days walking 30k steps on concrete floors moving tens of thousands of 50lb cases takes its toll on the body.
In a magical utopia, a job that uses up the body like that would compensate the worker fabulously, to make up for the wear and tear.
But instead, the best paying jobs are ones that can be done by barely lifting a finger.
Can we change this? Probably not, it is built into the entire fabric of society.

I worked in a grocery store for 10 years, ending a couple years ago. It was a small local chain with about 10 mid-size stores. It took a 3 person crew of full-time workers to keep price tags and sales tags up to date, in just my store. Literally, 3 people, there entire 8 hour shift consisted of scanning tags with a reader to see if they matched the price info on file, and pulling, printing, and replacing out of date tags; along with putting up ‘special sale’ tags, and removing sale tags.
I can only imagine the amount of work this must be in *big* stores like walmart or kroger or the like. I can see the cost savings just in printer toner and tags being enough to justify the switch to electronic tags, not even mentioning the labor costs.
We would go through hundreds of pounds of paper stickers and plastic tag backs a month, and like I said, we were a small operation compared to these.

Pretty much!
I worked 10 years in retail, and if I was stocking, I could work a 10-12 hour shift with no problems, because I was constantly moving. (30k+ steps a day). But if I got stuck running a register, I my body would be in agony in a few hours, even with the ‘anti-fatigue mats’. My back, legs, and feet would be screaming and no amount of fidgeting in place would relieve it. Actually moving around is key.

I think the investment is way larger than we might guess. Entire old power plants have been bought and brought back online to fuel the ai craze. There is talk of re-starting 3-mile island, just to power server farms. These are *huge* investments that reach further into the ‘normal’ economy than the .com era ever did. The Contractors, engineers, and workers involved in these massive projects will be left holding the bag when the ai craze flops, and that will have far-reaching impacts.

I think you are on the right line of thought; the AI bubble can only go so far before investors demand some tangible results from the billions/trillions they have been throwing at it. I’m really hoping the AI craze does not tank the world economy when it pops like the .com bubble.

Honestly, this is what put me off podcasts in the end. I don’t have a job that is conducive to listening to things like podcasts at work; and everyone I was listening to slowly went from thirty minutes up to an hour, then two hours, then even longer. They stopped being something I could listen to during lunch, or on a break, and became something that had to either be listened to in pieces, often with backtracking to remember what the conversation was even about, or block out an entire evening to listen to a whole episode. Finally I just stopped caring, the hassle was not worth the content to me.
Honestly, I liked the shorter, 30 minute ‘radio program style’ model, as that limitation tended to force the hosts/guests to stay on topic and be articulate and concise. If you are allowed to ramble on for hours, you *will* ramble for hours, and I think, often, that is to the detriment of the listeners.
Obviously I’m in a minority opinion group with this, as the long format podcast has sadly reined supreme, but I think we lost something by going this route.

Well this is a take on the subject I’d not seen before.