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Comment Walmart doesn't do tips (Score 1) 80

I don't know if HEB includes a tip, but I know that Walmart doesn't do tips. When I worked in the front end of a Walmart Supercenter six years ago, associates were trained to refuse tips, and if someone insists, to ring it up as a donation to whatever charity Walmart is collecting for at the time. Often that ends up being the nearest Children's Miracle Network hospital.

Comment Diverse double-compiling (Score 1) 136

Do you have the code for the compiler, and compile that yourself too?

If you have three different compilers for a language, and you bootstrap a compiler using all three of them, the first generation (e.g. GCC compiled with QuestionableCC, ShadyCC, or SlopCC) should be functionally identical, and the second generation (GCC compiled with GCC, which was compiled with the other compiler) should be bit-identical. See "Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling" by David A. Wheeler. Some people have trouble trusting Rust because only the latest stable rustc can compile the latest stable rustc.
AI

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the freed-market dept.
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

"Hello?"

"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.

"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."

"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."

"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."

"Oh! My bad...."

Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...

[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."

Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."

Comment Re:Integral layer of the Trusted-Computing/DRM sta (Score 1) 34

by tepples (#66318346) Attached to: Broadcom Pledges to Lock Down Open Source Python, Java Libraries

In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant.

You said home ISPs sought to deploy Trusted Network Connect about 20 years ago. It hasn't happened. What's holding it up? The rise of mobile devices, smart TVs, and other devices incompatible with the remediation means available in quarantine?

Comment $5 to $20 games exist now; IARC self-rating (Score 1) 102

by tepples (#66291692) Attached to: Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices?

Digital games themselves did not lower prices, despite them being marketed as doing so without the cost of materials/packaging/handling/shipping

From the summary: "Current prices are tied to retail. Without physical discs holding digital hostage we'll see a larger spectrum of pricing." As I understand this, paid downloads did not lower prices of AAA games because of retail price parity contracts. Paid downloads did, however, make the $5 to $20 tier for indie game pricing viable.

One thing not mentioned in the summary is that publishers of games distributed in physical copies owe a royalty to the age rating agency of each region in which a game is published. Publishers of downloadable games do not, instead relying on self-certification through the IARC form. The age rating agencies allow this because it's a lot more practical to update a game once it is found to have been misclassified.

Comment Re: They are all garbage is the problem (Score 1) 76

Easy for me to find lots of interesting things on Mastodon. I think, despite what people say, they love the rage bait on the bigger networks. Mastodon is just normal people discussing normal topics.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who ever posts in the tag for a particular toy line. Either I guessed the wrong tag, or I'm the only person on fedi interested in that topic. Which is more likely?

Comment Re:I don't understand why this is considered... (Score 1) 187

by tepples (#66285410) Attached to: Reddit Bans 11-Year Account for GPL Game Post, Testing the EU's DSA

What exactly do they owe you?

The summary states that Reddit owes the OP a reason why the user was banned, as well as a complete, untruncated copy of the user's posting history.

Can you cite the law that says so?

The summary states that the relevant law is Article 17 of the EU's Digital Services Act.

Comment GOG is for poaching more than launching (Score 1) 49

And like I said I don't see anyone talking about GOG.

How much of that is related to GOG's reputation for being selective about what games and genres they accept? I get the impression that GOG is a bit more "curated" than some other PC game stores. The curators don't really want visual novels (a style of menu-driven adventure game). And apart from new releases by CD Projekt (which owned GOG before the end of 2025), I suspect that GOG seeks to poach "catalog" games that have already been successful on the competing store Steam as opposed to having a game at day one.

Sources include GOG forums (thread; thread)

Comment Emulators on GitHub (Score 1) 45

by tepples (#66259864) Attached to: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects

GitHub has deleted projects because it didn't like them too or considered them too much of a hot potato. Try safely hosting an emulator on there for an older games console or something similar.

My own NES emulator is on Codeberg, but there are well over a dozen emulators on GitHub. Start here:

- LIJI32/SameBoy (Game Boy)
- TASEmulators/fceux (NES)
- mgba-emu/mgba (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance)
- nesdev-org/MesenCE (NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, PC Engine, Master System/Game Gear, WonderSwan)
- jsgroth/jgenesis (Mega Drive/Mega CD, Super NES, Master System/Game Gear)
- dolphin-emu/dolphin (GameCube, Wii)
- stenzek/duckstation (PlayStation)
- ares-emulator/ares (numerous)
- Dwedit/PocketNES (PocketNES on Game Boy Advance)
- FluBBaOfWard/NitroSwan (WonderSwan on Nintendo DS)
- FluBBaOfWard/NGPDS (Neo Geo Pocket on Nintendo DS)
- FluBBaOfWard/NitroGrafx (PC Engine on Nintendo DS)

Which emulator of a 20+-year-old console did you see deleted from GitHub, unless it included ROMs or system software copied without permission?

port forwarding your residential cable Internet service to a Pi

The problem is that a lot of home ISPs don't let their customers port forward because there just aren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around, and I'd bet a lot of your audience are behind ISPs that don't provide IPv6 (such as Frontier fiber). When an ISP is using carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to put an entire neighborhood behind a single IPv4 address, how would the ISP's router know to which customer to direct a TCP SYN packet received at that address? I guess each Forgejo instance operator could pay per month for some sort of proxy service using a reverse SSH tunnel.

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