My 10y old says 'nice' for 69, because video game streamers and other YouTubers say it, and of course all the other kids say it at school. He has no idea what it means, just that you are supposed to say 'nice'.

OpenAI technology is still, while used at large scale, mostly experimental. They also do not seem to have anything g that is years ahead of their competition, wherever they are today is at best a few months ahead of their competition.

They do not really have a moat, and it is trivial for customers to switch.

Considering a veteran shot and killed a man for flipping his finger at a military memorial a few weeks ago in the US, I'm pretty sure that burning a bible in front of a church can put you at risk of deadly violence.

Maybe the risk is a little less than if someone claimed you showed a drawing of Mohamed in Europe, but it is still a risk.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fu...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

It is common for Germans to send a picture of their "deposits" to their doctor. It is an accepted fact over there that it is a good proxy of your general health.

There is a new trend in the US for the same.

So this is probably not palatable for most of us, but there is a market for such a product.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry...

Carbon emissions from the engine are only one environmental factor. My understanding is that EV tires wear 20% faster than for ICE: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fmore-...

There was a somewhat recent study that the main cause of population loss for California salmon is tire dust: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcaltrout.org%2Fnews%2Fdid-...

This means that EVs are at best a tradeoff as an environmental solution.

An other point is that Uber, Lift, and Waymo are actually increasing the number of miles driven by cars, per rider. The reason is that when you park at your destination, the vehicle is not making more miles, but the ride hailing ones do:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fmach%2Fs...

As for public transportation, the train between San Jose and San Francisco was causing lot of pollution per passenger. Note that a 2021 study claims 5x less pollution per commuters but most trains between SJ and SF are far from full, only the ones during rush hour so the true impact per rider is not as good as often reported. Fortunately they recently electrified Caltrain. The old diesel units went to Peru, where they will keep on polluting the planet.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcleantechnica.com%2F2025...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kqed.org%2Fnews%2F1201...

Overall ... the environmental impact of keeping an older car or upgrading to EV is a whole lot more complicated than the binary ICE is bad, and EV is good.

We have 2 cars. A 2009 with 90k miles on it and a 2014 with around 30k miles on it (IIRC, wife's car). We are the original owners and we only had 2 repairs due to drivetrain issues over all that time. The older car has a couple of glitches with the infotainment system but I could replace it with a few hundred dollars if it really bothered me.

Other than that both cars get us perfectly from point A to point B, with plenty of fast refueling options along the way. The annual maintenance is usually under $100/y, maybe $300 if you average tires, breaks, and the occasional faulty sensor. Other than the cars starting to look less fresh, we don't feel the need to upgrade.

Replacing either car would cost us at the very least $25k and a bump in insurance premium, and having to deal with the horrendous dealership experience.

Usually the internal security of these companies is more like theatre and checkboxes filling than real security. They will buy static analysis tools that cover things like OWASP and file a quarterly report for external auditors so they can get there certifications.

During that time the product managers file feature requests with aggressive timelines that do not leave time for doing a secure implementation, until a customer complains that their own pen testing found holes.

I've worked at few high tech corporations including some cybersecurity ones. I've seen how the sausage is made.

Our focus on 42 is not much more logical, but the humor is more advanced.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fm.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D...

I knew that 6 is afraid of seven because 7 8 9. Seven ate nine.

LinkedIn, an other Microsoft acquisition, announced that they stopped their migration to Azure due to technical challenges.

If you give up on the tech stack of your new owners, after trying for years, it is pretty damning.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theregister.com%2F20...

SSDs will wear out, so swapping to them for no reason means your machine will break sooner. On Apple machines where you (usually) cannot replace the internal storage means that you will brick your machine. My wife has a 2018 Mac mini that still works fine, but we never used the internal drive and got an external one instead. Sure it is not as fast but she can't tell the difference and we can upgrade to larger capacity as needed for a lot less.

I think the poster knew that, but not the "dev" that actually wrote the original comment.

Related story:
We once had a production server where java went from 2GB ram usage to 10GB n 2 minutes. I told the main Dev he had a bug in his code. He went over my head to the VP and forced us to upgrade the servers to 20GB (we had VMs so it was possible). A week later, same day, same time, the RAM went from 2GB to 20GB. We could not double the RAM again so they actually looked at the bug. The issue was a customer clicked on a sorting tab on a table in the web UI. The code made a SQL query, with no LIMIT, then sorted everything in RAM. With millions of records, that crashed.

I've seen devs do the reverse with AWS APIs: ignore the fact that results are paginated, which means that testing with under the page size always worked, but not in production. Then they ask me why their code does not work, or why AWS is so stupid.

Note that AI generated code never added pagination without me asking for it explicitly, and of course jo error handling either. The details that make code work in production all need to be asked explicitly.

I remember, many years ago, I interviewed for a position on the Alexa team. At the time Amazon had no ads on any of their platforms. The interviews were very very focused on how to monetize through ads, which to me was very awkward as I feel rather negatively about forced advertising and consumer tracking. Needless to say I did not join them. I had some conversations wit Alexa insiders, outside the interviews, and the consensus was that the tech stack was actually of low overall quality. Apparently when a product get's buzz, other Amazon teams want to jump in and add inconsistent messes on top of already inconsistent foundations. The standard Amazon compensation model for tech roles is not great anyways, at least if you compare to Google or Netflix.

And on the topic of Ads, I stopped watching Prime Video once they added ads, and no I will not pay even more to remove them. There's enough to watch on other platforms.

Xbox seems to be moving to the streamed subscription only model.

Switch 2 is now online only, with hardware keys and hostile anti piracy behavior (bricks console if a suspected copied game is used).

PlayStation from Sony seems reasonable with physical games still present and we are still able to buy used games without much worries. Offline campaign games like Horizon 1&2, Last of Us 1&2 have solid sales.

Steam, has the portable Steam Deck, and offers lots of flexibility and a very large library of games. Including retro games.

Cheap retro game consoles from many vendors. Even the ones under $50 can have thousands of games (very questionable sources and legality). I got a game boy style handheld for my son. It can play most games from the 1970s all the way to early 2000, including some PS1 and N64 games... I paid $30 shipped. It stopped working after a few months due to a rusty screen cable, but I managed to fix it.

Personally I do not game that much but I do have a PS5 to play a few campaign games, some racing (I got a Logitech wheel and pedals), and a few sandbox games on my Apple laptop (Minecraft, terraria, space bound, ...)

Right now of the mainstream console players it looks like Sony is the less bad choice. I do not consider the SteamDeck mainstream compared to the main 3.

In the case of Google big wigs back around 2008 they planned on building a new HQ building on a vacant plot of land. Then endangered burrowing owls showed up in the area and went after the ground squirrel population that was on the plot of land. This stopped the project due to federal regulation on endangered species.

Google started plowing the field on regular basis to destroy the ground squirrel burrows and lower the population until they could get approval for construction.

At the same time Google employees were feeling the local feral cats which lowered the owls population.

They completed the building a few years ago.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fsanfra...

They did pay $20k for the owls at some point:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mv-voice.com%2Fnews%2F...

Sometimes they cut down hundreds of trees for construction, then change their mind.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mv-voice.com%2Fenvir...

Afaik the owl population is still declining but there is currently no staff to monitor them.