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maweaver

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One thing really stands out, which is that Bricks and Minifigs is pointing the finger at the franchisee for an "unauthorized" consignment deal. While the blog post has a screenshot of the contract specifically allowing consignments. Which undercuts a large part of the corporate argument.

Yes but generally one cannot walk into a store and buy a fake id, then turn around and hand it to another cashier in the same store for a restricted purchase. Which I think would be the closer metaphor.

As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each performance is unique, and people definitely value getting access to every show. For bands repeating the same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure how much it matters which performance you listen to. Although some people might be into it, for the "I was there" novelty factor.

Using what mechanism? Most Linux updates are not pushed but rather pulled at the user request. You can use Linux totally offline. This is fundamentally different than a webapp, where code is sent with every visit

I love using AI and find it greatly increases my productivity, but the dirty little secret is that you have to actually read what it writes. Both because it often makes mistakes both large and small that need to be corrected (or things that even if not outright wrong, do not match the style/architecture of the project), and because you have to be able to understand it for future maintenance. One other thing I've noticed through the years is that a surprising number of developers are "write only". Reading someone else's code and working out what it's doing and why is its own skillset. I am definitely concerned that the conflux of these two things is going to create a junk code mountain in the very near future. Humans willing to untangle it might find themselves in high demand.

Grok Code Fast 1 11 months ago

I literally saw it on video. I don't care who tells me it didn't happen, it very clearly did.

ChatGPT Search 2 years ago

You sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole... you don't have to have ID to vote, but you do have to be registered to vote (which requires ID). So in order for an illegal immigrant to vote, they would need to impersonate a registered voter (and presumably if that person did vote, it would be flagged as multiple votes under the same registration). Not impossible, but not the same as being able to just walk up and vote no questions asked.

For what it's worth, I've sent a "stop" before and gotten this:

NETWORK MSG: You replied with the word "stop" which blocks all texts sent from this number. Text back "unstop" or "start" to receive messages again.

I assumed it was from my carrier (T-Mobile in the US), but now I'm wondering, as I have gotten different replies from other numbers. Maybe it came from the sender's provider? Or is just misleading.

Funnily enough, that is especially not the case with the market Uber competes with, a.k.a taxis. The fare is pre-advertised and is based on distance/time. Transparent pricing that does not vary by customer was a very important aspect of traditional taxi services, to the point where you could see your fare change in real time as the ride progressed.

“When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?”

Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

It's not so much that he knows procedures well, it appears that he has some sort of didactic memory that he has focused on this topic. He would have had to basically already memorized this fact obscure enough that a congressional scholar was tweeting for an answer.

AI or Ain't: Eliza 3 years ago

Seems like the modern definition is something along the lines of an algorithm whose behavior depends on data which was itself machine generated, rather than hand-created by a human like Eliza's rules.

I've had the "joy" of doing data corrections on production databases before. Things I've learned:

- ALWAYS do the work inside of a transaction, as he mentioned. Rollback is your friend. For final run I always do a rollback and "clean" run just to make sure nothing extra slips in.

- Start by crafting your delete/updates as SELECTS. Make sure it targets the data you want then save the SELECT to run afterwards.

- Export any data you plan to modify off to a spreadsheet and save it somewhere. This is another chance to check it's what you intended to change, it's a record of what was changed, and it can be used to revert the data if needed.

- As the author mentioned, get another pair of eyes if possible. Besides making it less likely for things to go wrong, people are more understanding.

- And it probably goes without saying, but don't just fix the data and move on. Do everything possible to track down the bug that caused the issue in the first place and fix it. This is another place where having previous data available in a spreadsheet (or even a complete database backup) can help with data mining after the fact.

Most of them (especially the cold medicines) are not just ibuprofen/acetaminophen but are a "cocktail" that will also include dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, phenylephrine, diphenhydramine, etc in different combinations/amounts depending what they are intended for. I don't personally use them but I could see how it could be useful rather than buying a bunch of individual medications.

One issue they mention is that you lose the simple greedy algorithm for making change. For example, for $0.38 it's better to give 2x$0.18 plus 2 pennies (4 coins), but many might intuitively give back a quarter, a dime, and 3 pennies (5 coins). Besides the added complexity, introducing a new coin solely to reduce the amount of change given is not effective if it is not used optimally.

Well it's one thing for friends and family to be aware in general that you watch porn. It's another thing for it to become public record for potential employers etc to learn that you sought out "blacked raw" videos, which could be perceived as problematic for reasons beyond sexual prudishness.

Beyond which, fighting a 6 figure lawsuit rather than taking a 4 digit settlement can be a dangerous gamble, especially if the copyright infringement did actually take place.

Not to say that I agree with what they're doing, but I can certainly understand why people just take the settlement and move on.

Anyone using Eliza for more than a couple of minutes will quickly pick up on its tricks. Even in their cherry picked example it barely makes it a few messages in before the illusion starts to shatter with awkward lines like "Do you think coming here will help you to not be unhappy?". It might pass the turing test once or twice by sheer luck but it's clearly not competitive with a human conversing in general.

I had a similar thought, but then it says "high intensity" stair climbing, which is not how I would describe my climbing.

Then there's also this:

Researchers also found that those who stopped climbing stairs daily during the study showed a 32% higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who never reported climbing stairs.

So I guess if we ever move we're actually worse off in the long run

What can we expect students to get out of an elementary course in differential equations? I reject the “bag of tricks” answer to this question. A course taught as a bag of tricks is devoid of educational value. One year later, the students will forget the tricks, most of which are useless anyway.

That's exactly how I was taught differential equations 20 years ago. And as expected I have totally forgotten all of them. I do wish I'd gotten some deeper lessons from it. Even a concept or two that stuck with me would be better than remembering I learned a bunch of math tricks a long time ago that I can no longer do.

I tried Scrabble on my phone in portrait mode (which IMO is the use case you should be optimizing for) and am finding it not very usable. Not trying to be overly negative, but here are some things I'm seeing:

- Even with 2 players seeing everyone's score requires horizontal scrolling, which is annoying.

- In addition, the scrollbars seems to only appear when a cell is selected. And even then it only actually works with 2 finger scrolling. And even then, it is inconsistent.

- Having to double tap in to enter a score is annoying.

- Not sure what the "play" column is for. If it's intended to be the word played by that player, then it's too small for many words, and it doesn't even make sense for many turns (e.g. player is connecting existing words, or passing). Furthermore, IME most people don't bother keeping track of previous turns words.

My $.02 on improving, since I hate non-constructive criticism:

Make each player some sort of bottom tab, with their score visible. Clicking the player can show all the details.

Drop the "play" column.

Auto-prompt for next players score, don't make me find the right cell and double click into it. Provide special operations for editing previous scores or marking turns as passed, challenged, etc.

I think it makes more sense if you think of it in terms of "B2B" SaaS applications. Think selling a subscription to a medium-sized company, all in one geographical location, where data is shared between all users of that organization, and very carefully not shared outside of that group. For a more concrete example, think Salesforce.

I'm not sure that I would generalize that to all modern SaaS applications though.

People get tossed out of their seats every other episode in star trek. I'm sure I've seen multiple "medical team to the bridge"s due to someone getting knocked loose by the ship shaking and hitting their head on a console.