HN user
Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est (They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier).
Father in law was a real estate agent from the 80s until maybe 5 years ago.
The day he retired was the day he absolutely positively suddenly wanted nothing to do with real estate anymore. He loved the career but it was interesting watching him just suddenly be done with it.
He found other hobbies and interests pretty quickly once he took an inventory of how he wanted to spend his time.
Oh wow I can’t wait for the “one off” ways people find to abuse how Google presents this creative for products.
“Yes! You can use an ACME shovel to bury a dead body!”
I’m sure brands will love the screenshots this will produce.
My wife is in grad school at a major university and is dealing with this right now the week of midterms for spring quarter.
I totally understand why a university wouldn’t want to bake their own learning portals but just feels like such a single point of risk to use third party solutions for something like this.
Back in my day… all we had was a school email via on-premise services. I guess we registered for classes in a web portal but that’s about it. The idea of online class was entirely foreign at the time. Ain’t nobody hacking a blue book.
I honestly know I could “optimize” my phone replacement schedule based on resale values of phones etc, but for the last ~15ish years I just replace my iPhone when the battery starts shitting itself (3-5 years each in my experience)
Relevant Mitch Hedberg (rest in peace) joke: “ I love my fed-ex guy cause he's a drug dealer and he doesn't even know it”
We got one of these for our elementary-aged kids because it took off in our network of families at their school.
It’s so fun watching them talk to their buddies from school, planning play dates, just chitchatting etc. My favorite thing is when they prank call one another, cracks me up.
Maybe the novelty wears off soon but for at least the last month or so they’ve used it every day. It feels like it gives them a bit of autonomy they’re seeking right now at their ages, but in a relatively safe way.
Highly recommend it.
Just put them in row 24 on a Boeing 737 max and let the problem take care of itself.
There’s no doubt this is true in my mind.
I honestly bet 75% of the time I hear “We are currently experiencing high call volumes” someone answered within a minute or two.
In some sense that has the befit of a “surprise and delight” moment too because the consumer might be prepared to wait longer and then “whoa nice, that wasn’t so long!”
So... did the avatars ever get real legs, or no?
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
I really want to make a fake PSA that suggests anyone wearing the Meta glasses is probably a pervert and should be proactively avoided/shunned.
This product cannot be allowed to exist in the type of world I want to live in.
The power structure wants these to succeed in the market for so many horrific reasons and it will require some serious societal muscle to reject them.
I had a CT scan last year for some stomach issues they wanted to look at.
Doctor warned me up front that the odds the images find something that looks weird is high but not to panic because of how many false positives there are when looking inside someone’s body.
While I am happy to report they didn’t find anything serious, I do take slight offense to the following at the top of my results:
Last name, First name: Unremarkable
(Kidding of course but still got a chuckle out of me)
I should give Malick another shot. I love film, but only first tried him when I was much younger (Thin Red Line) and don’t think I really got it.
Never tried Tree of Life or any of his more recent stuff.
Got any recommendations in the first 2-3 of his you’d suggest?
Amazon drone delivery comes to mind…
Best VP I’ve ever had would stop meetings with regular frequency and say, “maybe I’m the dumbest person here, but I don’t understand [insert something being discussed], can you help me get a better understanding?”
It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.
Full disclosure: after leaving tech, I’m back in grad school to get my LMHC so I’m obviously biased.
First, I just don’t see a world where therapy can be replaced by LLMs, at least in the realistic future. I think humans have been social creatures since the dawn of our species and in these most intimate conversations are going to want to be having them with an actual human. One of my mentors has talked about how after years of virtual sessions dominating, the demand for in-person sessions is spiking back up. The power of being in the same physical room with someone who is offering a nonjudgmental space to exist isn’t going to be replaced.
That being said, given the shortage of licensed mental health counselors, and the prohibitive cost especially for many who need a therapist most, I truly hope LLMs develop to offer an accessible and cheap alternative that can at least offer some relief. It does have the potential to save lives and I fully support ethically-focused progress toward developing that sort of option.
Yes, this should be required viewing in high school imo.
As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.”
His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
My friend and I have started tinkering on our cars together.
He’s got an early 90s 525i BMW and I’ve got a 2000 SR5 Toyota 4Runner.
The engineering of my Toyota is so much simpler and easier to work on than his BMW. But his BMW has given us a lot more practice, if you know what I mean ^_^
That Tin Can device has infiltrated (in a good way, what a fun idea!) my oldest kids’ social circle at elementary school. Most of his friends are requesting one for Christmas and we’re planning on getting our kid one as well.
Really hoping the idea lasts, lots of good memories of dialing friends on our landline growing up and chatting casually.
Now if only it could replicate the dread of calling a crush’s house and her dad picking up the phone…
I just visited NYC for the first time a few months ago, and had the most amazing time, one hell of a city and I can’t wait to get back.
I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…
I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.
I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph)
Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI.
How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in this new era.
100%
His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.
It’s been what… 15-20 years since the ads ran but…
“I HAVE A STRUCTURED SETTLEMENT BUT I NEED CASH NOW!!
CALL JG WENTWORTH, 877-CASH-NOW!!”
It pops into my head at least once a month, and it sits for 1-3 days on repeat in my brain. I swear it was some MK-Ultra level psyops level writing, whoever came up with those commercials.
I’m fascinated. What makes a great radiologist so much better than the average?
Friend was told he had 12 months to live maybe 20 years ago (some rare form of melanoma).
Him and his wife committed hard to tons of clinical trials and is still alive to this day and has no indication he’ll be dying anytime soon.
He’s the very first patient on a number of studies, which he thinks is pretty cool.
I’ve never found a productivity tool/to-do list app I use more than just sending myself a barely comprehensible email.
A much better example is the Toyota Tundra that made it to 1m miles with only a transmission replacement at the ~800k mile mark
https://www.motortrend.com/features/million-mile-tundra-the-...
Toyota gave the guy a new truck so they could study the one he had.
As a Toyota fan boy myself (still driving a 2000 4Runner into the ground), those 2000s builds were such a great era of engineering. That being said, I think they’ve lost a step over the last decade (don’t get my started on the new v4/v6 turbo blocks they’re building…).
I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
Sorry, counterfeit is more accurate (edited original comment) - director mentioned a number of previous students who ordered their copy from Amazon and got DSM 4s or copies missing huge sections of diagnostic criteria, etc.
I’m about to start grad school to get my clinical mental health counseling licensure, and Amazon has multiple fake/counterfeit DSM-5s (basically the holy grail of recognized mental disorders and their insurance billing codes) on it, so much in fact that my program director mentioned the Amazon problem in the orientation.
So I’ll add “if you need to guarantee the accuracy of the information in whatever you’re buying… avoid Amazon as well”
Very relevant Key and Peele sketch: