I know this isn't the most popular opinion, but I love self-checkout systems when they're available and used correctly. My local supermarket closed 2 10-item-or-less lanes and put 6 self-checkouts in the same space. I probably make 2 trips/week to the store for fewer than 10 items, and being able to check myself out has been a huge time saver. There are still another 8 lanes with cashiers for larger shopping trips. If the supermarket can avoid the race to the bottom thinking of "well, we replaced 2 lanes, maybe we can also replace the other 8), it'll be a nice compromise.

Now contrast that with my local Home Depot, which typically has 1-2 cashiers MAX at any given time. They have turned the checkout process into a tedious pain in the ass, and I've more or less stopped shopping there as a result.

Having a hard time determining whether this is sarcasm or not. Then I see the phrase "JavaScript Engineer" and become doubly confused.

The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.

When did we get away from saying “X - formerly known as Twitter” ? I liked seeing that gentle nudge in every headline.

"Texas needs to be less dependent on the federal government, not more. These politicians want to mismanage our electric grid just like they mismanage our border," the statement said.

I don't think it's objectively possible to be more mismanaged than the current Texan electrical grid.

Because of course Bootgate is the thing that will bring the DeSantis campaign down -- not all of that fascism or corruption stuff.

Nothin says "Welcome to America!" like being kidnapped by a wannabe dictator and then filing a lawsuit against on of their conspirators.

I remember taking a design class in the 1990s right after GC came out, and the professor basically said "this will be used as a demo in intro design classes for the next century." I thought it was hyperbole, but people still talk about it.

Still amazes me that for well under $1 I can send a letter from Maine to Hawaii and it'll get there within a few days.

Their "how it works" blog article is worth a read - they're using a blackbox reverse engineering of the protocol and re-implementing it natively in the app, so there are no man-in-the-middle servers. Impressive software engineering for sure.

Ironically (to everyone but him) Trump himself is the reason a lot of people from the "good" countries would never consider moving here.

Irony meters everywhere explode

Florida man here (sigh). Was at the Dr for a routine physical a month ago. My doc is a stand-up guy and very well versed in dealing with the crazies down here. When it came time to discuss vaccinations, he said, "so, have you gotten the flu vaccine yet?". I noted that I had an appointment at CVS later that day. Then he said, "and the Florida Surgeon General recommends that people under the age of 65 do not get the Covid vaccine..." (I am well under 65) and let it hang in the air. We stared at each other for a few seconds. Then I said, "yup, getting that one at CVS later too." He sighed, said "ah, perfect" and moved things along. As it turns out, the hospital the doc is affiliated with had sent out several memos about exactly what should/should not be said to both try and encourage people to get vaccinated but NOT incur the wrath of the state. It's a different world down here...

ML =/= AI. There are legit uses for ML that don’t have anything to do with LLMs and the cloud. I worked on an ML project 3 or 4 years ago to listen for fan noise that might indicate that it was about to fail soon. We trained a tiny GAN on good and bad noises. It runs on a tiny CPU, locally. Highly specialized work, and I have to imagine there are and will continue to be lots of similar opportunities to bring efficiencies by getting computers to make good observations and decisions - even if only about “simple” things like “does this thing seem like it’s about to break?”

I don't think so. Most of the big LLMs have guardrails to prevent them from spitting out hate speech.

I like big butts and I cannot lie

Or

when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung

Really that whole song is a masterpiece.

As an anecdote, I work at a midsized software company as a product manager. I have an international team of about 20 that I manage from home (full-time remote). Overall there is some loss of speed and agility versus having a full-time in-office staff. I'm not a fan of trying to quantify productivity per se, but for things like estimations and deviations there's no question that in my environment at least, things move a little slower and take a little longer. Now personally, the fact that we can hire engineers anywhere across the globe (including in LCOL areas), don't have to pay rent and related fees, and that some of the best engineers specifically want full-time remote more than outweighs the reduced agility (putting aside all of the other potential QOL benefits) -- and if needed, some of the savings from reduced rent and salaries could be used to expand the team anyway. Thankfully my management team agrees and has continued to pursue a remote/hybrid environment. But for those places that value speed and agility most it could be a bit of a problem.

Has there been any data on whether the approach is working?

There's a thread from last week where some other alternatives were discussed: among them

• Nuggets: News & Conversation: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nuggets-news-conversation/id6462796101
• Feeds & Fediverse: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/newsbite/id1478566472
• Feeeed: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ixRrWfQL
• Feedly: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feedly-smart-news-reader/id396069556
• Perplexity https://apps.apple.com/us/app/perplexity-ask-anything/id1668000334
• NetNewsWire: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

I think the concept of a "mixed reader" that can pull in Big Social / Fediverse / RSS and other curated sources has a lot of potential (Nuggets is the most interesting one to me here)

Is this old enough to be called a classic yet?

How is Worldcoin still a thing?

This is actually pretty clever. If he's found guilty then it's rigged since even Mother Teresa would have been found guilty. If he's found not guilty though, then he's even better than Mother Teresa, since he beat a rap that would have taken her down or whatever.

I’d let all of these statues and monuments stand, but require the descriptions to all be preceded with “defeated traitor”. So instead of the Robert E Lee Memorial Park or whatever it would now be the Defeated Traitor Robert E Lee Memorial Park. Require it to be referred to that way on Google Maps, local newscasts, etc and see how quickly people suddenly want to rename them.

Maybe true, but even at $3500 the Vision Pro would be about the cheapest thing in the operating theater anyway.

A lack of real penalties for these companies just means they have no incentive. If they can make $1B on your data and then maaaaayyybeeeee have to pay a $50M fine because of a breach, why wouldn’t they continue doing that?

Was on a Zoom with a client in Brooklyn as it happened, it was pretty wild. I later spoke with my sister in Manhattan who didn't feel anything, so weird.

We've got to go dig them holes. 🎶

His complaint is hinged on the idea that GPT-4 is an AGI, so... I don't think this is going anywhere. It'll be interesting to hear what each side says constitutes an AGI though.

What's a tortoise?

It’s not like they swapped titanium for balsa wood. The origin docs were falsified or missing, which could mean anything from they weren’t the right purity but were shipped anyway to they were imported from Russia and illegally bypassing sanctions.

If the thing has developed its own approach to generalized symbolic reasoning that could actually be a pretty big deal.

Who is your PM or senior assigning the tasks? You need to take this up with them -- everyone always needs a couple of quick hits in their back pocket. When you stall out grinding on task after impossible task it kills your motivation and productivity, and that's your boss's job to fix.

One of the video clips has Doom Guy shooting at a Baron of Hell :)

Are there any self-hosted twitter front ends? Something that would still use your account credentials (or maybe shared credentials) but would cut out all of the cruft, kinda like piped for YT?

If Ukraine is forced to capitulate It could be 20x this number and the Kremlin would still consider it a massive win.

I read about 25% of the book this is based on before giving up (too manifesto-y for me, and needed a different/better editor), but the thought of coupling a book with a game like this is pretty interesting — get the point of your argument across to people who might otherwise never engage with it (if not for the title, anyway)

Investors who don’t bother reading past the letters A and I in the prospectus.

I honestly think the tiny fraction of MAU might be the reason. Something like once you exceed a Dunbar Number of contacts in a community it starts to go downhill.

Also because Taiwan is currently the only place to get state-of-the-art microchips

It doesn't sound like it did much damage, that area just (a) has a ton of people living in a small space and (b) doesn't typically have earthquakes. Like I literally can't remember NYC ever having an earthquake before.