Echo Dot

The only thing I use Google’s AI for is to get text out of images. Which I’ll give it credit for it does very well even with extremely blurry content

That was more or less the original comment back when they started. Bots were a thing on Reddit before of course but they really started getting out in hand around 2021 which was long before the deal.

The existence of extreme indifference suggests the existence of mild indifference, where you actually do care about the subject matter a tiny little bit, but insufficiently to get to the heights of mild interest.

Did they actually get anything useful from Reddit given that 90% of the content posted there is just BS. Especially now since it will be mostly just recycling its own slop.

I think he needs to Google dystopia.

Been loyal to a car brand is such a weird concept. Especially considering that they all use the same chassis these days anyway.

They are but whose fault is that? If you’re paying car companies and American car companies make decent EVs that wouldn’t be a market for Chinese imports.

The only reason I would do this would be to compile iOS apps, because I am not buying an iMac just for that. Except there’s already services out there that offer the solution, plus I can also access other hardware too.

If you stop using goods and services entirely funding things you disagree with the world would stop turning.

That’s a bit of a nihilistic philosophy don’t you think? “Everything is bad and terrible but I can’t be bothered to do anything about it so I’m just going to ignore it”. You know about the poem right? Your worldview is the entire point of the poem. It’s not good to have that worldview.

Oh yeah the idea that they can’t just get rid of people on a whim is a complete alien concept to them.

I love OSM because there was an island in the middle of the river in my town and depending on the water height this island gets smaller and bigger, whenever there is a large amount of rain and the river is extremely high the island vanishes. Usually the island disappears from OSM within about 10 minutes and then is re-added when the river drops down to its normal level. Truly Wikipedia levels of pedantic pettiness, and I’m here for it.

I suspect that actually Google maps use in the hiking community is pretty high. Just not amongst experts.

Usually it’s only experts who try to tackle these difficult routes.

There’s always a few stories every year about people nearly dying trying to climb mount Snowdon in Wales, and while it’s definitely no hill it’s also not exactly K2. The problem is that they try and climb a mountain called Snowdon in flip flops and short shorts, because it’s warm at the base.

If you want a vision of things to come look at the retail industry of the 1980s. All those big box stores and anchor stores of malls all over the US. Absolutely zero presence internationally. You can’t go to Target in London or Best Buy in Paris, because they don’t exist. What we do have though is German shops in Italy and Swedish stores in the UK. Everyone else understood how to do it it was only the Americans that couldn’t, and to be clear they tried to spread internationally, but they weren’t prepared to make the local changes and so they failed.

I have worked for US companies in the past and they always insist on trying to push American work culture in foreign officers, and it never works.

I don’t think it was Trump that banned EVs I think that happened under the biden administration because the US car companies couldn’t compete. I’m still not all that clear on why they can’t just make better cars, why is that so hard to do?

They also band Chinese EV cars but then don’t produce their own EV cars. Meaning the US will still be dependant on oil prices meanwhile China will use their own domestic product to protect themselves from increasingly unstable oil supplies. The US was offered the same opportunity to protect themselves and explicitly prohibited it.

I should go into politics it really doesn’t seem all that difficult. Been remotely competent does not appear to be a requirement.

I don’t install any social media on my work phone. It’s got teams on it and, LinkedIn (whenever I’m in especially dumb meetings I like to go on LinkedIn, I like the idea that they’re spying on the device and can see that I’m applying for other jobs).

And the most predictable and obvious one to ever be committed.

When the IPO first was announced I made the point that Elon Musk isn’t now a trillionaire because not one will buy the stock at that price. Overinflated IPOs aren’t really relevant to the stock market, they already knew the value of a company they don’t need to be told what it is, they’re just a marketing gimmick.

They’re still limited by the laws of physics and geometry. Assuming perfect reflection and perfect alignment with the sun to the target destination you’re looking at something like 0.1 percent of the total brightness worth of energy being transmitted to the surface of the earth.

In other words, considerably dimmer than the moon. It’s not going to turn night to day, it’s not even going to turn at night to dusk, it will be the brightness of a crescent moon on an overcast night, assuming clear conditions. Covering an area of less than 3 km for a period of time of less than 20 minutes (increase the orbital altitude and you increase the amount of time that you can be over an area but you also decrease the brightness) I don’t think Mr Badger is really going to notice.

But as I said this is irrelevant because they know this which is why they’re not going to do it.