Yeah, both our largest optician chains, Synsam and Synoptik, as well as others, are pushing subscriptions, hard.
Now, I am fortunate enough that I can afford to buy name brand glasses with the best lenses on the market, two pairs (one normal, one sunnies) cost me about €1500, but there are far cheaper alternatives.
I will not rent critical items.
There has been a large push to enter a subscription for eyeglasses, the large firms here keep pushing and pushing to rent glasses.
Fuck no, I refuse to have my eyesight be dependent on having to keep paying.
Same for music, I buy all my music through iTunes, I have never used Spotify, I refuse to be put in a situation where I am in financial trouble and I loose access to my music.
This is the same crap, I need a phone to be an active member of modern society, I will not rent that access.
I mean, this is just crap marketing from incompetent idiots.
A better marketing strategy would be to have Spiderman themes for the infotainment, and i don’t just mean a generic Spiderman wallpaper and icons, no, make an Avenger’s computer UI design that fits the theme, complete with themed sound and lighting effects. The tech is there, don’t just limit it to just displaying a video.
You could easily do that for different movies/brands without it being seen as marketing slop.
I mean if they wanted a themed UI from the Agents of Shield franchise they could make a Shield one and a Hydra one. When selecting the Hydra, the lightshow could make it look as if Hydra is taking over the car.
But good marketing today is a lost art, slap a video on everything, produce a shitload of crappy stickers with the generic logo of the film, produce from low quality “limited edition” collectors item…
This is just boring, but make the movie universe seem real, and you got a hook that will not only work, but actually be praised.
The EU should ban this crap as soon as possible, it is clearly a distraction from driving
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit’s history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it’s future value.
What I think happened is that, they had their AI model analyze the source code, have it work to find vulnerabilities, and then used those to attack systems
Thank you, you are quite correct, I will update the post, I remember being rather tired when typing that (:
The issue with that is that we don’t yet know what is culturally valuable or not.
Just because we don’t see a need for the specific book now, doesn’t mean it won’t change tomorrow.
Three decades?
You mean to tell me that you think that three decades is enough to digitize centuries of printed media in almost all languages in the world?
The use of the word “rare” implies that they are not bought in bulk…
The way I see the situation is that every single AI company can clearly see the massive wall they are speeding ever faster towards, they see it and can also see that it is a massive wall, thick and sturdy.
There is however one thing that keeps them pushing the accelerator down hard against the floor, the delusion that they alone are smart enough to find the prefect weakpoint where they can smash through to the promised land of massive promises, while everyone else is just flattened against the wall.
It is extreme narcissism combined with yes men powering this shit.
This doesn’t need AI, it has been done for a long time
Then they will just deny you entry into the country
I have no idea of the source for this image, but I like the aesthetic!
Looking back at computing history, cloud computing is basically reverting back to the original mainframes and dedicated terminals.
There was a hype of using thin clients, the concept is that you get just enough hardware and software to be able to connect to a session running on a shared server, the admin can allocate more resources like CPU cores, RAM and storage as individual needs change over time.
As an IT guy, I do like the concept in a corporate environment, especially when looking at the SunRay system from Sun, which used smartcards for easier access, you put your card into the client and if configured properly, you got your old session loaded and ready in a few sec, regardless of which client you put your card into.
The YT channel Clabretro has several interesting SunRay videos.
It has been done, with limited success:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)