Ah yes, throw the minimum wage call centre staff under the bus for what is clearly a systemic problem.

We used to occasionally use them if the discount is big enough to make it comparable to our typical grocery bill, but after how badly they fucked up last week Never Again.

• Busy weekend, so put in an order for delivery Sunday afternoon
• Saturday morning get a text saying “sorry, we can’t do deliveries on Sunday this week, you’ll get your box Monday before 6pm, we’ll give you a credit for the delivery fee”. Fine, annoying, but have enough stuff in the pantry and freezer to put a meal together
• Monday evening rolls around, 6pm comes and goes, still no food. Have scrounged another meal together for me, my wife and my toddler. Get the toddler to bed at 7pm, then call the help line - they clearly have not been told that something is going wrong, are actually super helpful and try to figure out what is happening and apologise a bunch
• At 8:30pm get another text saying “yeah, our linehaul is fucked, we can’t get you the food, we’ll give you a credit”
• Call up the help line again cos fuck no you don’t get to give me a credit when you’ve taken the money and supplied nothing. Again, call centre people are really helpful but absolutely have no idea that this is going on, eventually get a refund

For a company whose core function is logistics, they seem really bad at doing logistics. Also, I’ve worked in call centres before; if something like that is going down that is going to affect a big load of customers and generate calls, you tell the call centre so they don’t get caught out by angry people

There are two truely hard problems in computer science; P=NP, naming things, and off by one safety

Beyond just being able to draw a bow, being able to draw it well enough to have a chance of shooting at all repeatably takes a lot of training - it’s not just lifting a 50+lb weight, pulling it towards you with one and and pushing it away with the other while keeping your arms stable requires a lot of strength in muscles the people don’t tend to use.

Source: former colleague is an international competition level archer - the sheer amount of core strength and coordination and balance you need to be a good archer is wild

They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

Theoretically the contents of these lots would be insured, so if there was a sudden unexpected fire that happened to destroy all the cars Tesla gets a cash payout, unlike if they just sit there where Tesla has to take the cashflow hit of having paid to build cars that noone will buy

Oh one one eight nine nine nine…

This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

• The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
• Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
• If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

• A physical device
• An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.

So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

Yeah, that was the general point I was trying to gesture to without being too hamfisted about it; people can escape crappy situations and generational trauma with some outside help, either on the small, personal level or the larger structural level

I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently

Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn’t matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn’t worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it

Something something Luigi

Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack

I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city

For those interested in how they come up with the impact probabilities and why it’s really important that JWST is looking at this, Scott Manley did a great video on this recently: https://youtu.be/Esk1hg2knno

Even if it’s at the top end of the predicted range, an impact would be ~40MT equivalent. Enough to level a city, but not an extinction event by any means; plus the likely impact path is across central America, the Atlantic, central Africa and north India - not really regions that have the resources to respond to a threat like this. Personally I’m hoping it misses, because I don’t see the counties that could do something about it stepping up right now, so you’d be looking at maybe 100 million people displaced from their homes and an insurmountable humanitarian crisis

What’s the bet those filters never get changed either?

Sweet, thanks!

“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!”, said a voter for the “leopards eating people’s faces party”

Do you have a link? I’ve been using the square Aqara ones for years but they are way more expensive than that