I absolutely love that his name is the first thing anyone thinks about when someone so much as mentions a couch.

They would. Just not in the way they’d prefer.

Re-invent. Your still far too late to be first.

I don’t think you can in good faith compare…

Ooh, that’s just one of my pet peeves. Such a stupid fucking phrase. The only way to know if you “can’t compare” two things is to do a comparison between them and come to the conclusion that the two things are very different. I can compare self checkout to a kumquat if I want to.

Now for some actually useful conversation, let’s compare number of steps for vending machine vs self checkout (since that’s the closer of my two examples).

Vending machine:

• insert payment
• push button to select items
• pick up item
• repeat all steps until you have the number of items desired

Self checkout:

• scan item or place item on scanner/scale and push buttons for item type. This only counts as one step, because you are never doing both to the same item
• repeat first step until you have all items desired
• insert payment
• pick up items

It’s the same steps in a different order.

From what I’ve seen, the slower average time is made up for by having more of the stations. Depending on arrangement, you can fit three self checkouts in the same area as one traditional checkout. In my experience, the self checkout line is always moving faster overall.

I’m also not an employee of the vending machine company. I’m also not an employee of the gas station.

I don’t really see what added value a cashier checking out my items for me has.

Does it even matter if you wind up being a good person either way?

I don’t support this decision in any way, but I can at least think of some legitimate motivation for it (assuming the Synology branded ones aren’t marked up from the equivalent Seagate/Toshiba ones). I imagine Synology has to deal with a lot of service calls and returns for issues that are caused by shoddy drives (like those Seagate drives with the fudged lifespan numbers), not by anything that they can directly control.

In reality, the above was probably what sparked the idea, but I’m betting that they’re going to jack up the price of those drives just to squeeze out a little more profit for this quarter.

Ah the joys of being an hourly employee. They can try calling me at 3am. I won’t be answering though.

Sound quality will be exactly the same among any of the services that offer lossless files (ie all of the ones that aren’t Spotify). That’s literally the point of lossless.

Alright, hear me out: we split up Alphabet. Ads and search can be one company, since those two are always going to be related, while Chrome, Android, and the hardware division become the other company. This should help reduce Google’s current incentive for privacy invasion.

I think it’s the lead they’re actually looking for. Aggressive and unintelligent people are more likely to vote for them be MAGA supporters (the voting part may already be a useless distinction).

Where are you referring to? In North America, much of the infrastructure wasn’t changed, it was created for the first time to accommodate cars.

So after reading the article, are you editorializing or did Wired change their title? No where does it mention the legality of selling the Sakura in North America. It only mentions that Nissan has not chosen to sell it outside of Japan.

I’m betting that it’s a vet.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. And this is actually the first time I’ve heard of some use of LLMs that I may actually be interested in.

I never understood this one. What kind of course would you be doing that required very expensive paid software, but you didn’t know ahead of time that said software was required. I think the imaginary OP is just an idiot.

The whole NFT/crypto currency thing is so incredibly frustrating. Like, being able to verify that a given file is unique could be very useful. Instead, we simply used the technology for scamming people.

If the magic smoke comes out, that’s entirely the electrician/electrical designer’s fault. Their circuits shouldn’t have let me do that.

I do industrial programming. Everything is so far behind that yelling at the “computers” does nothing. Physical violence is just about the only thing they respect.