God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down.
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
Last year, I rented a Kia. I was coasting downhill on a curve and approached a group of bikers. Everything was fine. I was a little below the speed limit, they were in the bike lane, I was in my lane, it was a sunny day. The car detected them as a hazard to avoid and STRAIGHTENED AND LOCKED MY STEERING WHEEL in the middle of the curve turn. I ran into a shallow ditch, but holy shit, what if it took control and over corrected onto an oncoming car?
Years ago, like around 2000, I had a personal blog where I mentioned a local TV celebrity talking about something. The post was about 90% the topic, but in referencing the guy himself, I said something like, "this guy's cool." The local celeb had a trademarked moniker "The Car Czar," and I used it in reference to him.
I swear, on a busy week I had about 5 people reading that blog and they were all coworkers. The next day, I had a 6th visitor from Los Angeles and got excited. Who was this mysterious visitor? I found out when I opened my email and saw a C&D from Universal's lawyers saying I was abusing the trademark.
I blogged the next day, "Wtf, Universal?" and a few days later, got an email from the local celeb apologizing for the overzealous legal team. He was indeed totally cool about it.
Yep. Along with your other comment, I also think they're too big to be messed with for now. Last company I was at maybe serves as predictions of what's to come.
It's also blue collar tech, thirty years old, was the first or second player in the market. It fell behind quickly, but served a niche. The market completely changed on them in the last 15 years or so, lots driven by private equity. The company never changed. Customers kept telling them the old "hookers and blow" sales pitches (literally) isn't going to win renewals and new customers, but they never listened, never fixed things. Now the new PE owners don't know what to do with this boondoggle that never made money.
I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.
I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.
As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.
Thanks for doing this. I don't know if this is still the case, but I looked into high end consumer headphones ($700+) about three years ago and concluded almost all of them had a bad sustainability problem.
I looked at cosmetic repairability and battery replacement. All of them were impossible or near impossible to officially get non-electronic parts for. If you dig enough, you might be able to find sources for non-electronic parts.
For batteries, one or two, Focal Batys, I remember is one, had a battery swap program like Apple does. Some like Sony were quasi end-user serviceable. Some gave you like a $100-$150 credit on a new one if you sent the old one in. Bower Wilkins was the worst. If you needed repair or if your battery was dead, their response to me was, "We don't do that."
I found the whole thing hypocritical. All but one or two were based in Europe and touted sustainability commitments on their sites, but their replacement policies did not back it up.
I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.
The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.
We all know Google search has been broken for a long, long time. SEO trash will fill up your first page with results from trash content generation sites that repeat the same thing, usually flat out wrong. Actual meaningful results are buried deep, if Google will even let out of the "In order to show you the most relevant results" hell hole.
My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.
Don't care. I'm going to name and shame. I worked at Seattle Children's Hospital in tech for a short time. The insane amount of self congratulatory back patting to mask incompetence and tolerance of mediocrity wasted billions that could have gone to patient care. What I witnessed there was damn near criminal.
They certainly can do it. Hardcore fans understand what they're doing. Maybe some would hate it, but everyone knows that would be possible. It's sci-fi. Ghostbusters 2016 got decannonized.
For mainstream fans, the whole Star Wars franchise has been diluted with mediocre stories, I don't think they'd care. It's just another SW movie to watch.
That being said, this isn't the first time decannoizing the sequels has been brought up in a rumor. I wouldn't be surprised if this was just more wishful thinking.
Remembering and reading the source articles, divisiveness wasn't the fact Rey's parents weren't royal lineage, it was that fans are going to speculate, and Disney did nothing on or off screen to manage that speculation. In fact, Disney fanned the flames leading up to it.
Rian Johnson: "It's something that is absolutely going to be addressed... The other part of it is there are lots of surprises in this movie and lots of twists and turns, and I really want people to experience those when they see the movie for the first time. "
Ok, so years of oh, ah, and then the big lineage reveal comes and she's just a peasant girl. Screen rant called this "anticlimatic," which is was. The easily could have managed that earlier with a decent plot and decent writing, but the whole trilogy seemed to be written by a bunch of high school students.
One of my COVID projects was to set up a networked Time Machine backup on Raspberry Pi.
Every single one of the blogspam sites (lifehacker, howtogeek, etc.) told you to use AFP/HFS+/Netatalk. I had so many problems with this. Time Machine would work well the first few times and then slow to a crawl. If there was a power outage, look out. The whole thing would be corrupted. It wasn't the network. FTP and scp worked just fine.
Eventually I found one blog that told you how to do it with SMB and ext4. It was that site that I learned about the much malignment of AFP and HFS+. SMB/ext4 worked like a charm. Six years later and not a single hiccup.
I was outraged when I first read that article, but taking a step back and catching up on recent progress, I came to the same conclusion you did. Words like "nefarious", "fraud", and "corrupt" were thrown around, but no one was actively was seeking to do harm.
The harm was done by the groupthink and the sucking up of resources to research alternative causes. One of the comments on HN when that statnews article was first linked was by a commenter who worked on Alzheimer's. They agreed and I remember the line, (something to the effect of) "if you wanted funding for alternative investigations, you had to still throw a bone to beta amyloid in your proposal."
Was it all a waste? No. Current thought is beta amyloid is still involved, but Alzheimer's is multicausal. What those other causes are is in its investigation infancy. We could have started investigating those decades ago if the scientific research complex were truly open to new ideas.
It is just obnoxious the gap between thought leaders and everyone else.
I was at a panel last week. The most pro-AI person was an account executive from a big fintech company.
EVERYONE else - a data scientist that works in AI, regulatory compliance, cybersec, and marketing, took the position of "hey this is great and will change things, but let's pump the brakes... a lot."
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.