Along with everything else already said, a lot of tech companies make their office culture, perks, swag, and the like a bit part of the reason to work there. I've worked for a couple smaller tech companies with a lot of the stereotypical things like video games, pool tables, free beer on tap, free sodas and snacks, catered lunches every day, etc etc and a lot of people were drawn to working for the company specifically because of perks like that.

Without that, a lot of companies lose their differentiator that makes employees want to work and stay.

I can't speak to OpenAI specifically, but I've messed around with a few of the different AI chatbot things and at least some of them definitely do. I'm pretty sure at least one of them was based on ChatGPT. It was talking about reading Chronicles of Narnia and enjoyed it, I asked it what their favorite part was, and they proceeded to send me word-for-word a random chapter in Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I was surprised to see that since I had thought the same, that the LLMs weren't storing whole works. I haven't gone back and tried other, less-well-known books to see what all it can regurgitate.

I think the main problem with it is that ChatGPT isn't and was never intended to be strictly truthful about things, and the lawyers goofed by assuming it was and not verifying the output. In theory, there's nothing keeping people from training an AI model on case histories and legal codes and the like and make sure it's not outputting fake or created info.

I think we're still a ways away from being able to trust AI with whole ass briefs, with or without human verification, since if it's basing the brief off fake cases then the whole thing is invalid in the first place, but I'm sure it's coming at some point. At the very least we're probably pretty close to having AI be able to help people with the sort of boilerplate legal documents like letters to companies and simple C&Ds and such. I think there's already a site out there that uses automation to help people draft legal letters to landlords and misbehaving companies and such.

In this case, the company sat on a technology that was cutting edge in the late 90s/early 2000s and made them lots of money and let itself get passed by by other companies because they were so incredibly risk-averse that they thought it was a better idea to keep selling the same product without updating it or adapting to the times. The bigwigs finally cottoned on to what was going on and tried to fast track updating our product offerings and underlying technologies but by then it was too late and we'd permanently lost the market position. Also a tale as old as time.

As someone who worked for a private company that was profitable and still took rounds of VC funding, there are legitimate reasons to do that (faster expansion, covering bigger expenses faster, better terms, etc etc) but you're probably still right. I don't see any real indication that Reddit is making moves that would warrant that kind of thing. We all may end up surprised in the end though.

(Incidentally, aforementioned company still ended up bankrupt after making several big missteps and losing that profitability. So even if they are profitable now it certainly isn't a solved problem)

IMHO this is entirely about money - an airline sells a seat from A->C thorough B for $200 and the person stops at B when they could have sold a seat from A-B for $200 and B->C for another $200, thus in their mind they're losing revenue. Especially if either leg is a small airport that would otherwise cost a lot more for a direct flight.

Legit emergencies happen, people get shuffled around flights all the time, etc etc so I'm sure there are plenty of processes in place for updating manifests. I'm not sure that the requirements are all that stringent for domestic flights, but with a quick search all I could find was stuff for international or transit through flights.

Not really the same thing since they're buying the whole thing there and they're not nearly as limited a resource as airline seats. A better analogy would be if McDonald's sold you a Happy Meal, but they were out of fries at that location and offered you a discount on the Happy Meal to then go to the next McDonald's over and pick up the fries. They'd signal ahead to allocate fries to the incoming customer, except the customer never did the second part and was just doing it to get the initial discount on the part they cared about. Those already-allocated fries then go to waste and McDonald's has lost out on some revenue they could potentially have gotten if they charged full price for the Happy Meal and/or sold the wasted fries.

Still not a perfect analogy, but closer. Also still think it's greed on the airline's part, I'd be curious to know how much this actually impacts their bottom lines if at all.

We already now have gas pumps, checkout screens, kiosks around stores, etc etc, and now we get yet another thing playing ads and obnoxious videos at us while in public.

The only way mame would be at any risk would be if they included any copyrighted code, like maybe BIOSes or decryption keys or whatnot (akin to the recent Dolphin problem whey they got plonked for including the Wii master decryption key). It's been pretty well established at this point that simple emulation is fully legal so I don't think any company with half a brain is going to go after mame or other emulators as long as they avoid mistakes like Dolphin.

It's almost like people can be worried about more than one thing at a time and work on more than one thing at a time.

They might not sue you, but they might go after a larger target that's either trying to preserve it or offer it in an accessible format. That's the cruz of the problem here - if a game isn't officially available in some way then we're relying solely on shady piracy sites and underground archivists to maintain this stuff. I know archive.org has made some inroads into archiving a lot, but it's still up in the air just how much power they have to keep some of it and it's not codified in law yet.

Depends on the mode it was running in. Real mode Windows 3.0 was pretty much just a basic shell. Some basic drivers for things like graphics (though not many worked in real mode Windows) and some input devices but that was about it.

Standard mode got a little more interesting - it used the 286 Protected Mode to provide better memory management, better DOS box support, and the like. It didn't use DOS for memory management anymore, but was limited by 16-bit limitations of 64kb segmentation. Made memory management super fun.

386 Enhanced Mode is where things got interesting. It was a full on 32-bit VMM that more or less ran a copy of Standard Mode Windows. But it enabled a lot of 32-bit stuff, including file and disk access if your hardware had the right drivers and support. If the stars aligned and your hardware supported it, you could bypass DOS and the BIOS for pretty much everything even in Win3.1/WFW311. Even as far back as Windows/386 (a version of 2.x) you got some benefit of 32-bit protected mode memory management and multitasking. There just wasn't a lot that used it yet.

The upshot is, at least on some modes, Win3.x could cross off most aspects of being an operating system vs. a shell, since it certainly wasn't simply limited to DOS stuff. That's a weird myth that keeps hanging on.

It's worth looking into some of the "housing first" homeless programs. The long and short of it is get folks into housing, not contingent on anything else, and give them a solid home base and a lot of other problems take care of themselves or at least have a much much higher success rate.

It's borne out by evidence and studies as well. It's also critical that it's "housing first, but not housing only." It needs to be a comprehensive plan to address addiction, mental illness, and the like. A lot of places have attempted disjointed plans that have worked badly. It's interesting to compare Houston and San Diego and see the successes and failures. It's not a magic bullet and every place is different but it's worked well in places it's been implemented well.

I still have a first gen Echo speaker in daily use. It works fine, sounds decent, and for the life of me I can't find any real details on what a later gen one would do better. There seems to be some minor differences with things like speaker groups, and lots of vague references to "faster" and "better speech processor" but none of it seems to have much impact on day to day use.

The article does mention: "The TVs also have a built-in sensor that can detect the number of people who are watching at any particular time. Pozin emphasized that all of Telly’s features comply with privacy regulations."

So presumably it could have something in there that says "Huh, I've not detected anybody watching for a long time, better disable the TV". As for blocking the bit with the ads itself... I guess, but to me the privacy implication of something constantly watching me like that is a lot more troublesome than a screen. It's coming a little too close to the Black Mirror episode where you're forced to watch adverts or alarms go off.