Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

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Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.

I didn't say I had a problem with it; I was just stating that it's very commonplace and it has nothing to do with 'renter's mentality' as it happened when purchasing a home (this is the 4th home I've purchased in my lifetime).

A person with a 'management' title has no theoretical limit to the top end of their salary. Everyone else does.

I just bought a house in March. Any listing where the home was already vacated (95% in my case) the listing was AI-augmented with furniture that would not exist when I went to tour the home.

This has nothing to do w/renting; it's everywhere.

Greetings from Y2K!

I was playing on a 53K USR Courier at 185 ping and that was a bit laggy when compared to the LAN at college (even if it was 4xT1s for 25K students). I really want to know how the hell you were able to do anything useful at 500+ms.

Exactly.

I don't want a web-based Outlook to replace my Mac Outlook. I like the fat clients. Replacing everything with a single web-based client sounds terrible.

> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.