What about...wheels???

If you and I didn't ever work together, and we don't already know each other, then you have no reason to want to "connect." I'd like an AI tool that auto-rejects anyone who doesn't have a reason to connect.

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.

Very true. Been playing the Riven remake on an Oculus Rift and it's astoundingly beautiful. Playing on the Meta Quest was just sad in comparison. The headset Steamlink will make all the difference.

I did *not* mention Manhattan.

Well that makes sense. Manhattan and the Bay Area are the two least affordable places to live in the US. To those who are struggling to get by, who live in those places, my advice is to get out of there. The US is full of other much more affordable places to live. Sorry, Manhattan is a straw man here, it is not representative of people's experiences in the US, nor is it a sign that it's impossible or even difficult to live on a normal salary in the US.

All you did was say you disagree with the way inflation is calculated, but you didn't propose any alternatives. That's not an argument, that's just an opinion. As the linked BLS page explained, the CPI takes into account the things people actually buy. If I'm not supposed to "cling to inflation," what am I supposed to use instead? Your opinion?

The problem is, people don't bother to recirculate pennies. They just end up in jars in people's closets. So every year, the mint has to make a year's supply of basically single-use pennies.

Oh, sure they do! They give Wikimedia $1 for every million people who switch to Edge!

Ouch, the price is worse than iPad prices!

Yeah so we're each accusing the other of having a vivid imagination. The difference is, I provided actual, authoritative data.

Well if you're going to argue that the BLS isn't using a valid formula, you'll need to provide details on a better one. Without that, all you have is an opinion. You can say "people are worse off now than they used to be" but I say you have selective memory. Everybody likes to think the "good old days" were better, but if you look at them in any objective way, they were not.

Your scenarios make sense, but unfortunately they are wrong.

Pew research says that:

https://www.pewresearch.org/ra....

The same study noted that the middle class shrank, but not because people went from the middle class to the lower class, but because they went from the middle class to the upper class.

And your concept of how the "basket of goods" is calculated, is also incorrect. The BLS says that:

https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/CP...

That "market basket" is adjusted as time passes, to reflect the new realities of what people buy, that they didn't buy in previous decades.

Indeed they do have me sold.

Yesterday I wrote my first Vue.js application. AI (Copilot) was extremely helpful in that process. It laid out step-by-step instructions, and most importantly, was able to answer my questions about details that weren't obvious. Then when things didn't work right the first time, I was able to feed it the errors I encountered, and it helped me resolve them. In the old days of Stack Overflow, the same process would have taken me much longer and been more frustrating.

Did it make mistakes? Yes. It kept confusing a webpack approach with a Vite approach, and other mistakes. But I could tell when it was making those mistakes, and was able to rephrase my questions to get the answers I needed. I can live with those kinds of errors.

Short answer: yes.

A whole lot of code is simplified by being able to use 64-bit pointers. Instead of reading a file block by block, you can just read the whole thing into memory all at once. Eliminating the looping and checking of file position and cache sizes, simplifies a whole lot of code. And simpler means better performance and fewer bugs. Ditto for image file processing and many kinds of data sets.

Sure, it's a tradeoff. More memory availability means programmers get sloppier. At the same time, the programming effort required to deal with limited memory is highly complex, and the source of many bugs and vulnerabilities. Being able to pretend that you have no memory limits, is a good thing on balance.