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Submission + - Target Mandates Worker Smiles, Friendliness to Boost Sales in "Forced Joy" (bloomberg.com) 1

joshuark writes: The Minneapolis-based retailer has a new directive for store employees: If a shopper comes within 10 feet of you, then make sure you smile, make eye contact and greet or wave. If they come closer — within four feet — ask whether they need help or how their day is going, according to new guidance confirmed by Bloomberg News. This is part of the Forced Joy trend.

The new initiative — dubbed the 10-4 program internally — is among Target’s latest efforts to make its stores more welcoming and reverse its extended streak of weak sales. “Heading into the holiday, we’re making adjustments and implementing new ways to increase connection during the most important time of the year,” Chief Stores Officer Adrienne Costanzo said in a statement to Bloomberg News.

Target, which is set to report quarterly earnings later this month, recently cut 1,800 corporate roles to remove complexities and move faster. The company’s shares are down more than 30% year-to-date, compared to a 14% gain for the S&P 500. The retailer’s cheap chic allure has faded and customers have complained on social media about bare shelves and long lines.
Target has made trumped-up enthusiasm an expectation. Bugs Bunny said it best... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:Not AI (Score 1) 127

AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.

Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.

Comment Re:Not at all creepy (Score 1) 136

But as someone who was homeschooled, what are you going to do when you kids eventually have to interact with the shitshow that is the real world?

This presupposes that they don't get plenty of "real world" while they're homeschooling. As if they're in some hermetically sealed environment where bad things never touch them. When we homeschooled ours, one of my wife's single friends objected, asking us "what about socialization?". Well, what about it? There's still plenty of it with friends and family, church, and play. And when they're young adults, they're better able to deal with the scum of the world than a pre-teen or teenager thrown into the cage match that is modern public schools where you can't get to them. School is supposed to be about education, not be a Thunderdome where the weak are weeded out for the coming apocalypse. Whatever my sons missed in public schools, they're far better off not being in a concrete box where some hulking delinquent 3 to 4 years older than all his class peers is punching teachers or pulling a gun on students.

Submission + - Musk Wins $1 Trillion Pay Package, Creating Split Screen on Wealth in America (nytimes.com)

schwit1 writes: Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Elon Musk shares worth nearly $1 trillion if he meets ambitious goals, including vastly expanding the company’s stock market valuation.

Much like an earlier pay plan that Tesla shareholders approved in 2018, this 12-step package asks Mr. Musk, the company’s chief executive, to vastly expand Tesla’s stock market valuation — to $8.5 trillion from around $1.4 trillion — while hitting a variety of other goals. Those include selling one million robots with humanlike qualities and 10 million paid subscriptions to the company’s self-driving software.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

Comment Re:The biggest mistake (Score 0, Troll) 88

Oh sorry we can't allow healthcare because a black guy instituted it.

"Racism" is not the answer to every fucking political disagreement. The black guy in question did just as well as a percentage of the electorate (or better) than the white guys in the three presidential elections since he left office.

The government is currently shut down because, apparently, the "affordable" care act is so affordable that the emergency subsidies put in place during Covid now need to be made permanent, or, apparently, even people with six figure incomes can't afford it. I don't see "skin color" being at issue there, do you?

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

And my point is that AI wouldn't just stop being used even if the bubble imploded so heavily that all of the major AI providers of today went under. It's just too easy to run today. The average person who wants something free would on average use a worse-quality model, but they're not going to just stop using models. And inference costs for higher-end models would crash if the big AI companies were no longer monopolozing the giant datacentres (which will not simply vanish just because their owners lose their shirts; power is only about a third the cost of a datacentre, and it gets even cheaper if you idle datacentres during their local electricity peak-demand times).

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