We have W+ and Prime and these are probably the main 2 sites I cross-shop these days. They don't overlap entirely; Amazon sells a lot more variety under its own return policies etc, while Walmart is better for things like motor oil that they have locally (if you wanted to go into a Superstore). But there's enough overlap that it's worth cross-shopping, for now.

Large houses in hot climates don't have enough roof space to accommodate the number of panels you would need to displace grid power. Using obsolete panels that generated less power when they were new is only going to make the problem worse.

Leaning into unreliable power sources when demand is increasing is just going to make any supply issues worse.

Someone posted what they pay for electricity in California and what their buy back rate is and their rates are insane.

The woosh was over your head two posts back.

Learn to read and you'll have your answer.

DVD rentals are like prostitutes. You don't pay to be able to have them. You pay for them to leave afterwards.

Paris

They don't need AI for that. Teams - and pretty much all Microsoft products - are honeypots designed to collect data.

Well, no so much "honeypots" in the case of products that employees are forced to use at their workplace: they're no honey needed to attract them and get them to give Microsoft data. If you disagree with Microsoft's privacy invasion, you lose your job.

That's the genius of Microsoft's particular brand of invasiveness: instead of convincing individual people their products are good enough to relinquish their privacy for (Facebook), or convincing a large part of the internet to let them sneak in their trackers (Google), Microsoft convinced the bean counters at most companies to install their spyware and ram it down the throats of people who need to make a living. Disgusting...

Anyway, the AI thing is just the turd on top of the shit cake.

7b gemma nano models are... not terrible. I can see having a 30b model that uses 15gb on a phone that outperforms early (1H 2024 era) GPT 4 models by the end of the decade. Maybe in a year or two. Things are moving pretty fast. GPT4o mini was good enough for almost anyone already.

One does wonder what they are thinking - why would anybody want or tolerate this?

Most ads we are stuck with because we want the media or service that the ads support. Oh, you want to watch two teams of 53 millionaires play football? OK, but 30% of your time will be watching ads.

On a fridge what is the payoff?

Yeah, growing up in the cold war it was a foregone conclusion the commies would always lose because central planning doesn't work. You'd hear the story about a factory overflowing with left shoes and no matching right shoes were being made. I still think there is some truth to it, but China has been on a run for quite a while now. I am skeptical of any narrative in which a key element is them being very stupid.

Something that seems to constantly get lost in this discussion is that violent crime in the US is not particularly high right now by historical standards - e.g. murder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you were to ask the average "person on the street" to guess the murder rate, it would probably depend hugely on whether a school shooting or racially- or politically-motivated murder was currently a big media story. But that hardly corresponds to your risk as an individual.

DNF is Dandified YUM. You can still use most yum commands.

Agree, coral dying off is scary and makes big headlines, but coral will establish itself via polyps in cooler, or otherwise more appropriate waters, new species will form. Every 2 years or so there's a big media scare about the coral reefs bleaching but that's not actually a die-off, they run in low power mode until conditions change, then recolor