It's just a gag about the usual sequence of events from Google on a project, and maybe a South Park reference...

I think the challenge was that publishers saw Gamecube as a platform from a vendor that wasn't historically the easiest to work with business-wise, and with game sizes limited to 1.5GB whereas Xbox and PS2 did the full 8.5GB disk size. Of course Sony enjoyed coming off of Playstation being *the* platform (N64 cartridges severely limited them, Saturn made some bad bets technology wise), so a Playstation 2 that was *backwards compatible* was a slam dunk.

Xbox didn't do that well either, Sony was largely still in a class by itself that generation.

Yes, and there's plenty of stories about companies that *did* spend crazy amounts to expand capacity to meet demand only for the fad to die down before that spend could even matter, and then they spend all that for nothing.

When a company is faced with a surprise demand surge, they are carefully considering the likelihood of the surge subsiding before they can even do anything.

I hear OS/2 is pretty good...

Yeah, I was inclined to dig the post-scarcity angle, but Manna just rubbed me the wrong way.

I think in part because the author wanted to have a single character experience both halves of the coin, which means necessarily it has to be a world where not everyone gets to participate in the socialist approach, but somehow the protagonist could. So the contortions he did fell back on capitalistic mechanisms. To his credit, to make up for it, there was an implication that as the socialist approach scaled up, it would eventually cover everyone, but for the duration of the story I just got hung up on how one might consider the rich people who confine the 'unworthy' to not leave their little neighborhoods to how the new Australians confine the unworthy to live in their foreign countries until which point they were willing to accept them, and at that point still unclear what the criteria would be for being allowed in for priority access once they could handle all their candidates that bought their way.

I get the general concept, but just disheartening for a key cited work for illustrating how it 'could' be done ultimately undermines itself. And of course the detail that government reserved the right to disconnect mind from body ostensibly for crime prevention and the associated implied constant government monitoring, which seemed a totally unnecessary and dystopian angle to include with that much sincerity.

Per capita matters in terms of realistic expectations.

For example, you couldn't possibly expect Finland to put out 4.5 million annually, given they only have 5.5 million people.

Yes, if you are outnumbered, there's real impact. But if per capita numbers match, there wouldn't be much you could *expect* that could be done to reasonably rectify without a general explosion in the broader population to draw from.

This is a use case where I could see LLM being decent, subject to a couple of constraints:

- The submitter is always able to advance it to the next stage regardless of what the LLM says
- A human review is always the next step after the LLM review

LLM code review is actually one of the more innocuous situations, it offers very small, digestible indirect feedback about code. It's still usually wrong, but it occasionally will catch something useful that was otherwise overlooked. It may spare the reviewers from a volume of boneheaded mistakes left in a draft submission.

The human reviewer may check LLM indicated issues to confirm they are stupid if the submitter says they are, which I suppose is the one reason to host it on the project instead of the user just doing it privately in their IDE.

It may be normal, but it's bad PR for a brand like Starbuck's, and their PR blowback being evidence of what 'getting rid of liberalism' would do to their brand.

They could mandate all-white employees with MAGA themed uniforms and support *all* the traditionally conservative values you could imagine and it would still be a hard sell to win over people that have decided that Starbuck's is 'too woke', but it would chase away all their customers.

Conversely, Chick-fil-a could go full liberal and alienate their conservative base and still have nothing to show for it due to not being a trustworthy brand to the target demographic.

I presume that they mean voice ordering using LLM technology, so no kiosk. They think drive-through because the customer isn't getting "face time" with a person anyway, just a disembodied voice on a speaker.

Problem being that multiple places have tried it, and found out that the LLM mistakes are annoying to everyone and even when working the not-quite-natural text to speech is off putting, and just knowing it's a vocal chat bot even without being able to otherwise tell is enough to make people think poorly of it.

But it does mean *something* because part of their brand value took a dive *because* of those widely publicized fights with their baristas.

So it runs counter to his 'needs less liberalism' claim, since the biggest example of them going against liberalism has been a PR problem for them already.

A bit off base, if you just wanted that coffee fix as cheap as possible and you have no time to do it yourself or wait on a 'barista, then you'll just grab some McDonald's coffee, or whatever stuff is likely at your office or work site.

I've not been a Starbuck's customer, but I guarantee you a narrow focus on being as cheap as possible will never win it for Starbuck's. That 'liberalism' you are disdainful of is a core perceived brand value. It may not always be effective, but they will never 'win' against other sources of 'just need a coffee fix' in a race to the bottom. Conversely, when they get all pissy with their employees, their sales go *down*, not up, because the customer base likes to imagine standing in solidarity with the employees, rather than just exploiting the employees for the coffee.

A lot of these formerly premium brands have business leaders that think as you do and scratch their heads as they keep removing quality for the sake of expanding the top line and keep getting rewarded with ever worsening failure.

Well, no, depressingly, it offers one plausible outcome and one highly flawed 'utopia' that isn't very consistent.

So in his utopia, you might have think a community came together to make a socialist society, but no, it's some miraculously benevolent rich dude who only managed to pull it off because a bunch of people sent him their money as an almost 'lottery ticket' to get into this society. Given the way rich people work, in practice you'd have had a dozen billionaires all promising to 'kickstart' this utopian society with probably no one meaning it, but even if one *did* mean it, he'd be competing with bigger douches that are by their maliciousness better at marketing and will starve him out.

Ok, fine, put *that* aside, so at least you have a utopia where everyone is welcome and everyone is supported... Except they *explicitly* leave behind the people that didn't have their way paid. They hand waved this away by having a benevolent relative pay *for* him and a friend. So in the dystopia, you have the rich people living it up in their presumably nice lifestyle and the poor people stuck in the dorms, and in the utopia you have the people who essentially won a lottery living it up in their nice lifestyle and the poor people stuck in the dorms *in another country*. In both scenarios, they have an in-class that leave behind some unfortunates. Ironically, the 'utopia' solution is to let someone else take care of them rather than even giving them lower class accommodations...

But hey, for a moment I thought they were going to reflect on this... During the dystopia half they reflected how they never gave a thought to third world countries, and because the suffering was thousands of miles away they ignored it and lived their happy lives, and only *now* do they have sympathy. Which sounded *exactly* like where the utopia ended up so I kept expecting a callback to point out the cycle repeats, nope *this* time it's just pachy to ignore the plight of suckers far away...

And then there's the brain implant thing... If you have 'bad thoughts' the central government suspends your bodily autonomy so you don't act on those thoughts and thus crime is solved. Ok, *now* they are going to show this dystopian undercurrent for this utopia because that is some heavily dystopian stuff... Oh wait, the author just thinks that is a good, cool idea....

Ok, that sounds like you accept you've tried to 'business and tech' away a decent customer experience, and that you are going to circle back to more customer friendly territory..

Umm... that makes you think the customers are going to think you have a *nicer* connection to them and their community?

Ok, this is *exactly* how you said you were already screwing up, so you want to double down?

Again, this sounds like more doubling down on the 'tech' you said had distracted and diminished the customer experience?

Fine, but surely there's something consistent with what you claimed to do...

Yeah, that'll fix your problems...

At least on some of the rural roads, the trunks are right next to the road and the roads actually have the tree canopy covering the road itself. Roads where, from above, you wouldn't even see the roads.

But yes, absolutely suicidal deer are notorious for jumping in front of cars with no chance of realistic stopping distance.

That applies for the things you can reasonably see...

If something jumps into your path of travel randomly from a total blind spot, there's generally not much people can do.

Basically you'd have to drive at no more than 3 miles an hour if there are woods near the road or parallel parked cars or anything that could conceivably obscure someone that could jump out at you.