Being from the Bay Area, I was an early Craigslist user. Used it to find multiple apartments, furniture and other items as a 20-something in the 90s, and sell a few things here and there that did not make sense on Ebay. It was a really great thing, especially when the only real alternative at that time was newspaper classifieds.

The other day I was looking for an inexpensive musical keyboard, and I was having trouble with Facebook Marketplace listings because most of the sellers didn't respond to inquiries about their ads. (this seemed particular to the type of item I was looking for, I've not generally had trouble with other stuff.) So I thought, "I wonder if anyone still uses craigslist" and sure enough, plenty of listings. I contacted one and went to pick it up later the same day. Reminds me to check there for anything else I am looking for as well.

Unlike just about every other online business today, Craigslist is a completely honest, straightforward business. There is no hidden toll or price (your data) for 'free' (they make revenue elsewhere) and the transaction is straightforward for buyer and seller. No upsells to a paid version. No AI. Unlike many early sites, the founders did not sell out and continued to be satisfied with the existing level of income provided rather than the temptation of a large payout up front, enjoying a first-mover advantage with a lot of good will and brand recognition. Somehow, no one came and ate their lunch. It just kept going, year after year after year. How many sites do you remember becoming enshittified after being sold to a large corporation? Craigslist is a super rare example of what happens when you don't sell out.

It would be fun if an AI and data mining backlash spurred a bunch of new 'old school' sites with honest, straightforward dealings. I guess one can dream...

Has there ever been a successful VR headset that has survived long term after the initial launch frenzy? It just seems like something that people are trying to will into existence, but most people have no interest in it. A niche product for hardcore gamers and a few useful applications in science and medicine. No one's come up with a 'gotta have it' application for them. Most of generative AI is trash, but there are more useful applications for that than for VR headsets.

Anything running an LLM interface as a means of input is not only insecure, it's anti-secure. When you write something that accepts user input, you always sanitize those inputs by dropping special characters,etc to prevent command injections. buffer overflows, etc. Anything that isn't what you are expecting. With input coming through voice to an LLM, How the HELL do you do that? So far in the last few years the only thing that's been proven is no one has come up with a way to properly sanitize inputs. LLMs are a nightmare of garbage both in and out. They can do some amazing tricks, but are still terrible at accuracy and safety.

The world is heating up, and we need to continue to find ways to make food and energy production more sustainable, but coming up with these completely un-relatable and nonsensical figures won't help. It's about as useful as a 'carbon tax'.

When costs impact individual consumer wallets, that's when people start paying attention. Food shortages due to lack of water or shifting climates drive up prices and create scarcity. Water scarcity and resulting political instability is scary, and starting to rear it's ugly head in a few places.

Unfortunately, I think people are going to have to get a taste of the impact before they do anything meaningful about it. Time has shown you can yell about it all you want, but sitting down to figure out how you can accomplish these goals without reducing quality of life is the most important thing you can do. Leaning into modern, safe nuclear energy for energy abundance (in addition to solar) is much better than advocating for artificial scarcity and extreme conservation. Figuring out ways to more efficiently grow food at scale, as we have been doing since the mid-20th century, is better than advocating for immediate, drastic changes in diet. Lab grown meat that tastes and feels identical to the real thing but environmentally costs far less to produce once it's at scale? I think it's possible. Keep working on it. Hyper efficient crop growth? I don't think we've gotten close to what we can accomplish with a given acre yet, or vertical greenhouse farming. energy efficient de-salinization or condensing? It appears possible. Space-based manufacturing and asteroid mining? It's far better to mine the asteroid belt than the earth, and send the products downhill to earth. Metals that exist in abundance in the solar system should be gotten from elsewhere if robotic mining and modern delivery systems can make it economical. This is a GIANT untapped economy that will eventually bare fruit, but it may take a while.

There's a lot of things we could push really hard that we're not doing. Markets are lazy and want to optimize today and not worry about tomorrow, if there is no immediate perceived danger. It creates a kind of blind spot that can lead to the world eating its own tail, causing a collapse. We'll either figure it out or we'll collapse and have to start over, or possibly die out completely. I think there's a window of opportunity to continue to lift civilization to great heights, that will close in the next 100 years if the status quo continues as-is.

Just a few weeks ago there was a slashdot post via the Reigster giving a good clue as to why people still pay for it versus LibreOffice/OpenOffice versions or Google Sheets:

"Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register."

You might say, "Well, if you have 20 million cells in a single spreadsheet you're doing it wrong" but excel has been abused in all kinds of ways for edge use cases and it will take it, and that's why people still use it. People have found it enormously useful to crunch vast amounts of data, and sometimes it requires astonishingly large cell counts. The world excel championships show just now useful it is for so many things. At an aerospace company I worked at, excel was the primary tool to calculate suborbital and orbital rocket trajectories given initial specific impulse, drag, mass, etc. The person who created the spreadsheet was a math and physics genius, and I referred to him as 'the Excel whisperer'.

Large companies that pioneered a piece of software have a first mover advantage, and then when they get big, they can afford to keep plowing money into improving the software and adding features to keep ahead of the competition that is less well funded, or relying on volunteers in the case of Open Source.

I ran into a similar problem trying to switch from Solidworks to a much cheaper lookalike competitor, as when you started to dig down there were some critical features that I needed that were just completely missing. I have the last bought and paid for version of Solidworks that they offered (2022) with no subscription, works great for my needs.

I use excel these days for a very complicated cost calculating sheet I developed to sell a particular product line with many different options. It calculates shipping weights and volumes critical for international container shipping quotes. It's a godsend. This sheet could be replicated on one of the free pieces of software, but since I own an Office 2019 desktop license outright, I'll continue to use it until I can no longer install it on future computers. You can still purchase a copy of MS Office 2024 desktop outright from Microsoft for $150. They don't advertise it much, but it's there on their website. I don't generally do software-as-a-service subscriptions, with a few very narrow exceptions. That's the one thing that will finally drive me away from Office, when 365 is the only option.

I'll keep driving my car that A. doesn't have any of that stuff and B. is to old for anyone to want to steal /25 year old truck with a bulletproof engine /10 year old car with same

Channel subscriptions, and I have my own channel that I manage.

I don't use that Google account for anything else though, so there's that. It's not logged in to my smartphone either. I have a throwaway account that holds my contacts in case I lose or break my phone. I got tired of re-entering the contacts by hand each time I got a new phone, so I gave up on staying logged out entirely on the smartphone.

Knowing Google, it's quite the possibility. To avoid that, you would need to stay logged out, use private browsing in a browser that isn't chrome, and use proxies to vary your IP address, and probably randomly spoof your browser type and OS type to avoid other methods of profiling. I don't think I care that much.

Hopefully not if you've left your YouTube watch history turned off.

Go to your Google Account settings, click "my activity" and then there is a button for YouTube history where you can disable it if you don't want them needlessly collecting data about your watch habits.

This will however make your YouTube landing page blank. But your subscription page for following channels still works the same.

I was clicking around Zillow a few days ago and noticed the First Street link. I clicked on it for a few local homes where I know exactly where they are and they gave some of them nonexistent flood and wildfire risks. I don't know how they distill their data but I'd say they're doing it wrong, or erring on the side of paranoia. As both a homeowner and a potential home buyer it's not something I would ever look at. In California you need to rely on the Natural Hazard Disclosure Report for the property you are looking to buy.

Also, flood zone determinations as a general thing are often widely disputed for insurance purposes, sometimes properties are not considered to be in a flood zone when they should be, and sometimes they are considered in a flood zone when they are not.

Folded it's nearly 1/2" thick. Perfectly fine for an inside jacket pocket. but where I live you only wear jackets about half the year. The rest of the time you have to shove it into a pants pocket, no thanks. My S23-Ultra is already bulky enough with the Otterbox around it.

Also, one more hinge point is one more mechanical thing to break.

It would be nice to have on an airplane flight though.

A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.

The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through the game, not so much.

It would be interesting to fish through the code to see how it was put together.

Talk about exploiting a loophole. Had no idea that was happening. I'm assuming they did not pass on the savings. I've never seen a third party booking go down in price after being booked.

When I book directly with Marriott while signed in, the lowest price is usually 'flexible' (You can cancel it.) Sometimes I use third party sites to get a really low price if I know I'm not going to cancel, but lately I've been booking directly with the hotel to avoid hassles if it's a major chain I have a login for.

Due to business travel, I had a year or two where I had platinum elite status with Marriott. (the only scenario in which earning status points has any effect - if you live out of a hotel for 3 - 5 days a week and someone else is paying for it, or you launder a ton of purchases through a points credit card, but those can have yearly maximums) The various perks were nice and there were enough points to pay for a lot of our personal hotel stays for that year, with free room upgrades wherever we went. Fun while it lasted.

It must be nice to have the luxury of doing that. For most of us that kind of money would be a helpful windfall in these rough times.

...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.