I'm not sure online sales were ever part of Walmart's core competencies; I suspect they contracted all that stuff out to third parties.

The reason I suspect that is that one of my relatives bought a product from Walmart.com and needed to return it, so she called the number listed on the front page of the Walmart.com web site (and dialled it correctly; I later double-checked the call record on her phone against the walmart.com web page), and the representative who answered put her on hold, then forwarded her to a scammer who tried to trick her into allowing him to TeamViewer in to her computer remotely. When she refused, he got increasingly abusive and eventually hung up on her.

So whomever Walmart was contracting for online support, they were at least bribable, and arguably criminal.

They'd better be giving these refrigerators out for free, or at an insane discount that they plan to make up for via ad revenue. Otherwise, there's no reason for that feature to exist.

The thing is that places that historically didn't have to worry about this, now have to worry about this.

If they want it preconditioned? Yes, welcome to 2025, they can install the app on their phone. Or they use the 'remote climate start' option on the keyfob. Or they shoot you a quick text asking you to hit the button in your app.

You keep trying to paint these advancements in convenience and comfort as terrible burdens, and it's weird.

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.

... this year. And next year, the same logic will have us getting rid of all of the entry-level employees, and the year after that, the mid-level employees, and some years from now, all employees. Yay, progress?

Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Well, sure, in the same way a 747 is just a fancy mechanical bird. Which is to say, yes, but no.

https://neildegrassetyson.com/...

Great. Tapping the 'climate start' button in your car's app on your phone not only will absolutely not 'make you late for work,' it will potentially get you to work quicker, *and* in a better mood, *and* more safely than driving an unheated car in -30 weather.

Because it's more pleasant to drive in a warm vehicle than a -30c vehicle? Especially when all it takes to accomplish this is three taps on your phone's screen?

The Dreamcast/PowerVR architecture was pretty awesome. But if there's one thing computing keeps teaching us, it's that in the end, brute force beats specalization. That said, we're about at the point for somebody to wire up eight SATA lanes in parallel, and make Super Parallel ATA or something. Then, in another twenty years, move back to serial when they realize that it's faster to blast eight bits down whatever new system there is, than to synchronize eight lanes. And so on.

Gasp, same as an EV! Hell, my EV 'heats up' faster than any ICE car I've ever driven, what with the heater being independent of having to warm up an entire engine block through inefficient combustion.

Perhaps, but it's not a battle that is solved by choosing an ICE car over an EV, so I'm not sure how it's relevant.

How are you 'delayed' by getting into a cold EV? Are you 'more' or 'less' delayed than climbing into a cold ICE car?

How is 'some people forget to tie their shoelaces' an argument against shoes?