I do most of my shopping there, at Grocery Outlet, and at Costco. I actually do more shopping at grossout, because they are the closest thing that doesn't suck. We have a local market and mini-market, and I'm not a big fan of either one. (The market is somewhere around "OK", the mini market is disappointing.) I got Costco's card honestly just to get fuel quicker as the card is a membership card, and it's convenient for me to stop in there on my way to work.

Winco is an employee-owned co-op, and their pricing seems to be dynamic in general and the prices actually go back down, so I'm really happy with them. Grocery Outlet has beer I want to drink and high quality local dairy products, and an interesting and ever-changing stock of weird shit, and neither of the local ones are scuzzy. I have a chest freezer...

Of course it does. It doesn't have to do with just one thing. Keeping the machine spinning is the reason why even heartless fucks should be interested in workers' needs being met, if they weren't idiots. But that's the problem with such people, if you're smart then you realize that you don't want to live in a world of shit.

That's because you're taking the default, most expensive, booking option. On hilton.com, which I almost always use for business travel, click through the "more rates" link and you'll typically see rates for prepayment with no cancellation, rates with 2-3 day cancellation and rates with 24-hour cancellation. Also rates with free breakfast, rates with double points, etc.

Only consumers who are okay with possibly not being able to book a room.

I actually do this quite often on vacation. We like to fly to an interesting place with only a rough itinerary -- basically a list of things we want to see in approximate order based on a rough driving route -- then during the trip we book each night's accommodations that day, usually mid or late afternoon. By searching the whole area reachable by driving from our current location (and in the direction of what we'd like to do the next day) we can usually find a really good price on a decent place, and very often end up finding nice places that we'd never have stayed otherwise.

A few times we've really hit the jackpot, such as one night we spent at the fantastic Liss Ard Estate in southern Ireland, paying about 120 EUR for a room that usually goes for upwards of 500. That was so nice we almost decided to stay a second night. Another time, a call directly to the hotel got us the owner who offered us the night in a nice room for 50 EUR on the condition that we pay in cash :D . The flip side is that we have a couple of times had to stay places we really didn't like. It's likely that if we do this for long enough we may eventually have to badly overpay for a room (since hoteliers sometimes hold back a small number of rooms they hope to rent at very high rates when things are busy), go to a hostel, or even end up sleeping in the car. But on balance it's a risk that has paid off for us, mostly because it makes our vacations flexible and casual rather than tying us to a rigid schedule of locations, or keeping us restricted to one region.

I highly recommend this vacation strategy if you can be flexible and a little adventurous and when traveling in countries where you speak the language (or many of the locals speak yours) and which are generally safe. We've done it on a western US road trip (UT, NV, CA, OR, WA, ID), and in New Zealand, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal and the US Virgin Islands. This is a vacation strategy that wasn't really possible before smartphones and Internet booking. I guess it could have been done pre-Internet, but it would have required a more adventurous mindset than I have at this point in my life, or than my wife has ever had.

For business travel I want my hotel reservation locked in, well in advance.

Just because there are people available to work that doesn't mean they will be hired. And they won't be hired because of AI.

If the GOP continues to run the government the old people won't be a problem either because they will die when they lose health coverage.

Creating icons in the game is part of creating the game. You just said it wasn't used for that and then said it was used for that.

"I'm against AI slop as much as anyone, and in general a fan of regulation, but this really is something that should be solved by the market. If people don't want AI slop, let them not buy it"

This isn't about the slop. If you're a fan of regulation, and saving jobs isn't a good enough reason for you, wait you're not actually a fan.

My local supermarkets, at least the ones where I shop, don't allow purchases with credit. This is irritating AF even though I have the money in the bank because I get a percentage back.

Yep, and just like happened to the Internet, after the bubble bursts everyone will realize the tech is useless and it will quickly fade into obscurity. Same thing that happened with the telecom bubble and the railroad bubble. So much fiber / track that got laid and then never used.

Completely different situation. A human is making the decisions in that case. Google Maps even warns drivers not to blindly follow it. This is entirely different from a fully autonomous vehicle which is moving without any human direction or control.

Umm, none of the suits against OpenAI for suicides have been closed out, they're all still pending. It also isn't remotely the same thing. A self-driving car operating without any human control that kills someone is clearly at fault and there is no one to shift the blame to. The case of LLM users committing suicide is very fuzzy at best.

Right, it's going to take Jihad.

Quite the opposite (until a couple of months ago I worked at Google, on Android, and wrote a lot of Rust): Much Rust code requires more reviews. This is because if the reviewer you'd normally go to as a subject-matter expert in the area isn't also an experienced Rust developer (common), what you do is get two reviews, one from the reviewer who knows the area, and one from an experienced Rust engineer.

The reviews still tend to go faster, though, because there are a whole lot of things reviewers don't have to check. When reviewing C++ code you have to watch carefully to make sure the author didn't write something subtly incorrect that could smash the stack or create a race condition. When reviewing Rust code you can just assume that the compiler wouldn't allow any of that, so you just focus on looking for higher-level logic bugs. Unless you're looking at an unsafe block, of course, but those are (a) rare and (b) required to be accompanied with thorough documentation that explains why the code is actually safe.

I can answer this, at least for Android (which is the topic of TFA): Android requires all new native code to be written in Rust, unless there is some specific reason to use C++. And, really, the only valid reason for using C++ is that the new code is a small addition to an existing C++ binary. So, effectively everyone on the Android team that works on native code and isn't just making small maintenance changes to existing code is "recruited" to write Rust.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that software engineers at Google are significantly more capable than the industry average. So while I don't think your point has anything to do with the successful results in Android, it might well be a significant factor in other environments.

When looking at defects that constitute security vulnerabilities, this is false. In typical C/C++ code about 75% of security vulnerabilities are due to memory safety bugs.