> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.

This is always the danger of beginning birders adding their findings to ebird. Many of us use another app, Merlin, made by the same organization, to listen to birds around us to help us identify birds by their sounds. The preferred method (the one we hope everyone does, but know that they don't all do) is to use Merlin to give you a list of birds to look for, then once you can confirm the bird is in the area, track it on ebird. Merlin uses "AI" to identify birds in the area, but makes mistakes. People trying to use Merlin to ID a bird using a picture are even more prone to errors than the part that identifies with sound. If someone just dumps what Merlin hears into ebird, and it's not a particularly uncommon thing for people to do, it can clog up the database with this AI spam.

I'm certain any ornithologists using the data would treat it like a CAPCHA, where they only count data that agrees among several accounts, instead of treating any individual count as being truthful.

The Internet Archive’s fundamental duty is to preserve human knowledge — to ensure that cultural, scholarly, and historical materials are not lost to time, obscurity, or commercial impermanence. Preservation does not mean competing with publishers, nor does it mean undermining legitimate markets. It means ensuring that when something ceases to be readily available, it can still be found, studied, and remembered.

If a book is commercially available, widely distributed, and maintained by its rightsholders, then it is not in danger of disappearing. There is nothing for the Archive to “preserve” in that case; the responsibility lies with publishers and distributors. For such works, the Archive’s role should be standby stewardship — maintaining a secure, non-public copy to ensure continuity of access if and when availability lapses.

In contrast, for works that have fallen out of print, lost their commercial distribution, or exist in fragile physical form, the Archive’s duty is active and urgent. These are the works at real risk of vanishing, and preserving them — including through controlled digital lending — serves the public good and the historical record.

This approach strikes a balance between copyright compliance and cultural preservation:

The Archive would withhold digital access to works that are actively in print or licensed.

It would, however, retain preservation copies in its secure collections.

And it would make these available again only if those works become unavailable through ordinary channels.

By adopting this preservation-first, access-conditional model, the Internet Archive fulfills its mission without infringing upon the rights or revenues of living markets — ensuring that the world’s knowledge remains safe, even when the commercial world moves on.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

This is progress. The USB-C cable and charger is no longer new tech, and cheap versions that work well enough are readily available. Devices should start advertising the recommended wattage and let stores stock chargers sorted by that.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

This might not be such a good idea as Vegas was begging Canada to come back. Their tourism isnâ(TM)t what it used to be and talk of 51st state has turned off Canadian tourism.

Honestly, it was the tone of the message, which is admittedly difficult to derive from a forum. IMHO, the proper response would have been one that questioned whether the 'upscale grocer' selling spareribs at $6.99/lb vs $1.49/lb were at different ends of the subjective or objective quality spectrum. In my case, they are literally the same brand: Smithfield. The only difference is that Aldi is $5+/lb less expensive.

That said, IMO, unless we're talking about a butcher that sources heritage-breed Berkshire (or the like) pork from a local farmer, I don't really give a flying fuck where the previously cheap cut of meat I'm going to put on my smoker for 6h is sourced from.

Why would I pay $6.99/lb at one of the 'upscale grocers' in town for spareribs when I can get them at Aldi for $1.49? I, too, drive a Mercedes, but it doesn't mean I'm a fucking moron w/my money.

The average employee lasts well less than a year at a fast casual; this had little to do w/her background.

https://www.fastcasual.com/blo...

I am absolutely certain many of those kids are great at writing code; what I have found in the last ~3y of hiring candidates out of undergrad and/or masters programs is that they DO NOT interview well.

They can answer esoteric technical questions about software dev (I *assume* this is because they study for coding interview questions) but they cannot possibly answer more general questions about themselves, how they would operate in a real-world business setting, and/or how they might build something from soup to nuts.

I'm not asking them to give me real-world experience; but, I expect a college graduate to be able to think about questions asked critically and provide a coherent and thoughtful reply to that question. Even if it's technically 'wrong', the conversational nature is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT for any work I have done in my 25+ year career.

Anyone can have AI solve most esoteric technical coding problems now; interfacing ability w/others on the dev teams and the rest of the business is what is important in getting shit done.

Colleges need to start investing HEAVILY in leveling up their students in how to interview well.

"Ms. Mishra, the Purdue graduate, did not get the burrito-making gig at Chipotle."

I think this single sentence says more about it than anything else in the article.

What self hosted solutions have you been looking at?

I've used TTRSS ever since Google Reader went away, however long ago that was. Works like a champ, and there are one or two Android clients that talk to it.

I watch dogs (primarily overnight--most for 3-7 days but some 1 day and some >7d) via Rover. I make around $1500/month (pre-1099) and after their ~20% cut (of which most people give back to me in tips).

I WFH so the largely passive income is nice. I wouldn't have found as many people w/o a platform to do the heavy lifting for me in finding new dogs.

I am not advocating that we need to have these sorts of things in the market, but it does make for nice extra cash. YMMV.