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Comment Re:There was once a time... (Score 3, Insightful) 69

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

Comment Re: Propoganda -LOL (Score 3, Insightful) 174

Freedom of speech is a laudable ideal but your freedom of speech ends when human beings are dying because of what you are speaking about

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

Comment Re:Jesus (Score 1) 57

Oh, and onedrive is fucking cancer

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.

Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 71

No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have their friends & significant others stay over quite a bit. I'm too much of an autistic introvert to live with that many other people in the same house 24/7 even if the house were a mansion.

The only reason I pay for the highest tier Netflix account is because of the number of devices allowed. Basically for my wife and daughters. I almost never watch it myself. Every time I open it up I feel like I spend more time scrolling to try and find something to watch than actually watching content. So if Netflix comes after us for "account sharing" I'm cancelling our subscription immediately without thinking twice about it. We're a single family, we just occupy multiple locations most of the time.

And our case is a bit more complicated than people who are talking about paying for a family account that includes kids who are away at school or camp or what-have-you. Or families who travel a lot. My wife and I are magicians (our commercial property is a small theatre and magic shop). This gets me thinking about families that travel for work. Army families or entertainers. Imagine being a Cirque Du Soleil performer - many of whom have kids ... they live on the road most days of the year.

The point is that there is no one-sized-fits-all "family" and it's more common for a nuclear family to occupy multiple locations than many would think.

Comment Re:A few things... (Score 4, Insightful) 44

A lot of us are old enough to have worked through the dot-com bubble and crash. The AI boom over the last year or two feels a lot like the late 90s leading up.

That said, if the market hadn't gone so all-in on the Internet and world wide web, investing stupid amounts of money into so many idiotic crackpot ideas that were doomed to fail, we arguably wouldn't have the Internet that we enjoy today.

In other words, you have to throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what will stick. 90% of just about everything we humans create is unremarkable. It's the 10% that we end up with that matters.

And we will get the 10% out of AI. Which is another way of framing what you are saying.

I've been a pretty big skeptic when it comes to the hype vs actual productivity gains, but that doesn't mean I haven't found a few areas where it has been useful in my workflow. LLMs are a cool magic trick. They can create some breathtaking illusions and are exceptionally useful at a few narrow applications such as searching and pattern matching.

While I don't want to see the ugly side of the crash (layoffs and unemployment), I am looking forward to when the hype train is over so everyone shuts up about their overstated fantasy and we can get on with doing actual work. The blockchain hype was annoying too, but since it wasn't obvious how blockchain could be applied to all types of work we didn't hear every single CEO at every single company talk about how AI is going to fundamentally change the way we work.

Comment Re:I'm ready for this yesterday (Score 1) 11

Why wait for Cruise? You can do this today. My daily commute is 20min going up 45 and around 610.. I get the worst of it all. But I don't drive, and while I don't play games or watch movies, I do text, catchup on emails, and eat breakfast. Makes that drive go so much quicker.. Waymo is here too now, so there's space for a new player...

Comment Re:Why???!?? (Score 1) 154

My wife worked extensively with Michelin-starred chefs in the Bay Area for a decade. I've been lucky enough to get to know some of them and their mentality.

The best of the best are always trying to be, well, better. Food is only one of the aspects that they think about- they also want you to feel welcome and respected. As the article mentions, some chefs have kept notebooks of guest preferences in the past. If they can use someone's Instagram account to get a sense of who they are before they come in, they can make sure that the waitstaff are treating them in a manner they would like. For example, if someone seems like they are introverted, then maybe they back off on the social interactions with them. If they seem to be someone more extroverted, then they get more attention.

Chefs want anyone that comes in to feel like they are special. This is just a new innovation in that direction, and it's not something that you're going to find happening at Chili's anytime soon.

Comment Re: Telecommunications is gone (Score 1) 35

>can block
>can throttle

You realize a lot of ISPs block ports like HTTP, SMTP, SMB.. right? Should we allow unfettered access to services that when compromised affects the entirety of the internet? Iâ(TM)m okay with gating it behind a more expensive service since, you know, most home users donâ(TM)t need to send email to every smtp server on the internet

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