In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

>"I agree with everything in your post except for that. My search engine is startpage.com, which acts as a proxy between me and Google so that it has no way of knowing who made which query."

I use both DDG and StartPage. StartPage is a non-Google search page, even though it returns Google results. So you do actually agree with everything :)

>"It's probably not legal, but M$ has always thought they were above the law."

They *are* essentially above the law. As evidenced by an entire history in which nothing is really ever done to slap down their monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.

Google isn't far behind.

>"I simply refuse to use an OS that leans so hard on trying to modify my behavior."

Me too. Which is one of many reasons all my machines run Linux.

And I refuse to use a browser that allows Google more control over the way the web works, works against open standards, and creates a seriously dangerous monoculture. Which is why all my machines use Firefox.

And I don't want Google having complete control over search either. Which is why all my searching is done with non-Google search pages.

>"Sounds nice, is unworkable in practice."

Oh, I think it is workable. But I don't think the Times team will get what they want that way. :)

>"How on earth can you "exhaustively" deidentify millions of chat logs that could contain literally any personal details"

Exactly. There is no way. Except....

Expose the logs to the Time's team, but with extreme control. Meaning the Times could have people go into a secure room of OpenAI, with no personal electronics of any kind allowed, and use a locked-down machine of OpenAI's to search and view logs and tag some of interest. The data never leaves OpenAI's machines. And OpenAI can look at the tagged ones and ensure they are suitably scrubbed before a copy of ONLY THOSE are transmitted to the Times or court.

I think Samsung might be the only one making great Android tablets. I have used several. The last two have been in the "S" line. Current one I use is Galaxy Tab S9. They are expensive, but freaking fantastic screen, great build, fast, lots of RAM, etc.

Even their lower-end models are nice. But the S has that kick-butt screen.

>"I run a very small boutique hosting service and traffic has more than doubled since AI, all attributable to them. OpenAI in particular just seems to come along and hit like 30-60K links per day, no robots.txt rate limiting, just a "gimme all your data" scraping posture. Amazon is by far the worst, "

Oh, there is far worse now. Last week my club website was hit by a full-on distributed bot-net scraping our wiki. Up to a dozen hits per second from 250,000 unique IP addresses all over the world (but mostly Singapore and Brazil addresses). All of them ignoring robots.txt. All of them pretending to be people/browsers. It crippled the old/small server, so I took the content down and the traffic continued for 5 MORE DAYS still requesting various links into the content, until it finally started tricking to 2 or so per minute.

>"If something goes wrong and the child needs expensive lifelong medical care for an unanticipated problem, guess who will be first to shout "NOT IT!"

And much worse if the unintended issues go undiscovered and procreation happens and then those meddled genes get scattered throughout the population. Then what? Oh, we can fix that too?

I am surprised nobody has brought up GATTACA yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even if there are no immediate physiological or psychological downsides for the "designer babies" (and that is a tall claim), what does it mean for those who are not?

All good points. All my machines are Linux and on low-end machines (not the Linux servers, which are beefy, but the Linux clients are all almost 10 year old I3's) and everything is super fast. But we are also talking about hundreds of users, not thousands. And almost all are local, not remote. And logins are mostly staggered across several timeframes. So my references and guesses are based on what I know.

I still think if it takes just a few minutes (which is way longer than I would expect), it is no big deal. But if it is a lot longer, they do have an issue that needs to be fixed. Yet I find it ironic the people whining are the stay-at-home's who don't have to spend perhaps 30 to 90 minutes a day *UNPAID* driving to work, and paying for gas and maintenance and sometimes parking and then walking to and from the building and office.

>"required her and fellow hourly workers to log into multiple security systems [...] all before the clock started ticking on their workday."

White collar working from home job. And I am sure all the time on the clock was spent glued to the computer/phone doing work, right? Or at least as much as would be, had that person been in "the office", right? But, anyway....

>Workers turned on their computers

Leave computer on or suspended. 0 sec

>waited for Windows to load

Leave computer on or suspended. 0 sec

>grabbed their cell phones

2 sec.

>to request a security token for the company's VPN, waited for that token to arrive

5 sec?

>logged into the network

10 sec?

>opened required web applications with separate passwords

have to guess on that, I do it every day and takes me about 20 seconds

>and downloaded the Excel files they needed for the day.

10 sec?

So that is maybe 47 seconds? Double or quadruple it, it is still much ado about nothing, unless their systems are DREADFULLY slow or problematic. If the workers do need to get on a tech support call to get logged in, due to issues, I agree that there should be some way to account for that time.

You are 100% correct.

And yes, often they were sold in buckets. And also there were some generally-generic sets that had tailored pieces, like roof, wheels, hinges, swivels, but they could be used to build anything. They weren't designed/patterned/colored for a specific model.

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I am a super STTNG fan and think this kit is awesome. I mean, it even has Spot! (But I also won't be forking out that much money for some plastic blocks).

>"I, for one, much prefer this kind of LEGO"

OMG, that is freaking fantastic :)

I think we all know nothing good ever came from that place.