we all knew that streamers were basically giving the service away and spending A on of money to buy viewers. Operating at a serious loss is something that could not go on forever. Plus we all know now that part of this was the streamers taking advantage of vague working in actor contracts around digital distribution to save money by not paying them

If you go back to around the time of the Cultural Revolution and the period right before that, lots of women finished school after 8th grade and started working, often in dangerous factories. And then they got married and raised families while working. By the time they are 50 they are actually pretty worn out and not capable of doing more.

and how is that woking out in your town? Lots of new buildings going up?

I mean California has such a glut of housing. Better not build anymore.

I'm not really what you'd call an TV commercial expert, like most of us I suspect I try to avoid being forced to watch them as much as possible. But I didn't really see anything particularly weird or bad about this one. If you hadn't told me it was AI created I'd never know know that. It seems a bit too much CGI for my taste is all. It's probably not a great ad but saying 'it fucking sucks' is over the top.

The critics I think are just letting their personal animosity against generative AI drive what they are saying.

So I personally like knowing if my messages with someone are end to end encrypted.

If kids are hassling each other over this, as they do with nearly every other sort of trivial difference, that's on us for creating a society where kids think thats normal and ok. Making apple turn all bubble beige or whatever doesn't fix bullying.

There should be an open standard that all phones could use that supports all these features but it's not Apple that is stopping that from happening. It's telcos and of course the DOJ is totally against hard encryption for mobile devices.

Apple could I suppose release iMessages for Android although we already have Signal that sits in a similar role.

I don't think top brass messed it up, that Bolt you got for that price was losing GM money. It was a compliance car. If they have to show a profit they couldn't sell it for that price.

Coinbase has a dedicated taxes section of its website. I'm surprised this is not the normal case

As a programmer I'm finding access to tools like GitHub copilot and ChatGPT makes me more productive and less stressed out dealing with simple boilerplate stuff or complex stuff I've not run into. I'm using it to learn new programming languages as well. So for me its a net plus but I get with everything there's winners and losers. Basically everything bad I'm hearing about AI I heard about the internet back in the mid 90s.

If someone has a talent for it and an interest we should nurture it. Telling people to learn to code because it's a stable job option just isn't smart. Not everyone is going to have the type of mind that is a good programmer.

I know some of you might be thinking 'kill someone over a truck'?? but you should know here in TX lots of guys depend on their truck for their living and not just for getting around. I'm talking contractors, builders, landscaping people and so forth where the truck is for business and is a true working vehicle. And despite the police saying 'we have the resources...' people generally don't get their truck back or it comes back totally wrecked and unusable. Lots of people in the US can't afford to miss working. So although I'd personally not kill someone over property, that's me being privileged enough to know if someone takes my car its just a big hassle not a 'losing my job and getting evicted' problem.

It does make errors in code suggestions but usually it gets it wrong in a way that at least gets me moving. I consider that 'usefully wrong' in a positive way. Same thing when doing my creative work, a lot of the time you experiment and when you do that things don't always go as planned or even very well but you do learn something from it. 'Usually wrong' isn't a terrible thing.

It's on my retirement list for sure.

I have three heat pumps for heating / cooling (two in the main house and one in the greenhouse) and all three do the job I ask of them. All are high efficiency models (SEER 20+). Main thing with them is that they like to stay at a set point so you don't want to do the 'turn the heat down for the night' thing since it takes too long to get the temp back up in the morning and running it hard you've lost any gain you expected. They don't blow out very hot or very hot air, rather just very warm and very cool so you pretty much let them run all the time and your house just stays at a comfortable temp all the time. I actually prefer that to the old system where in the summer the house would get hot and then the system would cycle on and blow crazy cold air for 10 minutes. As a result they work best as part of a whole system with other improvements like better insulation. We did spray foam insulation at the same time and been very happy with the overall result. But if you have bad insulation you might not be able to get the house warm if your leakage is higher than what your heat pump is putting out. I find we we've had those cold times in TX when it gets to the lower teens or even 10F then the system does seem to struggle to keep the temp up, I suspect if I replaced windows that would help a lot since my windows are old and leaky. They do work but not a panacea you have to think of them as working as part of a system that includes insulation and other things.

I personally never had trouble being productive remotely, but perhaps extrovert personalities, the bulk of who are over represented at the higher management levels, need more face time. Seems like a personality flaw to me. I also wonder how much of this is political pressure on companies because of how much remote work impacted local businesses. Has anyone out there actually have a 'serendipity' moment at the 'water cooler?' Never happened to me and I've been working since the mid 90's but again I'm introvert personality style and really don't get anything out of 'hanging out' with coworkers. I find it draining not invigorating. But my BFF is the opposite, he's very gregarious and talks about how his house is basically a community center. Works for him.