My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.

If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

A space weapons arms race plus one million data center satellites.

What could possibly go wrong?

And fission plants definitely aren't cheap.

Especially if you include the unsolved issues such as waste barrels stranded on the beach.

"But but no true Scotsman would put barrels..."

Just shut up.

I guess that proves that even this site is using AI to write their summaries these days.

Way more than cheaper rides.
* App to summon
* Automatic driver mapping to pickup
* Predictable arrival for pickup
* Predictable arrival for drop off
* No BS routing and you knew the cost before pickup/dropoff.

Back in the day I called for cabs ahead of time and had them fail to show up 25% of the time. I've never lived in a dangerous area, so that wasn't it. They just were not reliable or predictable. Uber saw a huge opening for a service and they took it. They also saw a huge opportunity for destroying the existing market solution in an anti-competitive and illegal way and took that, too - banking on the notion that government would not act fast enough to stop them. And they were right.

Obviously, if you approximate a complex system containing 1e30 quantum particles using a couple of differential equations and a few boundary conditions, you're not going catch every detail.

I've never used TiVo, but I'm still using MythTV after more than 20 years. (Anybody else here using it? ...Crickets.)

I ditched cable 15 years ago, but it works fine with an antenna. (Or, at least it will until they screw us all over with ATSC 3.0.)

They can't remove the auto-ad-skip on free open-source software, but I never used it anyway. It's not 100% reliable at detecting the ad boundaries, and it occasionally skips over part of the actual show. Instead, I just FF at 60X through the ads.

And because cars are a certain size. Making it half the size for just one person would be nearly as expensive and would be worse for taxi'ing 2 people (which are still a reasonable number of fares).