there are lots of those, often with their own "store." I find batteries like that a lot.

But this was explicitly a Walmart listing, by Walmart, rather than a 3d party listing.

I’m not sure I believe something can cost more per kilogram then ink jet ink.

It's not just amazon.

I ordered a thermostat for my mustang last week. It was described as "sold and shipped by Walmart."

A couple of days later, I found an Autozone box on my porch. And not just the box, but the shipping return address was to auto zone!

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

>They didn't say whose value it strengthened.

LG's, Westinghouse, GE, and so forth!

Actually, if they had the testicular fortitude, your Samsung would display an add reading, "if you had bought LG, you wouldn't be seeing this!" :)

hawk

>Has about the same importance as smart tech in a fridge for me.

I live in the desert, you insensitive clod! :_)

but seriously we doohave many days of 115-117F most summers. Self-replenishing ice is *important*.

it's not why we bought it, but our LG actually has two ice makers; one in the refrigerator door, which you can actually clean out, and another for larger square tubes in the upper freezer drawer (which we turn off for the cooler half of the year)

>A fridge will last for a decade or more,

you would *think* that, but my prior fridge was a Samsung.

The ice maker died of its own buildup just out of warranty, the drip tray for the water dispenser caused rust lines through the paint below it, and the whole thing failed at 4 or 5 years--we came out one morning and it was at 50.

Compare to the Samsung dryers whose stainless steel barrels tend to crack and go out of round, wanting a $400 replacement!

The refurbisher who came out with our temporary dryer told us that from his experience (primarily washers & dryers), Samsung had the highest failure rate, while the other Korean brand, lg,had the lowest, with everything else in between.

>Agree, and don't even allow my TStat's to connect to wifi.

Have you *read* the license on those?

I brought home a wifi thermostat, thinking it would be nice to be able to change it half an hour out when coming home, and then read the terms.

It was like a parody of the terms you find offered sarcastically around here.

Pretty much, "you agree that we can send armed goons into your house, torture your dog, rape your cat, and sell your children into slavery. We may do anything we want with your data, and even more so if someone is willing to pay us for it."

It went back.

They tried that, briefly.

Then they gave up . . .

Wait, you lost your 6 digit account number how?

It is well known to developers that writing a new feature is the easy part, debugging it is the hard part. Letting the AI do the “easy part” and having the human do the “hard part” doesn’t really help. Debugging tends to be the largest part of an accurate schedule, and it is the most uncertain part. People frequently make pretty accurate estimates of how long it takes to hit feature complete, but poor estimates of how long it takes to debug those features.

Developers should have an intuitive understanding of this, while product managers, and upper management should have an observational understanding (as in they should have seen it before many many many times and been able to learn it is true even if they have no idea why it is true).

So why is it any surprise to people that having AI write applications and humans debug them doesn’t really save much time?

The USB-A should be relocated between the Centronics and RS-232 ports. Save space by mounting it vertically!

bizarre as it sounds, try Walmart's house brand, Onn.

they'er the only brand (other than apple itself) that I've tried that consistently works (and I've tried most if not all of the major brands).

They usually last until I do something stupid (leave behind, catch in hinges, drop laptop cable first, etc.). And the price is right, too--most are $6-$10.

>I'm hoping to see the first recycled reactor core! ;^)

c'mon, now.

*everyone* knows that reactor cores blow into a fireball of plasma when you eject them, as soon as they're far enough out that the writers think the ship can (almost) plausibly escape! :)

hawk

Maybe, but that isn’t what seems to be going on with AI.

We don’t get the same “news” publication with AI and zero workers. We get a crappy news publication with one worker and AIs cranking out the same volume of articles as 14 workers, but the articles themselves are crap. They manage to get some level of readership and sell roughly the same ad volume per readership level as a “real” news publication. In theory that should show up on GDP because it is a bunch of revenue from ads that didn’t exist before, or maybe that one person would have been 14th of the personal of another publication, so it should look like that one person is 14x more productive.

We get AI in our watch telling us we should see our doctors because we “might” have hypertension. If we do actually see our doctors when we wouldn't have otherwise done so, GDP gets a little boost, one more doctor’s vist! Or it doesn’t get a boost if we move it up 3 months sooner. If we do actually have hypertension and would not otherwise have spotted it before a heart attack and death maybe that has another GDP boost, all the productivity of a person who otherwise would have died.

We also get AI generated hog butchering schemes and mass customized SPAM that slips past traditional SPAM filters. AI seems to be a big friend to scammers, or a big tool of scammers. I don’t know if it is boosting scammers productivity, but assuming it does, how does that get measured in GDP? More fraud moves money from people’s life savings into fraudsters accounts where presumably they spend it in part laundering it into ligitimate seeming income and then buy some luxury goods, or maybe sustenance goods. The people who got defrauded now need to work extra hard to build up a new retirement savings? Do they? Maybe this is an untapped statistic! A major source of GDP growth! We should defraud some people for science! For the dismal science in particular!