Pizza Hut has degraded its food quality so badly that its barely edible. Growing up and in college that was my pizza of choice but after not having pizza from them in over 5 years I decided over Christmas to try it again as "maybe it got better?". No. It was still the same tasteless, oversalty, slop they've been pushing for years.
Likewise for Papa Johns which continues to lower their pizza quality to cut costs which I'm sure their CFO here is well aware of and approved.

The problem isn't just pizza though, all the big restaurant chains are following the same MBA approved march to death.

Mexican restaurants are doing well because they're mostly mom and pop shops actually COOKING their food and not relaying processed garbage.

I have long ago moved my personal folders OUT of the stock provided directories (photos, documents, etc), initially out of convenience as I had a D: drive and wanted to keep stuff there rather than on the OS drive, but more recently it's been advantageous to stop MS from snooping around and trying to auto index my content for personal reasons or even auto-move it to OneDrive.

The most irritating thing about this is the repeated advertisements on the start bar that I can't block (Hey! LIssen! Time to backup to OneDrive! Oh, you don't have enough free space on OneDrive! You should rent more storage space!) and moving the OneDrive directories to the top of the File Explorer.

And Pamela Hensley...

Senators have been "democratizing" projects like football stadiums and "public works" projects they want for years. Now that they can get some political grift out of it they suddenly have a problem with it..

Yeah, using Intellij via Amazon Q. In "theory" it should've been on the same context but maybe there's some quirk somewhere.

There was a separate time where I had a really complex test, same code, that required merging 4 different data sets into a unified data set. I generated the 4 different test sets from real world data then gave the prompt about generating a test for the merge using these 4 different data samples and... it, first time, made a proper test with mocks that read the files at the appropriate time and then verified that the returned, merged result was correct.

It's just wild that that complex unit test was 100% on the first try but simpler tests went off into the woods. But, like I said, that's been my experience with AI, so far.

I'm not sure that's true, at least for Claude Sonnet 4.5. In the same chat I had it write up some unit tests that exercised a function and verified that certain external libraries were called via mock. It wrote up the tests and they looked good but the mock syntax was incorrect. So, in the same chat, I pointed out the error and asked it to fix the syntax issues. It churned for a few minutes and couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue so it decided the best solution was to simplify the test... which it did... and removed all the mock verification that the external libraries were called! So I pointed out that the test looked good but still had to verify that external libraries were called via mock. To which it responded, yes I can do that - and proceeded to generate a wholly different set of mocks, perfectly.

That's been my experience overall so far. Sometimes the AI gives a bang-on solution and code and sometimes it just flails about. I'm sure part of that is how I'm prompting but even then the AI seems to respond differently even if I phrase/word instructions in a similar fashion.

Ya gotta go all Captain Kirk on that AI!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Is COM still a "growth opportunity" technology?

Don't live in California but I've just gotten bitten by this. My apartment complex was sold to a new management company last year and this summer they installed wifi transmitters in all the apartments and then announced that we all now have fiber internet with a whopping 200mb up and down for the low low AND MANDATORY fee of $65/month.

These apartments have DSL and Cable internet providers as well and I've been a customer of both - currently on cable internet with 1gb down and 300mb up!

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

There's not even a way to setup a hard connection with ethernet to their transmitters (wifi only) and there's no "cable tv" included (not that I had cable tv but if any of the renters had a combo tv/internet deal they're further boned)

I've got no problem with them offering the service. But this mandatory, no opt-out fee for an OPTIONAL service that's also served by 2 other ISPs is predatory and monopolistic.

Posting pictures of their juice boxes and glazed carrots to their instagram?!

More seriously, was out at a semi-nice place for dinner last week and the number of kids and their parents carrying around pads and tablets to keep the little ones entertained... instead of teaching them how to socialize at dinners just seems sad. And yeah, I was a pre-ipad kid and remember being bored silly but it also encouraged me to try to get involved in the adults conversation.

To a lesser extent we have the same problem as adults with tv monitors showing sports games all over most restaurants these days.

Close. More like "Your balls are already in the vice, would you like to opt-out for a small fee? You can do this 3 times a year."

Um, no...

> Flordia has a population of 23.37 million, they lost 51,240 people to COVID.

That's 219.9 deaths per 100k

> California's population in 2023 was 39 million and had ~100,000 deaths attributed to COVID

That's 256 deaths per 100k

California's population in 2023 was 39 million and had ~100,000 deaths attributed to COVID and California had some of the strictest COVID policies.

What's your point?

Yes - that's the point. I needed to run Windows 11 because I use Windows specific apps. I also have 2 personal macbooks, have an employer provided macbook for my professional job and will probably install some version of Linux on the old system and maybe turn it into a NAS of some sort.

But then that wasn't the point of your reply was it? Because in your rush to play whataboustism and score some internet karma you seemed to have missed the last line of my post - "just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence."

That was THE point. I'm well aware of Apple's built-in obsolescence and hate it which is why I still gave the nod to Windows because I USED TO BE ABLE TO RUN NEW WINDOWS VERSIONS ON OLDER HARDWARE. But not anymore because MS has now added forced obsolescence.

uh-huh, behind my desk is an intel computer I built myself 10 years ago - Rampage V edition 10, Intel i7-6950X EXTREME (it runs fast because it has EXTREME in the name...also ran fantastically hot but that was another issue...) quad channel DDR4 that was overclocked and an MSI NVIDIA GTX 790. It STILL runs like a champ and I could do about 80% of what I needed it to including coding, photo and video editing and mid level gaming and all around home server.

And what I thought would be my last build... wasn't... because I was forced to update because... get this... while I could get a TPM module for the motherboard - the CPU ISN'T SUPPORTED.

So this year I forked over a ton of cash and built a whole new rig just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence.