Comment Re: Pyrite Pete's failed prediction (Score 0) 51
How much has your government money grown in that time?
Comment Good memories... (Score 4, Interesting) 25
I was active online in this era. starting with 300 baud on a C=64, then moving up to C=128, Amiga and finally PC with a 57.6k modem before moving to dual-ISDN and DSL during the shell account / early WWW era. In Silicon Valley we of course had a healthy BBS scene. The one I called the most maxed out at 32 lines and ran the MajorBBS software by GlactiComm. GalactiComm made a 'GalactiBox' ISA serial expansion unit that would allow you to stack 16 internal modems into it. (max 64 modems over four units) So the place I called had two of them. The phone company had a great time getting those lines into a residence in Monte Sereno...
The popular multiplayer games on that system were Quest for Magic (it came stock with the BBS) Legend of Kyrandia (both are multiplayer MUD/Zork-likes, the latter was made into a successful point and click game in the 90s by Westwood) and Infinity Complex, which had a mutable environment you could dig out and expand.
I also occasionally called Spies in the Wire, which was run by Andy Rubin, later the creator of the Android operating system. Andy was a student and hobbyist at the time.
This is all receding so far into the past now it feels very quaint. But it was cool to dial up and see some of this great ANSI art from time to time. I was always impressed with people who could look at that character set and make art of out it.
Comment Re: Yeah, right... (Score 1) 37
Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.
Comment This is nothing new (Score 1) 30
The only change is that these are speakers without a screen. Both google and amazon screen products have had cameras for years, and people have bought them for years.
Comment this what you would call malicious compliance (Score 1) 25
Also, is there a point, when any app uploaded to one of these app stores would have to basically comply with the same terms and conditions as apps on the Google Play Store, from the looks of it?
Google is trying to claw back some of their precious per-sale revenue loss by charging that $10K, and increasing the barrier to entry to the point where only serious businesses will attempt it. It's obvious that having third party app stores provides no benefit for Google, so they are doing everything they legally can to stem their losses. With monopoly app stores, Google and Apple basically have a license to print money. The incentives are not great for consumer freedom.
Comment This will certainly be great discussion (Score 1) 42
I look forward to a mature discussion about what this might mean as opposed to 400 comments all talking about how much they hate systemd and it is the devil.!
Comment Re: Lazy owners. (Score 4, Informative) 132
I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.
2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.
Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.
Comment Re: VRBO (Score 1) 132
Airbnb allowed making guests do it.
They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.
Comment Re:The cutting edge cuts back. (Score 1) 101
So I'm not going to defend Microsoft about anything else, but I can play xbox 360 games (and a FEW xbox OG) games I bought on the latest xbox and I haven't had to re-buy anything.
Comment Re:Won't be possible. (Score 1) 152
"companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down..."
You can't even read the summary, let alone the article.
Comment Silo your accounts (Score 1) 34
It can very occasionally be a pain in the butt, but I use a throwaway google account for my phone, and nothing but my phone. The only data I allow it to back up is my contacts list (even that is a stretch for me, but I got tired of re-entering all the names and numbers each time I bought a new phone or doing a manual local backup process). There are no other google accounts added to my phone. No gmail (I use a third party IMAP client for a non-google email, only two weeks of emails are kept on the server before being downloaded to my local PC and deleted.)
Depends on how much you want to sacrifice convenience for safety in terms of someone potentially having access to your entire digital history / footprint by getting a hold of your phone.
The idea is to keep a reasonable amount of stuff local-only and off the device that is easy to steal / confiscate / hack.
Comment Re:Fascinating... (Score 2) 40
Same here. And I probably expended a lot less energy learning how to play it than AI did. But I was certainly not world champion level. I might be able to beat my cousin once in a while...
Comment Re: Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen (Score 1) 57
I don't want to poop on Nouveau, but it's just not useful. It's not their fault, as they are mostly pooped on by Nvidia. IME closed Nvidia drivers are better than closed AMD drivers, but the open AMD drivers are very good.
If you're talking about Linux, there are no closed AMD drivers. So yeah, the Nvidia drivers are better than something that doesn't exist.
Comment Sounds like Crisco (Score 1) 160
Hydrogenated oils seemed like a miracle food because they didn't go rancid. It turned out that if microbes can't break them down, neither can the human digestive tract. We now know that hydrogenated oils are not safe. Bananas that don't spoil could be just as indigestible, and would be no good for banana bread in any case.
A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
