Yup. I use credit a lot but also pay off my cards every pay period. I get that it sucks for merchants, but you know what sucks worse: getting cheated like this on a debit/cash transaction, or worse having your debit card skimmed.

A relative of mine had the latter and the bank froze her account for weeks while investigating. If it was a credit card they’d just freeze the transaction and maybe send you a replacement card with different #

This does seem like an important step. Like yeah, absolutely report this to the vendor but a theft also occurred so at least get a file going. Providing a police file # might have been enough to get them to refund as well

Or if you’re in Canada: London Drugs actually has decent service in their computer dept

Or really short adults

You can fit an awful lot of Perl into one line too if you minimize it. It’ll be completely unreadable to most anyone, but it’ll run

That one is for the buttcrack of any co-worker found bending over too far.

That and/or a big influx of vulnerable unpatched Windows machines…

Had this years ago except it was a dumbass contractor where I worked who left a Windows server with FTP services exposed to the Internet and IIRC anonymous FTP enabled, on a Friday.

When I came in on Monday it had become a repository for warez, malware, and questionable porn. We wiped out rather than trying to recover anything.

You could also just put it on the old MacBook…

Yeah. Calling something a sale at a price that’s not actually discounted under the regular price (with some caveats on how long it needs to be at said regular price), then yeah it’s a violation of the act. Basically false advertising.

Bumping up the regular price to cover what you’d have otherwise saved on tax is dickish but not against any regulations AFAIK

Raising prices then advertising a “sale” at the same/higher price IS actually against the law though. Unfortunately we have terrible enforcement of these laws but they do exist:

https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-practices/types-deceptive-marketing-practices/ordinary-selling-price

So basically, no good billionaires but maybe good former-billionaires?

Except at some point he would have been between the two - an active billionaire giving away his wealth - and presumably still a good person.

Yeah, I’m generally ok if somebody is charging a reasonable rent which covers their reasonable mortgage, so long as they’re still taking care of all the other stuff (repairs, city taxes, etc).

What burns me is people who either a) knowingly buy in a hot, excessively priced market with full intent to charge excessive rents while providing absolutely minimal service or support

b) bought 10+ years ago but have pumped up rents to the same as those who bought at mortgages 2-3x the rate, citing “market rates” and often doing sketchy things to raise rents including renovictions etc, while being shitty - often absentee - slumlords

Maybe I’m showing my age, but there did used to be quite a good number of mom & pop type landlords who weren’t shit, and while the commercial ones cost a bit more there was a decent mix.

Now, the commercial ones are actually mostly a safer bet in small cities. They’ll raise rent every year but consistently, and the decent ones are pretty prompt about repairs and not fucking people over deposits etc. There are bad ones but it’s pretty easy to tell which are which. The problem is of course that availability at the good ones is lower and they do cost more.

Good private landlords are increasingly hard to come by, as the best ones generally end up quitting after either getting too old or after a bad tenant experience, while the slumlords have leveraged their existing properties to finance buying more and more, leading to a market full of increasingly overpriced mould-monsters.

Still waiting for an AI NPC that I can have a real-time conversation with in VR while slaying a dragon on some shit

Meh… I’m not the best woodworker but I’m not terrible. I’d hope by that time I can at least leave them a decent handcrafted stained table or chair or something. No giant frescoes but nice routered edges on solid wood with a good burn+stain and a thick layer of lacquer.

Yeah, I’d tend to agree on that. Even beyond the security issues, nuclear has the potential to be a safe, but it also has the potential to be disastrous if mis-managed.

We see plenty of issues like this already, including what occurred here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident

Now imagine a plant in Texas, where power companies response to winter outages has basically been “sucks to be you, winterizing is too costly”.

Or maybe we’d like to go with a long-time trusted company, who totally wouldn’t throw away safety and their reputation for a few extra bucks. Boeing comes to mind.

I like nuclear as a power source, but the absolutely needs to be immutable rules in place to ensure it is properly managed and that anyone attempting to cut corners to save costs gets slapped down immediately. Corporate culture in North America seems to indicate otherwise.

This is actually one thing I’ve been thinking AI and deepfake tech can potentially do good. Let’s say you have an idea and can code… You have an idea for music but no instrumental talent, so the best you can do is hum it. You can’t afford voice actors or other professionals.

Or maybe you’re artist with an idea who can storyboard but not code. Maybe you can make 2d designs but not 3D models, or aren’t great at animate.

But… there is software that can take what you say and change it to a different voice. It can animate a model to match the words. Similarly, software that could generate instrumental sounds from humming is possible. An AI can generate interactive dialog. It could also provide assistance in the generation of music, debugging of code, and eventually more advanced 3D modeling.

A lot of game design software is much more a GUI to an environment/model and triggers etc than stuff like writing hardcore backend C++ code etc. AI could take that even further.

Then add VR. Drop somebody into a blank-slate where they can create a whole world with a word, a gesture, and a great idea.

One day, that might be a reality.

If you want pretty good color screen, try the Boox Tab Mini C

Absolutely, and I appreciate that you pointed it out as being the Israeli government (and their military complex/IDF) that continues the atrocities target than the people as a whole. Personally I wish we could bury the lot (Hamas, and the corrupt members of the govt+IDF) upside down beneath a public outhouse.

If anything, it seemed that many had enough of Netanyahu’s corruption and things might change there… before recent events, which to me is rather suspicious as well.

Any training data almost certainly has biases. For awhile, if you asked for pictures of people eating waffles or fried chicken they’d very likely be black.

Most of the pictures I tried of kid-type characters were blue eyed.

Then people review the output and say "hey this might still racist, so they tweak things to “diversity” the output. This is likely the result of that, where they’ve “fixed” one “problem” and created another.

Behold, Homer in brownface. D’oh!