It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

Just housing them is really damn effective in my experience. They recently opened a pallet shelter “village” in my area. Since, I basically never see encampments, and the number of visibly unhoused folks has dropped a lot (since they just look like everybody else due to regular access to hygiene facilities). According to the cops, they’ve had zero calls out to the village.

We should still do all the other things, but just put up a ton of free basic housing and you can make enormous visual progress.

An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.

It seems as depressing as you’d think.

McDonald’s stopped using beef tallow for fries in 1990. I suppose that might be relatively recent if you are an elf.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

They are almost certainly not actually working that much though. Look up the recent Massachusetts state police overtime scandal.

There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”

I’m pretty sure this is just how people try to manipulate Trump. He responds to flattery, and this almost makes it sound like Trump would be weak to do nothing.

From what I’ve read, 65+ was about evenly split Harris-Trump in 2024. 40-64 broke decidedly Trump. If the markets (and 401ks) manage to bounce back by the time the 40-64 cohort largely enters retirement, I fully expect they will have learned absolutely nothing.

It also speeds up the games a bit. I simply do not have the time as a full adult to sink 10+ hours into a single game. I have actually finished every game of Civ 7 I’ve played so far, which has never happened with any prior Civ installments at my current playtime.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.

English used to have this! Yea/nay for positive, and yes/no for negative I believe. The former fell out of common use.

There’s nothing wrong with having different preferences. It doesn’t have to be because someone has a worse or better attention span.

I personally do think the number of enemies that had to be killed should have been decreased. For me, it was mostly because it became comical sometimes that more guys kept coming out of the woodwork. After the fiftieth O’Driscoll you kill, you start to wonder if it’s a gang or a country’s military.

The gameplay is definitely way exaggerated because it would not be very engaging to get into one gunfight per chapter. I interpret these parts of many games symbolically—the amount of violence is to make a point. The game would be very short or really boring if it was realistic in that regard.

Arthur is a really complicated character who, despite being sometimes sympathetic, is ultimately not a good person. Even if you make only “good honor” choices, his story is still filled with points where he struggles to reconcile his actions with his beliefs. You wouldn’t want to live near a person like Arthur in reality, and he doesn’t like being that person.

RDR2 is ultimately a story about bad people struggling against other bad people. One group represents the lawless banditry that is dying out, while the other is the capitalist yoke that wears a nice suit. Lots of normal people get caught in the middle, and they usually suffer for it.

It succeeds for me because it still keeps the humanity in focus. Bad people are humans too. It does not absolve them, but it underscores the conditions that can manufacture them.

You spend the entire game moving from place to place because the gang keeps getting into too much trouble.

The fragmenting of teams needs more attention. My group uses a follow the sun model that has our team split up across at least seven countries, plus a decent chunk are always contracted through a vendor. Add in remote workers, and it’s very difficult to see an effective way to organize.

It’s definitely become more of a thing in the past 10-15 years. When I was a kid, outside of ice cream there was just Del’s. The hot wiener trucks did not come our way I guess… or they didn’t want to compete with the brick and mortar ny systems.

I’m thrilled with the food culture we have now though. We punch way above our weight when it comes to food.

Rarely. I don’t think I ever have two years in a row.

Usually only if I’m very sure it’s a game I will get a lot of playtime out of due to past titles. For instance, I did pre-order Civ 7 because prior Civs have been the best hours-enjoyed-per-dollar investments I’ve ever made. No exaggeration, even accounting for DLCs I bought at full price.