That might sound strange at first, but we've seen enough now to know that this will inevitably mean that a lot of manufacturers will follow this model.
I can imagine deals where you get a huge 'rebate' if you permanently enable the ad-feature (the on-screen wizard will blow one of those tiny fuses as its final step, locking the device to that setting). That effectively mandates that the price for the device is its selling price minus the huge rebate, and the whole market will adjust to that.
"Telly" [1] is a real 55" TV that is available for free. It is designed to always, constantly be running advertisements.
> To reserve a Telly, you must agree to use the device as the main TV in your home, constantly keep it connected to the internet, and regularly watch it. If the company finds that you violate these rules, Telly will ask you to return the TV (and charge a $1,000 fee if you don’t send it back).
The product website isn't convincing either. It's only in private beta, and the first example shows 'A scenic walking tour of Venice' as the desired trip. I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice, including all highlights people write and post about a lot on social media to show how great their life is. But if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically? I thought you hated crowds — have you considered less crowded alternatives where you will be appreciated more as a tourist? Have you actually been to Italy at all?'.
LLMs are always going to give you the most plausible thing for your query, and will likely just rehash the same destinations from hundreds of listicles and status signalling social media posts.
She probably understood this from the minimal description given.
> I'll readily believe LLMs will gladly give you some sort of itinerary for walking in Venice
I tried this in Crotone in September. The suggested walking tour was shit. The facts weren't remarkable. The stops were stupid and stupidly laid out. The whole experience was dumb and only redeeming because I was vacationing with a friend who founded on the of the AI companies.
> if you asked anyone knowledgable about travel in that region, the counter questions would be 'Why Venice specifically?
In the region? Because it's a gorgeous city with beautiful architecture, history and festivals?
> In the region? Because it's a gorgeous city with beautiful architecture, history and festivals?
That would be a great answer to continue from. Would you come for the Biennale specifically? Do you care greatly about sustainability? Would you enjoy yourself more in a different gorgeous city without the mass-tourism problem if that meant you would feel more welcome? Is there a way you can visit Venice without contributing to the issue as much? Off-season perhaps?
Venice is unique, but there are a lot of gorgeous places in the region, from Verona to Trieste.
If it’s your first time going to Italy you absolutely should visit Venice. The crowds are unpleasant, but so what?
Are you going to avoid Rome too? Only go to little provincial villages?
Why should you absolutely visit Venice? It's not just the crowds that are unpleasant, you are actively contributing to a problem.
No, you don't have to avoid Rome — it's not as bad as Venice, and can support more people — but plan ahead and don't just do a tour of all the 'must see' highlights. Look into the off season if you are a history buff with a hyperfocus on Rome — you won't be able to finish your list otherwise due to all the pointless waiting around.
And yes, visit provincial villages and eat in an authentic Italian restaurant where tourists are mostly other Italians. Experience the difference. But you are not limited to villages. Italy is huge, and there are a lot of cities with remarkable museums, world-renowned festivals, great cuisine, and where your money is more than welcome and your stay won't be marred by extreme crowds and pushy con artists in faux Roman gladiator gear.
My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.
And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person.
> My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board.
My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.
Nothing says "this product is useful" quite like forcing people to use it and punishing people who don't. If it was that good, there'd be organic demand to use it. People would be begging to use it, going around their boss's back to use it.
The fact that companies have to force you to use it with quotas and threats is damning.
> My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.
“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”
Yeah. Well. There are company that require TPS reports, too.
It's mostly a sign leadership has lost reasoning capability if it's mandatory.
But no, reporting isn't necessarily the problem. There are plenty of places that use reporting to drive a conversation on what's broken, and why it's broken for their workflow, and then use that to drive improvement.
It's only a problem if the leadership stance is "Haha! We found underpants gnome step 2! Make underpants number go up, and we are geniuses". Sadly not as rare as one would hope, but still stupid.
> And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport company, whatever. You call them, because online contact means haggling with an AI chatbot first to finally give up and shunt you over to an actual person who can help, and contact forms and e-mail have been killed off. Calling is not exactly as bad, but step one nowadays is 'please describe what you're calling for', where some LLM will try to parse that, fail miserably, and then shunt you to an actual person
All of this predates LLMs (what “AI” means today) becoming a useful product. All of this happened already with previous generations of “AI”.
It was just even shittier than the version we have today.
It was also shittier than the version we had before it (human receptionists).
This is what I always think of when I imagine how AI will change the world and daily life. Automation doesn't have to be better (for the customer, for the person using it, for society) in order to push out the alternatives. If the automation is cheap enough, it can be worse for everyone, and still change everything. Those are the niches in ehich I'm most certain will be here to stay— because sometimes, it hardly matters if it's any good.
It isn't a universal thing. I have no doubt there is a job out there that that isn't a requirement. I think the issue is the C-level folks are seeing how more productive someone might be and making it a demand. That to me is the wrong approach. If you demonstrate and build interest, the adoption will happen.
As opposed to reaching, say, somebody in an offshored call center with an utterly undecipherable accent reading a script at you? Without any room for deviation?
Is this conjecture or actually done? Bricklink Buyers expect Lego bricks, including the trademark on each stud, so any shop sending anything not produced by the Lego Group, but with the trademark on it, would be sending actual counterfeit products, not third party bricks.
Buying actual Lego bricks produced in whichever Lego factory and reselling them is not counterfeiting.
It is mere conjecture, I have no datapoints to support this. I would assume, since Bricklink sends worldwide, that you would not open a support case when buying a couple of $ worth of parts if they are non-original. The effort of return shippment probably not worth it. I could also imagine that you can buy china-manufactured parts that carry the lego logo.
i highly doubt that. i have never seen a counterfeit lego set with an actual lego logo. even in china that would not be legal. someone would have to specifically target bricklink shops to sell such bricks.
if you get fake bricks you might not open a support case to get the bricks replaced, but you would complain and report that shop. with enough reports coming in someone would look into that. so i feel that this is unlikely to happen. at the worst case it's someone clueless, mixing in alternative brands by accident. but i expect someone doing that intentionally would be shut down quickly by reputation only. i mean, shops get closed simply because they get to many complaints about taking to long to ship.
> i highly doubt that. i have never seen a counterfeit lego set with an actual lego logo
Question: do the legit brick manufacturers equal the quality of Lego? I picked up a Lego-compatible set years ago, and it didn't quite fit with Lego blocks (I'm assuming due to poorer tolerances).
I admit I have no knowledge here, but if 100% compatibility is possible, faking the logo doesn't seem like a high bar. If you were buying fake individual bricks (not sets), how would you even know?
the quality is generally equal, but there is more variety i suppose. what you describe sounds like extremely bad quality. if you can share the brand then maybe someone can give more insights.
producing bricks with a LEGO logo is a low bar. selling them is more difficult. you need to sell a lot of them to make it worth it. in order to sell them at scale on bricklink you would need to target a lot of stores. how would you do that without the storeowners knowing? a single store would not sell enough without being noticed.
I would disagree. Quality is a hit-and-miss. I have some cheap chinese manufactured bricks that are far off the lego quality, and some others which have on-par quality and better color consitency.
yes, but it depends on the brand. there are some brands that have reliably good quality, and some that don't. i have been buying various brands in china for 10 years now and the quality was always decent or good.
>i have never seen a counterfeit lego set with an actual lego logo
how would you know? you may never have seen a crappy you-could-tell-it-was-counterfeit with the lego logo, but a high quality copy? that can't be beyond reach of injection molders
see my other comment on how unlikely it is that someone is able to sell that. they can fake the bricks, but faking a complete set with a box and instructions is much harder and even in china that can't be sold openly. you would have to distribute the bricks just like you distribute counterfeit money. how likely is that? there would have to be a black market for that. the only way to sell bricks without packaging in volume is on sites like ebay. but even there you probably can't sell that much fast enough to make it profitable without anyone noticing.
If a store actually delivers counterfeit bricks, returning them is not relevant. Bricklink stores rely heavily on their reputation, so anyone pulling a stunt like this would have to start over and over again.
> I could also imagine that you can buy china-manufactured parts that carry the lego logo.
It wouldn't gain the manufacturer anything, but cost them in terms of liability. It would also mean they can't sell bricks made with such moulds to any party which very much does not want get into a trademark dispute with the Lego Group. So it is very, very unlikely.
There are plenty of cowboys out there who produce sets which look way too much like Lego sets (boxes and all), and which violate the trademark by having logos which sort of look like the Lego logo if you squint, but bricks with the literal Lego logo on them would blow away any sort of defence based on plausible deniability.
This goes for much of Europe. 'Peanuts' is hardly known. Everybody over the age of 40 knows Snoopy, mostly by virtue of it being a strong brand with lots of merchandise in the eighties/nineties.
It's not only normal, it is completely to be expected. Even if you have only one project, there will come a time when one branch will be used to test the jump from 17 to 24 or something like that, so you'll work on that, but also switch back to the master branch when a colleague needs some help there.
sdk use java xxx
And done. A new LTS is released? Just sdk install it. Set the one you use most as default, and focus on the project instead of managing JDKs.
Oh, and very occasionally you'll actually get hit by a bug within one Java major version (like when they removed historic offsets from the timezone database included in the JVM, that was fun). At that point being able to switch between minor versions easily is quite nice.
> there will come a time when one branch will be used to test the jump from 17 to 24 or something like that, so you'll work on that, but also switch back to the master branch when a colleague needs some help there.
But can you not just install 24 on your dev box and use that to work on either branch, maybe with -source/-target arguments? It never used to be a problem to develop with a newer JVM even if it was an older project.
Note: Java compiler versions from 9 onwards have lost the ability to -target 1.5 and earlier.
Sometimes you still need Java 8 to compile for super old programs — think decades old IoT devices too small to handle newer JVMs that you still need to do the occasional minor update for.
But really sdkman is just nice to be able to quickly install and quickly switch jvms without worrying about any opinions the os package manager may have. If I want an old jre8, do I need to fuss around with finding the right package repo for my arch etc, or should I just use sdkman and be done with it.
Ideally, yes. In the real world? Nope. The longer you work one some project, the bigger the chance you will run into some edge case determined by the major version of the JDK. It just happens.
Even if you do all developing on the latest LTS, you will want to be able to switch to whatever version is running on the dev or prod application servers to replicate a bug as closely as possible.
By the way, you are ignoring the case I mentioned where a JDK bug happened between one minor version and the next.
> Even if you do all developing on the latest LTS, you will want to be able to switch to whatever version is running on the dev or prod application servers to replicate a bug as closely as possible.
Occasionally, sure. But is it really frequent enough to worry about?
> By the way, you are ignoring the case I mentioned where a JDK bug happened between one minor version and the next.
I am, because I don't see why it's a case you'd worry about. Just install the version without the bug.
I mean sure, I can see some minor advantages to making it easy to change JDK versions. But for how often you want to do that, it really doesn't seem worth the overhead of having another moving part in your setup.
Just install the version without the bug? Have you never developed software in a company?
Sometimes the JDK version you are targetting cannot be changed at that time, for a variety of reasons, most beyond your control.
Sometimes the JDK contains or triggers a bug you need to workaround and test in various minor versions.
Sometimes you need to switch to the exact minor version used in production.
Often you need to switch JDKs even within a single project, more often with several projects.
In the years that I've used SDKMan the number of times I invoked it to switch JDK versions in a terminal was more than once on hundreds of days (along with hundreds of days where whatever I set it to was fine for weeks on end). All painless, quick, and easy. Why wouldn't anyone involved in developing Java in a corporate setting make life easier on themselves? Those are not 'minor advantages', those are major time and mental overhead savers. It's a trivial tool to install and maintain too with almost no overhead for me to worry about. And if it breaks? Then the last version I configured will just keep working, and I can spend maybe half an hour to set up an alternative. That hasn't happened yet, so for a tool I've been using for a decade or so, that's pretty good.
I've hit JVM bugs in my professional career, sure. I just don't see the scenario where you'd need to be switching back and forth more than occasionally.
If you're running x.0.3 in production, you'd run x.0.3 locally. If there's a JVM bug that your application hits on x.0.3, either it's a showstopper in which case you'll find a way to upgrade/fix production quickly, or it's something you can tolerate, in which case you can tolerate it in local dev too. If you decide it's time to upgrade to x.0.4, you'd upgrade to x.0.4 locally, test a bit, then upgrade to x.0.4 in production. What's the scenario where you need to keep switching between x.0.3 and x.0.4 locally? You upgraded application Y to x.0.4, then discovered that application Z hits a showstopper bug and needs to stay on x.0.3? That's not a situation that you let fester for months, you either fix or work around the bug pretty quickly, or you decide that x.0.4 is too buggy and put everything back to x.0.3, and for that short period sure theoretically you would want to develop application Y under x.0.4 but the risk of developing it under x.0.3 is pretty damn small.
I get the argument that the cost is pretty low. It's just this is addressing something that really doesn't feel like a problem for me, and something that I don't think should be acceptable for it to be a problem. The JVM always used to be something you could upgrade almost fearlessly, and I think there was a lot of value in that.
The update-java-alternatives tool is suitable for adjusting the JDK for everything at once, but it lacks the ease of use of something like SDKMan when you have one project stuck at Java 8 and another on 11, and another on 17, or perhaps you're testing a branch on 24, etc.
Then it's just:
sdk use java 11.0.29-tem
And in that terminal it will use that, while another terminal happily uses a different version. That's useful when you are running two tools on different Java versions which interact. Installing another version is trivial too.
Horrific, I imagine. Brewer's mash is usually a little below 70°C. If someone fell in they probably survived with extensive scalding and died later from infection.
I imagine "suddenly" would be things like a heart attack – if you're not taking measurements as the patient is dying, you don't know enough to deduce it from symptoms, and don't perform an autopsy, it's hard to tell what happened.
If the main purpose of this was to satisfy people's morbid curiosity that makes a lot of sense. Maybe they made up some juicy deaths in slow news weeks even.
The author obviously has this as an acquired habit or affectation, possibly for stylistic reasons. It's interesting that some people can read this just as well as normal prose, but to others it feels as if someone is pouring sand all over their well-oiled gears. I gave up after a paragraph as well.
I fully support people writing in whatever way pleases them, but for broadly accessible article length text capitalisation is a must in English. Not because it is 'correct', but because many readers rely on capitalisation.
Many readers rely on articles being written in a specific language, does that mean every writer is obligated to publish every piece in every language?
Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
Maybe it's because I studied poetry, or because I was a voracious reader of experimental writing when I was younger, but I've probably worked my way through thousands of pages of uncapitalized or unconventionally capitalized writing; I can empathize if it's more difficult for you to read (personally I would consider an absence of paragraph breaks a nearly-unforgivable travesty), and I wouldn't even deny you the opportunity to complain about it.
But I think calling it "a must" for accessibility is perhaps overstating it a bit.
There is no obligation at all (my comment did not include any must beyond that being a requirement for broadly accessible text either). Merely the observation that if you want to write accessible text in any chosen language, following conventions means that you expand your reach.
Experimental language has its place. I can quite enjoy that too depending on the context. But combining the wish to convey a story or message with avant-garde text layout turns it into something more akin to art. I'm not always in the mood for that, in part because it is more taxing to engage with. In this case I figure the goal of the author is for readers to hear their story, not grapple with their specific manner of self-expression. Of course if their life goal is to make lowercase text common and acceptable, then this may be completely on point. My point about the accessibility of the text still stands though.
> Has it occurred to anyone who sees capitalization as a must-have for legibility, that an opportunity is being presented to train oneself to read text without traditional capitalization?
I can train myself to read text upside-down as well, or in Klingon, or with no spaces at all. I have no wish to do so, since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers. Besides, being able to read well because you have a solid grasp on the conventions, lexicon, and idioms used is a net benefit to me. Our brains are pattern matching machines after all — pattern recognition is what we humans excel in. If have no desire to diminish that skill either.
> since most authors seem to regard such text as unnecessarily harsh on their readers.
To push back on this, following convention is often the easy thing to do (so not something regarded versus defaulted to).
There's a literary history of form influencing story; there was even a story about a famous example of this on HN recently that discussed this year's Nobel laureate—who notably publishes long novels that play with punctuation conventions: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-high-brodernism/
I find that people who make a point out of violating writing norms as part of their house style typically don't have thoughts worth communicating. Nothing is missed by not training myself instead of reading something that flows smoothly.
Generally agree with that, but in this particular case I don't think this text was designed to be broadly accessible, given the content and the platform (little indie website).
Edit: checked out some of their other posts and they don't always use this style. Seems like a pretty deliberate choice here.
I can imagine deals where you get a huge 'rebate' if you permanently enable the ad-feature (the on-screen wizard will blow one of those tiny fuses as its final step, locking the device to that setting). That effectively mandates that the price for the device is its selling price minus the huge rebate, and the whole market will adjust to that.
Just ban advertising on those devices.
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