Technically neither of those cars would be net environmentally friendly though. The mining operations to produce the cobalt required to produce EV batteries, including the hybrid electric engine of the Prius line, produces enough greenhouse gasses in the production of a single Hybrid/EV car to completely eclipse the lifetime operating emissions of a single ICE car.

Considering the Prius also has emissions, albeit fewer overall compared to a non-hybrid vehicle, it’s arguably worse than economy ICE alternatives over their lifespan. The electricity that powers the Tesla might be “clean”, but if it was produced by burning fossil fuels at a power plant, it’s just shifting the method of combustion from local (petroleum in the tank to feed the combustion engine) to centralized (shoveling coal into a furnace at a power plant) as powergrids will need to continue to ramp up production of electricity to power everybody’s cars now too.

When insurance companies start writing policies that allow me to pay less for coverage if my car operates entirely autonomously, that’s when I’ll start taking car automation seriously. Until then, I’ll assume all of these car companies and robotaxi services are just blowing smoke up my ass trying to convince me that this is the future of driving. Sure, it might be in somebody’s future, but as long as I’m liable for what my car does while it’s in motion, I’m going to insist that I remain in control of the vehicle. Lane/braking assist are all wonderful, but it shouldn’t be a substitute for human awareness, it should be a supplement.

I imagine that a university level coding assignment and the backend code that runs the Twitter.com website (albeit just fractions of it) are several orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of size and complexity. I don’t know shit about programming though, I took C++ in high school and got a D+. Should’ve called the class Introduction to D++.

I signed up to do the free IRS filing but got rejected unfortunately because I had entered into a domestic partnership which made me ineligible. Not really sure why since I was filing single anyway but oh well, this is good news and I can’t wait to try it next year.

Yes, this is also true. I see things like UBI as an inevitable necessity, because AI and automation in general will eliminate the need for most companies to employ humans. Our capitalistic system is set up in a way such that a person can sell their ability to work and provide value to the owner class, but if that dynamic is ever challenged on a fundamental level, it will violently collapse when people who can’t get jobs because a robot replaced them either reject automation to preserve the status quo or embrace a new dynamic that provides for the population’s basic needs without requiring them to be productive.

But the way that managers talk about AI makes it sound like the techbros have convinced everybody that AI is far more powerful than it currently is, which is a glorified chatbot with access to unfiltered Google search results.

People down vote me when I point this out in response to “AI will take our jobs” doomerism.

Meta is a private company and can do whatever the fuck they like.

This guy shouldn’t be let anywhere near a position of decision making, let alone the highest office in the nation.

“Just walk out” was a cool idea, but I’m not sure the way they tried to implement it would have ever been successful even if they had perfected the technology. The fact that they tried to disguise it as a fully automated system when they had a team of thousands of people overseas analyzing the footage is disturbing. I like the idea of just having the scanner in the basket much better. It’s still more convenient/efficient than a checkout line or a kiosk and it helps you keep track of your total balance.

I’ve never actually been to one of these stores. They seem pretty scarce.

Okay, I was expecting something a lot worse than what the article describes. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but at least these ads seem somewhat topical and also give tangible rewards for doing something that you might do already anyway (stream a game to a couple of friends in a private Discord server). Maybe I’m misinterpreting the change, but this doesn’t seem that bad?

I’m not sure what everyone’s hangup is about Discord. My group that I play video games with swapped over to Discord from Skype years ago and it’s still a good experience. You want to hear about enshittification? Just look at what they did to Skype over the years. That platform is completely unusable now.

I doubt Discord will remain totally useable forever, but at least there are budding alternatives out there that might be able to carry the torch if Discord can’t continue it’s freemium service. One that I’ve tried in the past is Guilded and they are sort of like a Discord clone if you really want the same general user experience - pseudoforum live chat with VOIP lobbies, streaming capabilities, etc. I tried it out and it was fine but not worth swapping everyone on our Discord server to the new one since it wasn’t substantially different or better in any way.

Night in the Woods is an okay story/adventure game, but man the soundtrack for that game is a real earworm. Years later now and some of the town jingles still pop into my head randomly. RIP to the composer who passed away way too young.

Imagine being in /r/centuryclub but still not being cool enough to get into the real exclusive club - Group 1 reddit IPO.

The motive was that the car drove down a crowded Chinatown street during Chinese New Year. I imagine something similar might happen if a human driver tried to do the same thing. Not saying the vandals were right to wreck the car, but you don’t just creep a car down a busy street during a festival and expect nothing bad to happen to it when crowd mentality/anonymity takes over. Especially when there’s no driver so no immediate consequences/accountability. I think it was quite fortunate that it was not transporting a passenger at the time.

TurboTax lobbys the US Government heavily to keep free alternatives from existing. At one point in time, the IRS was going to allow everyone to be able to report their taxes directly via their website and Intuit and the rest of the tax preparation software developers moved heaven and earth to kill the legislation that would have allowed it.

So, to answer the question, there’s nothing wrong with TurboTax except for the fact that it’s run by a private company that charges you a fee for something that the federal government could operate for free. If you want to keep paying a 3rd party to send the IRS the information they already have, then the system works just fine.

No, those are usually embedded into the video itself as a segment by the content creator. However, SponsorBlock works really well and will automatically skip those bits for you (assuming someone else already put in the effort to mark the sponsored content).

The cooled seats, passenger visibility, handling characteristics, acceleration, speed, and steer-by-wire system were also appreciated. The fact that the truck gets a lot of attention, including from people who want to touch the pickup and take photos, not so much.

So they bought the attention seeker pickup truck, but got more attention than they bargained for? lol

It depends a lot on the specific store, but I don’t usually have to wait in a line longer than about 3 people and it moves quick.

On one hand, I agree with the video that the system doesn’t solve the problem of lines at the supermarket. It was fairly obvious that they never anticipated queuing because there’s never a dedicated section for where to stand while you wait for the next available terminal, so the line often spills into the end of some aisle and blocks all the cross traffic trying to navigate to the other end of the store.

On the other, it’s not like we’re going to go back to not having to stand around and wait if we get cashiers back filling the old school checkout lines.

IMO, the way forward is going to be to eliminate pay stations altogether and do either RFID tags on all the items so you are just charged for what you take while walking out of the store, or you have a scanner in the cart so you can total up all your purchases as you shop, reducing friction at checkout.

We’re obviously talking about consumer contract law here, so the point of business relationships falling apart is moot.

If cable companies could prove to me that them pressing a button to cancel my service merits the exorbitant cancellation fees that they charge, then maybe I’d change my opinion.

I find it hard to believe that anybody who hasn’t had a frontal lobotomy or isn’t a corpo ratfucker could ever be in favor of early termination fees as a legitimate and healthy business practice.

There’s no way in hell this shit doesn’t completely flop, right? Like, who in their right mind would buy this garbage aside from techbros riding Elon’s pole?

I’ve never spoken with a Tesla employee, current or former, who hasn’t corroborated this information about working conditions. Doesn’t matter if you are a line worker in the factory or an engineer in the design offices, you are expected to put work above all else, keep your nose down and your mouth shut.

I’ll never buy a Tesla because of the shit that I’ve heard about how they treat their employees there, let alone that dipshit Musk spouting off about full self driving and never following through.