bonestamp2

My kids use Alexa for listening to (spotify) music more than anything else. If Alexa could convince my kids that Amazon music is better than Spotify, then I'd pay for amazon music instead of spotify. So far, there hasn't been any serious attempt at getting us to embrace amazon music.

If I was amazon, it would look like this. "Oh hey, you want to play Taylor Swift? Well, it looks like your brother is playing spotify on a different Alexa device. Would you like to play Taylor Swift using Amazon Music?" No ads. No bullshit. For 1 month.

After that month, then it would say "It looks like your Brother is playing music on a different Alexa device. Sign up for Amazon music to play up to 5 different streams on alexa and elsewhere." (something that is possible, but more challenging to do with spotify on alexa devices).

I agree the results should be free for personal use, but not for commercial use (such as training paid AIs). Training free AIs is probably fine. Similar to how it's free to use google maps in your project if your use is free to everyone, but you must pay if you're charging people to use it.

Very cool. It would be awesome if you could lift some of the major contributors of the accident/death up to the top (wet conditions, driver was drinking, driving too fast, etc).

Yes, I already heard one manager at my company today say they're getting a mac for their next computer. That's great, the whole management team shouldn't be on Windows. The engineering team is already pretty diversified between mac, windows, and linux. The next one might take down all 3 but at least we tried to diversify the risk.

> without even the most basic level of qualification

That was my first thought too. Our company does firmware updates to hundreds of thousands of devices every month and those updates always go through 3 rounds of internal testing, then to a couple dozen real world users who we have a close relationship with (and we supply them with spare hardware that is not on the early update path in case there is a problem with an early rollout). Then the update goes to a small subset of users who opt in to those updates, then they get rolled out in batches to the regular users in case we still somehow missed something along the way. Nothing has ever gotten past our two dozen real world users.

> so the app doesn’t have to do anything with that

It's probably useful for knowing roughly where you are, and location is used for context. For example, you're connected to your home wifi so when you ask for the weather it can use that location quickly without looking up your location from an IP location service. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I do see how it could be useful... not to mention locking GPS satellites more quickly.

> sell it to someone who will make it uterly shitty

Imgur is still good. It's just not great anymore, and it's a long way from shitty.

California is working on a "passive speed limiter" law. It's basically just a verbal warning that the driver has exceeded the posted speed limit by 10+ mph.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a60871999/california-passi...

My last 3 cars have had this feature and there are more false positives than not because none of them had a perfect map of the speed limits, so they'd often get triggered in places where I was not speeding, or they get triggered on a Saturday when you're driving through a "__MPH Speed Limit when children are present" zone.

Comparing a "boring" 2020 vintage car to simple software is insane since that boring car is full of complex software, not to mention it's a network of at least 40 separate computers. A 2020 model probably has a bus firewall or gateway as well.

> I’ve driven it 40,000 miles and I’ve never had to take it in for maintenance

That car should have been in for at least 4 oil changes (maintenance) in that mileage -- more if not using synthetic oil.

Is it fair to assume this is used for fingerprinting/tracking users?

I did that for several years. I don't really consider it voting though because nobody is counting the votes -- they still sell out of tickets with higher profits each year.

I guess it depends on your definition of scalper. It prevents mom and pop from reselling their unwanted tickets. If they stopped there and prevented all reselling I'd be fine with that even though I'd lose out on some money in this one case.

But then they literally built a whole platform (link in my last comment) for actual scalpers to resell tickets in bulk. So, they're not trying to prevent scalping, they're just ensuring that only their "partners" can scalp.

I have purchased secondary tickets outside of TicketMaster many times and the fee has always been lower. But, that's anecdotal of course... there's no reason why they couldn't be higher. But, let's leave the actual fee amount aside for a moment...

I'm slightly less concerned with the actual amount of the fee and more concerned with the fact that ticket scalping has apparently become legal and that the original ticket seller is not only in on it, but getting even higher fees on the scalped tickets than the original tickets.

It's disturbing that it's illegal to scalp a single ticket in person outside an event, but if someone does it online with hundreds of tickets then they're a "ticket broker" and that's legal (in California at least).

There's another good point in here. Why do they hold the ticket until just before the event? I bought tickets to a concert for my wife's favorite band. Then, my wife's work scheduled an event for that same week and she had to leave town. So, what I really wanted was a refund so someone else could buy the tickets. They don't do that of course. So, then I wanted to sell the tickets for face value... but ticketmaster didn't "deliver" the tickets to my account until the day before the event!

I watched for a month leading up to the event as the ticket prices plummeted while the scalpers were desperate to get at least something for their tickets before my ticket was even delivered to me.

As soon as they take my money, they should update the database to show that the ticket is mine. If I want to sell it, I should be able to do that immediately too.

But, from what I've read, that instant resale ability only belongs to their "partners" who resell a lot of tickets, and you need access to their "TradeDesk" tool to do it: https://tradedesk.ticketmaster.com

Actually, TicketMaster was involved in each transaction. Let's revisit the first paragraph: "TicketMaster is taking massive fees each time the same ticket is sold."

I'll lay it out in detail so it's more clear: TicketMaster sold the original ticket to the scalper. Then the scalper listed the ticket on TicketMaster's secondary market. Then I bought the ticket on TicketMaster's secondary market and TicketMaster collected a $50/ticket fee from me. TicketMaster also collected a fee on each ticket the first time TicketMaster sold those tickets to the scalper.

TicketMaster also charges the scalper a fee to list the ticket, so TicketMaster actually made more than the $50/ticket fee that they collected from me.

It's also possible that the ticket was sold on TicketMaster's secondary market several times before I bought it on TicketMaster's secondary market, which would allow TicketMaster to collect many fees on the same ticket.

> but I am sure people have a choice

Often, they do not. The DOJ is currently suing TicketMaster because they have exclusive agreements with nearly all of the large venues and that prevents those venues from using other ticket providers. To be fair to TicketMaster, they argue they are not a monopoly because there are many smaller venues that they are not exclusive with.

But, TicketMaster even requires that artists use TicketMaster's promotional agency if they want access to these large venues.

And more evil stuff! Details here...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-live-...

For sure. Additional info... many libraries also let you stream movies through kanopy.com, and read/listen to e-books through the app Libby.

Yep, I've bought 3 laser printers over the past 30 years... 1 about every 10 years, and not because I needed to... because I wanted more features. I've passed the old models down to others and they're still running. Toner never dries out, heads don't need cleaning. I would never buy another inkjet. The only use I can see for inkjet is photo printing, and even then I'd rather get them done at CVS or walgreens unless it is a special size or printing material that they can't handle.

A brother laser can often be had for $100 these days.

Yes, non-transferable tickets would fix the scalping part of it. I'm guessing the face value would go up a lot in that case, and that's fine... at least it's an honest market then and ticketmaster cannot pass the blame on to the scalpers.

I can't confirm what they said, but TicketMaster does have a "partner" reseller program for scalpers where they have tools to help scalpers list and manage resale tickets in bulk. They also have events where they help teach scalpers how to make more money, which is good for TicketMaster since it makes even more money on secondary sales. Ticket scalping used to be illegal, and now TicketMaster is helping facilitate it.

Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-...

Scalping aside, TicketMaster is taking massive fees each time the same ticket is sold. For example, I went to an event last year and the fee was $50 on each ticket, and these were reseller tickets so TicketMaster had already taken a fee on each of those tickets at least once already (perhaps more than once).

TicketMaster also owns many venues or has exclusive deals with most large venues that prevent those venues from using any other ticket selling platform. The DOJ is currently investigating this monopoly. TicketMaster alleges it is not a monopoly since there are many smaller venues that they are not involved with.

This is my experience too. After buying Affinity licenses, I don't want to pay Adobe their monthly rake too, but I do.

It can be a chicken/egg problem. If you run a meetup, you need to meet regularly to create a community and keep members engaged. If you want to meet relatively regularly then you need something to meet about. Sometimes it's hard to get someone to present, so you have to fallback to people who need more incentive to present.

In a perfect world, a great sponsor would provide a free space for everyone to meet and great community members would spend hours preparing amazing content to teach the community something without gaining much for themselves. But, that combination is pretty rare these days unfortunately.

I know some groups meet at a city library (many of them have meeting rooms that can be booked for free or for a small fee).

We had this same problem and ended up starting a (non-profit) makerspace where we now host several meetups. It's win/win really. We are all about building community and bringing people together with similar interests is a great way to do that. It has also helped us get more paying members.

Thank you for drawing attention to this. Whenever I've scrolled past that option in the settings, I incorrectly assumed how it works and it's actually much more useful than I realized. I've adjusted my settings accordingly and I'll give it a chance. Thanks again.

Should probably just do a layer of stones under the whole fence... then you'd get that benefit for all of the boards that are close to the ground and not just the posts.

Exactly, and not just the same area code, the spammers often have the same prefix as my phone number too... so it looks like someone "just around the corner".

Reminds me of my parents... they live close enough to the US border that they just have a US cell phone plan. The plan is $50/mo/line USD and includes unlimited data/calling/text in Canada/US/Mexico. But because they live so close they're not actually roaming most of the time, and they're snow birds so they're in the US half the year anyway. They found the same thing as you... any calls from the same area code as their phone numbers was definitely not for them since it was somewhere very far away and they don't have any business there.

Or maybe telecommunications in general need disruption. Instead of having a number that anyone in the world can call, I should provide an abstract identity to a contact. When I approve that entity to contact me, and they get a unique identifier that only their identity can use to contact me, I decide how important their calls are to me:

1. Phone rings no matter what (doctors and other high profile contacts that I do not want to miss a call from)

2. Phone rings unless sleep mode active (family/friends). A second call within 3 minutes rings through in case of emergency.

3. Call goes straight to pre-recorded message (generic or unique to that identity) that tells them to text me their message/request (or when AI gets good enough, and it doesn't seem like it there yet for all accents, it transcribes their voicemail message).

4. Caller can leave a message but it is completely ignored by me and I don't know they left a message unless I go and check my spam folder.

I can change the call handling of any identity at any time, and there should also be an email and text message layer on top of this system so the same rules apply and I choose who can contact me with those methods as well.

I recently setup a focus profile on my iPhone that only lets calls ring through from knowns contacts. There is going to be an adjustment period as I discover people and companies (such as doctors/hospitals) that I want to allow calls from and add them to the whitelist. But otherwise, it has been really nice to cut down on all of the interruptions.