brvsft

At this point, I don't understand what the fuck you people are talking about. This is an article about people paying for subscriptions they don't use, not people ruining their goddamn lives. The hyperbole is extensive, is this article posted to some Socialist Discord so everyone can raid the comments? Why is this level of bad faith discussion occurring?

I can understand suggesting that services like this, especially when using tech like Apple Pay, have made it too easy to 'check out' through a trial process, but the language is still over-the-top since the user is still clearly considering the product as potentially useful to go through the effort of signing up for a trial or an actual sub. (And on the flipside, Apple Pay, e.g., makes it easy to see all subs in one place and cancel them in one place, so it has that going for it.)

And of course, what illegal practices are you talking about? I'm going to guess most people here aren't blaming the victim if a practice is actually illegal. But I see you're being hyperbolic so maybe I shouldn't bother.

(And when they're not being loud, they're being cute, and it's a tempting and easy distraction to go spend some time with them in the middle of a work day.)

In this sort of dynamic, I see working at an office as a fairly healthy option. I know it's a bit of an outlier (SAH mother + WFH father), but I'm definitely more productive and less stressed out working from an office.

Where are you taking this analogy?

This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.

It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.

The linked article from Irish Examiner has a more accurate title:

> Porn sites may require passport details in order to stop children from using them

How would you detect that these requests are coming from the same "system?"

We're talking about people who 'friended' others on 23andme, right? How is that responsible user behavior? I had an account with 23andme before I forced them to delete my data, which was not that difficult to do.

One of the things I remember was getting friend invites from random people who were distant cousins, and while I suppose that might be fun conceptually, I never did it because I didn't know any of these people. In what world does a "responsible" user who cares about their privacy add access to personal information, on a website that profiles your DNA, to people who are blood-related but still total strangers? I would call that highly irresponsible, personally. But that's just me, an idiot who avoided all of this by deleting my 23andme account half a decade ago.

RIP Alec Baldwin

I don't inherently disagree, but proponents would point out that the alternative also costs money and has other costs (especially for victims where a person turns back to crime after being released from prison).

It's unfortunate I don't think there's any source of data I can trust on the costs in either direction. So to me, it ultimately comes down to what value I'd prefer to see in society. I stand somewhere along the lines of: (1) these men did their time and deserve a second chance and (2) one of the worst things you can do with a violent criminal is release them early, before they're rehabilitated, to see them go on to hurt another victim.

I used to hate eggs, and now I love them, and I am aware of that change in my taste. The concept that tastes change is not new to me. I also used to love Oreos, and I still do. They do not taste significantly different. Chocolate chip cookies, in general, still taste good to me, especially slightly under-baked ones (which the "Chewy" Chips Ahoy resembled in texture when I enjoyed them as a kid).

The fact that, in current day, I would despise this one type of chocolate chip cookie that I used to like--and also while still enjoying other cookies and chocolate chip cookies, and fully understanding that tastes change--seems to be an absurd scenario compared to the distinct possibility that something changed in the way they make the cookies. Also, considering Kraft (which owned Nabisco which owned Chips Ahoy) split up in 2012, I'd be more surprised if they didn't decide to make changes to some of their recipes.

However, I do remember at one point trying baijiu (白酒), and it ruined the taste of sodas and diet sodas to me for several months. It was an abrupt but temporary change. No idea how that works, but the taste (really the smell) became unbearably similar to baijiu. Kind of want to try baijiu again now that I think about it.

* writing blog posts and outline for blog posts

* writing SEO descriptions

Generally though, its output was just a starting point, and I'd have to make a lot of edits of my own to actually include something of a writer's voice, remove any errors, etc.

I also found it fun to use ChatGPT to generate descriptive 'image alt text' for scenes and then plug that text into ComfyUI and A1111 to generate images. There were some cases where I was generating patterns and would use it to give me long lists of ideas for things, like I'll ask it "give me 20 ideas for christmas-themed patterns" and it spits out a bunch of stuff like "merry reindeer." Some of it isn't exactly usable, but it's also easier to have ChatGPT generate 100+ ideas than to do that yourself, which becomes pretty tedious past ten (for me).

I'm looking into using it for language learning, although I trust it less than something like Duolingo, which I already don't trust. I'm wondering how I can 'chat' with it in a different language and make sure that it correctly corrects my grammar and is also using proper grammar itself. Not sure how useful that could be, but if anyone else has had success with this, I'm interested in hearing how.

I think this sums it up well. People mostly don't know or care about how hedonic regression is used in CPI (myself included, on knowing). I don't think the process is easy to understand nor transparent (although I may be wrong here).

But BLS denies this assessment (and it's not 100% related to the article posted, but closely related to your comment I think):

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo...

> When the cost of food rises, does the CPI assume that consumers switch to less desired foods, such as substituting hamburger for steak?

> No. ...

> Is the use of "hedonic quality adjustment" in the CPI simply a way of lowering the inflation rate?

> No. ...

Obviously, they provide their own explanations, but I'm not going to paste the whole thing. This is definitely something I'd like to understand better though. Especially every time I complain about how Chewy Chips Ahoy or some other product I enjoyed in my childhood is absolute garbage now, and I don't buy the explanation that I simply had bad taste as a kid.

They also host this Quality Adjustment page to say which types of products do or don't have such adjustments: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/home.htm. So maybe this is transparency. I think it would take me 2+ hours on a weekend to really research this to understand it myself.

> Tomato Puree

> Made from cooked tomatoes that have been strained of seeds and skins. Often this is just “reconstituted tomato paste,” made by adding water to tomato paste. This product has weak tomato flavor and isn’t called for in many recipes. Use in chilis, soups, and other long-cooked recipes where smooth, rich tomato texture is required. Many American commercial pasta sauces have tomato puree as their first ingredient (because tomato paste is cheaper to ship) which is why they’re not as fresh tasting as homemade sauces. I don’t think this exists in Germany, but it doesn’t matter so much because you’re going to be adding it to recipes that calls for long cooking times and many ingredients. If you have a recipe that calls for it, you can make it by adding water to tomato paste, or cooking down passierte tomatoes.

No idea how accurate this is, but I would assume it's true and thus "partially reconstituted tomato puree" is less ideal for a pasta sauce (where you likely want more of a tomato flavor).

We had an All Hands once where they actually spent 20+ minutes talking about the Genderbread Cookie, which I found especially egregious. Not that I have a problem with the Genderbread Cookie, but an All Hands is the most expensive meeting a company can host. Why are we learning about sex and gender identity vocabulary in that meeting?

Of course, this all matters a lot less than hiring and promotion processes. I don't work at a larger company, so I don't think I've seen the worst of it. Smaller businesses still have to take what they can get, and if that means the pipeline is mostly Asian men and white men, that's who gets hired.

Oh, actually I think the problem is that I would like temporary housing to be built for the homeless, just far away from me. But certain people insist that they let homeless people, with their many varied problems, live up the street from me instead.

One would think that being willing to have temporary housing built somewhat distant from any major cities is a compromise on my part, but my opponents insist on getting everything they want and having homeless people live on the exact same block as me. It's like every other topic where people have zero intention of compromising, e.g. no abortions even in the case of rape, no guns allowed period, etc. etc. The internal debate people use to arrive at a position becomes: How can I best poke my neighbor in the eye and force them to exist in a political reality that they despise, instead of compromising? That is the position I would like to take.

And instead of reaching any sort of compromise that could help solve the problem, we get nothing, a political stalemate where no one wins and everyone loses. Politics in the US is absolute trash.

The ability to evict someone before missing rent payments seems absurd. Are you saying this is an element of simple 'contract law' somehow, or that, often, boilerplate leases (contracts) specifically have clauses that allow eviction over insolvency without missing rent payments?

I'm not sure what will happen in the future, but I would be surprised if an AI model estimating a person's insolvency would meet requirements of evidence. Maybe the AI knows the renter, say, used a payday lender twice in the last month and that has a 98% correlation with insolvency in the next three months (making up all these numbers, I have no idea, but it sounds almost believable). I would still be surprised if a judge allowed this to become evidence of insolvency. But of course it depends on the jurisdiction.

> > Oh uhhh... like $15.

> Okay, thanks. I am writing that down in my report. Now it is a fact.

While it is ethically dubious, I don't really care. The pearl-clutching that we're inventing a fake reality can be viewed two different ways. Either it's overblown, as it clearly doesn't matter who is liking what on the internet, not in the grand scheme of things. Or if it is a problem, the ship sailed a decade ago when people started carrying a screen around in their pockets 24/7, and AI art is just another drop in the bucket.

I'm not saying this is a good enough reason to even begin trying to upend the existing calendar system and replace it. But the somewhat random nature of how weekends and certain holidays are distributed throughout the calendar can have effects on business, and presumably other areas. One might suggest it is all awash because the bad effects of one year/week/month will erase the good effects of a future one, but I don't find that comforting if it contributes to, say, the company I work for having an under-performing year, resulting in layoffs (granted, there would be other factors here as well). Regardless, the inconsistency is a problem.

I recall working at a FinTech company and hearing some team gloat about something like an 8% increase in MoM revenue, only to be shut down by someone in finance pointing out that there were 8% more bank days that month. Imagine someone wasn't thinking of this and people got promoted (or fired) because of a total nothing-signal being misinterpreted as a hugely positive (or negative) performance. The existing calendar allows this.

But to your point, when I was 13, I was able to find much worse (or better depending on how you look at it) pornography on the internet. And that was in the late 90s. So I'm not convinced this is the worst thing in the world. However, I get why Twitch feels like they can't allow it. And I'd still rather have this sort of censorship occur at the corporate level than at the government level, as we're seeing some states attempt.