I must be living under a rock. I didn’t even realize it was outdated! :-)
81 karma · joined April 28, 2019
And voice-to-text is just as broken. I did side-by-side tests, and if you’re in perfect conditions, facing the phone directly, with no background noise (i.e., never), then the 7 performed okay, but it would fail horrible in any other case. The 2XL performed quite well, relatively. I even replaced the 7 thinking there was an issue, but the new one did the same thing.
Unfortunately, lack of updates means the 2 is no longer usable for many purposes.
And yes, I recanted on the 'firing" part, but I still feel that Amazon's "resolution" here was weak-sauce compared to the "extreme" action taken in the first place. At this point, I'm guessing they wish they'd offered the customer some minor token (say 2 years of free Prime at a minimum) compensation in return for an NDA on the topic. 20/20 hindsight ;-)
- A customer can be mistakenly called a racist
- Their home automation systems they bought and paid for disabled
- Any digital content (Kindle books, Amazon Prime Video purchases, Audible books, etc.) they bought (sorry, "licensed") revoked.
- It takes more than a week to resolve after being provided with clear evidence of the company's mistake. I mean, good grief, at least the manager/executive should have reactivated the customer's account during the review process, but they opted for "guilty until we've taken our sweet time reviewing the evidence and make sure they're innocent".
- After all that, the customer isn't even offered an apology, much less compensation.
This isn't just a "mistakes and failures happen" situation. Failures and mistakes occurred at multiple points in this process and along the decision chain, and apparently no one involved had the common sense to break out of the resulting insanity-loop.
Short summary - Someone had tied in most of their home automation to Alexa and found their account cancelled suddenly one day. They went through the automated recovery systems and were told to contact support, which they did. Support ended up transferring them to an Amazon exec (let's assume "manager") who told them their account was disabled because an Amazon delivery driver reported that someone said something racist to them over their video doorbell (which wasn't a Ring, ironically).
Upon investigating, checking cameras, logs, etc,, the owner determined that (a) no one was home at the time of the delivery, (b) the driver was wearing headphones, (c) the doorbell had done an automated, "Hello, how can I help you?" response to the driver as they were walking away (presumably ring-and-dash or drop-and-dash delivery, as usual).
The driver had apparently, with the headphones on, completely misunderstood.
It took over a week to get Amazon to review all the evidence and reactivate the account. No apology at that point (although I believe I saw they subsequently have).
That's a bad look for Amazon, and the Youtuber makes a valid point that it's a bad idea to trust control of your home to a company that will make such boneheaded decisions.
IMHO, the only correct response for Amazon here is firing at least two people involved in the debacle, apologizing publicly, and promising to review and adapt their policies in response to the incident. Any halfway decent PR department at anything other than a mega-monopoly would be scurrying to do exactly that, but not Amazon apparently.
And while I'm not a moderator, as just a user I've flagged over 1,200 answers on Stack Overflow (and several of the smaller communities like Ask Ubuntu) that were subsequently removed. Automatic detection was never the sole criteria that was used to determine if it was AI - It's entirely possible to spot GPT content using multiple methods. I don't publicly talk about most of these, since we do have a group of users (sometimes spammers) who attempt to hide their use and make it more difficult to detect. See some of my additional notes on the topic on https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/389674/902710
I saw one user yesterday post 10 lengthy, detailed answers in an hour, in 3 different programming languages. But the Mods aren't allowed by SE to consider that (or pretty much anything) to be an indicator that it's AI-generated.
According to the event's sponsorship page (linked elsewhere in the comments here), the speaking slot was 1500€ on top of the 990-4500€ "base". We can assume that they didn't get the "prepayment" discount since if they had already paid, this wouldn't be an issue.
What's still unclear is whether they are pulling out of the speaker slot only, or the entire sponsorship. Regardless, Couchbase shouldn't be withholding those funds just because their employee is unwell. They are essentially saying that they were planning on paying for that, but now they won't since they can't attend. That falls on them and is not the fault of T3chfest. They should still be expected to pay up.
And maybe they plan to? Maybe this is just a misunderstanding between parties where Couchbase told T3chfest that they wouldn't be able to send the speaker, but in the confusion someone took that to mean they wouldn't be paying for it either, when that wasn't stated?
Again, don't know, so I'm not going to jump to assumptions other than to say that, based on the response, I would expect (and hope) that Couchbase would still pay the sponsorship fees that they (clearly) committed to.
For example, the sponsorship form might not have been signed by someone with signing authority. Usually, it's a lower-level marketing (or even engineering) person that is working on getting everything squared away. The peon who is "negotiating" was told by their management that they want to do it. The peon assures the person who they are working with at the event that it's going to happen (because they've been told that).
The time comes to print the materials, and the form still hasn't been signed. The event has two options - Forgo the possibility of the $5k sponsorship by telling Couchbase that they haven't signed the commitment, so they can't print their logo. Or hope that things comes through.
Again, 99% of the time, things work out. Printing the materials even though they didn't have the agreement (or money) in hand was the right call for the organization.
But sometimes it doesn't work out ...
Maybe (pure hypotheticals following, because we don't yet know) the person who was working on the sponsorship at the Couchbase end left the company. Maybe their boss, who had given the "okay" even left the company. Now there's no one at Couchbase who knew where this agreement was in the process - They only know that there's no sponsorship commitment that has been made. And they question why there doing it in the first place.
That's just one example.
Maybe the person who signed the sponsorship form wasn't a director and didn't have signing authority, but thought they were authorized to sign something as "simple" as a sponsorship form. Oops! The employee is fired for signing a $5k agreement, the agreement isn't technically valid, and ...
---
Sometimes things are moving along beautifully and someone in management (rightfully) asks to have legal do a "quick review" of it, and there turns out to be something that the attorney has issue with (often an indemnification clause, inserted by an attorney on the other end). They end up not being able to resolve it and get the sponsorship agreement signed at all. Deadline passed, logos printed already ... uh oh.
---
If there was a sponsorship agreement in place, then let's be realistic - It's doubtful that Couchbase would be thinking they could just get away with "pulling out" four days before the conference.
Something else is going on here. I've been through this before myself -- Usually we get the agreement finalized in time, for the good of all parties.
But is T3chFest really "out" this money? Would they have found another sponsor in time? Or did they go ahead and print the materials because they really had no other choice, and no time to line up another sponsor before the deadline since Couchbase hadn't signed the forms yet?
$ ls | get 0 | select modified | to json
{ "modified": "2022-08-16 16:38:28 -04:00" }
The internal data format looks pretty JSON-like, with the added ability to keep Nushell types intact.
While I'm not ready to replace Fish with Nushell, it's definitely taken the place of jq for me.
And, "If you like awk and sed, you should take a look into Tokay ...."
So it "focuses on processing textual input" (sounds like awk), but it's "not intended ... to be a replacement for awk". It "might serve as a general purpose scripting language", but it's not "intended to be a general purpose programming language." If you like awk, you might should ...
Oh, I give up!
Apple Card allows you to generate a new card number, but it replaces the existing number. And you either have to tie your bank account to them to pay, or use your card number (which you might change) on payment correspondence.
> You have two people doing the same job but if you live in Romania and your colleague lives in the US at
a company that pays both equally
> Then after your career you’ll go and retire in Spain. Guess who’ll afford a better lifestyle?
That's right - You, the Romanian citizen.
Since your cost of living is 42.4% cheaper than your US colleague, you'll have much more disposable income to invest over the course of your career.
Let's say you both make an after-tax income of $60,000 USD. If your colleague pays $40,000 a year for rent/food/transportation/clothing/staples and another $5,000 for (optional) non-essentials, then they'll have $15,000 to invest.
You will spend roughly $23,000 on the same essentials and another $3,000 on non-essentials, leaving you $34,000 to invest annually.
If you both invest in the S&P500, and it continues to return around 10% annually, then you both move to Spain to retire after 30 number of years, you'll have just over $5.5 million USD compared to your US colleague's ~ $2.5million.
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states... - Although the basic principle holds as long as there's any cost of living difference. Also doesn't include tax or healthcare.
That said, I don't know of many third-party apps that require a reboot.
But I certainly could be missing out on a great Linux terminal. If there's one that is better than Windows Terminal, I could switch to it under WSL/WSLg on Windows 11.
Bonus: Windows Terminal's release notes occasionally include some fun nuggets like:
> You spoke up about the scroll bars being WAY TOO THIN, so we chonked them up
> Our confidence in the settings UI's Save button has led to us no longer backing up the settings JSON file. We won't be deleting the 61,000 backups we did leave on your hard drive, but what's a couple thousand kilobytes between friends?
> The breadcrumbs have been picked up and will no longer navigate you to strange cottages
> No longer will dropdown menus and combo boxes fly wildly off the screen if you scroll or drag the window! Rejoice!
:-)
In my experience, there's never a good time to update/reboot. I always have multiple applications and tabs open, and always several tasks in flight.
For many years, I had Windows set to not automatically update. Now, given the rapid speed with which vulnerabilities can be exploited, I'm personally glad that it does.
In a corporate environment, though, as the blog author is in, it's really going to be the IT policies that dictate this. They typically have the ability to update not just Windows, but any other software on the system. And often do.
That's one of the reasons that IT departments do prefer (and sometimes dictate) Windows -- It does make it easier for them to secure the multitude of systems for which they are responsible.
Agreed - PowerShell <-> WSL integration is pretty nice. Just remember (mostly for others reading) that PowerShell has a nasty habit of automatically appending a trailing newline when piping to external commands like WSL. So you often need a "tr -d '\n'" in the WSL part of your pipeline.
It was a pretty big change when our (already outdated at that time) lab in college scrapped the PDP11-44 and replaced it with 20 Windows 3.0 machines and 10 Macs.
Been using Linux since I picked up a Yggdrasil CD in 1993.
Sorry to hear you can't use WSL ... it's great IMO.
Question - Does secure channel come into play on every git operation? I would expect that it only comes into play when dealing with a remote repository (e.g. clone, push), right?
If so, what's the breakdown of your git operations that requires remote repo access? Would it help if you pushed using Git for Windows but did most of your other operations in WSL?
> I'll ever understand why there are about 8 versions of System Preferences in Windows 10
There's no good excuse for it; just legacy cruft. Same as with the different window styles.
For me, personally, the answer is that I feel Windows provides a better desktop experience, but Linux provides a better command-line experience.
For more opinions on that topic, see https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/s0m8...
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Since the beginning of November, your test-positive rate has more than doubled, from a relatively good 3% to 6%. 5% is considered "good" coverage for tests.
Test coverage per-capita does not seem to be increasing, and may have even dropped slightly in the same time period.
I'd advise against complacency in any country. We've seen just how quickly this thing can spike in a number of countries that appeared to have things "under control".
And in a normal year, my wife would come down with bronchitis shortly thereafter. Recently we learned that's mostly due to a congenital immune deficiency that had been undiagnosed for years.
Given that, we'll of course be sitting this year out. We may do a drive-by visit to air-hug folks from the car or something, as long as they don't try to get to close to the window unmasked (as some have done in the past).
I carry rolls of dog poop cleanup bags. They make great temporary gloves that you can slip over your hand before touching the gas pump, and they slide off into the trash easily without touching the outside with the other hand.
Keep in mind that Clorox wipes still take 30 seconds to kill the virus (according to the manufacturer page). Most people don't tend to wait after disinfecting a surface before touching it, meaning the cleaning agent may become more diluted and less effective.
Better yet, disinfect and wear a baggie-glove while pumping. I don't disinfect the pump when wearing a plastic bag glove myself, but I do use hand sanitizer as soon as I'm done.