I don't think calling it AI is a stretch. It's a system with sensors, actuators, a knowledge base, and a ruleset; plus it can learn and adapt its ruleset based on success/failure. That's the textbook definition of AI.
It seems like you're basing your judgement largely on your Black Friday shopping experience. You go from saying the "ENTIRE experience was dreadful" to "Aside from the trackpad I don't have too many complaints". This is a rant about Black Friday, not Microsoft.
Black bars are essentially free; I never got the reason to ration them. While Glenn may not have been a part of the hacker community, he's an international icon of science, technology, and space exploration. I would guess a nontrivial number of people here have been positively influenced by John Glenn, and I'm sure every single person here has at least heard of him. I believe a black bar would be appropriate, as this is the only opportunity that we have to honor his passing.
I've been using Samsung phones for several years (currently still using a Galaxy S6), and my Pixel is supposed to come around the end of the month. Did they really get rid of app badges? That has been a thing for a while, unless I'm not understanding what "badges" are. Also, is the battery life on an iPhone good enough that you don't have to charge it every day. I can't remember owning a smartphone that could go longer than 24+ hours on one charge.
While I disagree with Peter Thiel's support of Trump, I believe that he is a very smart man, and quite qualified to be a partner with YC. To fire him over his political affiliation would be petty censorship. It's easy to look at somebody like Trump and see the racist, sexist, and xenophobic parts. These attributes aren't naturally shared with Trump's supporters. As Altman said, it would be different if Thiel expressed some sort of bigotry. Also, many states (including California) have laws forbidding retaliation for political practices outside of work.
Blurring product labels isn't about censorship; it's usually because shows that go to syndication don't want to violate any promotional clauses. Like, if I'm a television station and one of my primary sponsors is Coca Cola, I probably can't (or at least shouldn't) buy a show that shows a person conspicuously drinking a Pepsi.
I think the most annoying thing about the Coolest Cooler campaign is this quote: I'm just frustrated that people who live in my same town [...] who purchased their Coolest cooler AFTER I did [...] have received their shipment before I have. I've contributed to several Kickstarter campaigns, one of which failed. I was bitter about the failure, but I understood the risk. However, I think I would be much more upset if my neighbor received their product and I didn't.
The bot learned from interacting with users. A bunch of people took to bombarding Tay with racist/sexist/antisemitic remarks which worked their way into its vocabulary. I'm not sure if you could really call it a vulnerability as this is pretty much what the bot was designed to do. It's more of a flaw in the inability to properly filter the content that works its way into the AI.
I don't see why this applies to mattresses specifically. The author seems jaded that companies are able to buy products cheaply and resell them like it's a new concept.
Do you (or anybody else) have any advice on how to figure out how to come up with limits for things? Somebody else mentioned that Github limits stars to 5000/hr, but that definitely seems high. How would you decide on how to limit something like this?
I feel like this headline is misleading. They've solved the first three parts, but not the last. I was really hoping that this article was going to say something about progress on the last section, commonly called K4.
This is what resonated poorly for me. Airbnb has numerous advantages over hotels that they can put into ads. No part of this ad compels me to stay at an Airbnb, and it makes them seem petty/smug.
You make very good points, and I agree that having Elon as the spokesperson makes the event feel more personal and genuine. I still feel like his presentation manner is disappointing, though. I get that it's a petty thing to complain about, but he seems nervous when he's talking publicly and I find that distracting. I don't want to make it seem like I'm dissing Tesla or Elon Musk directly. I liked the launch event otherwise.
I admire Tesla as a company, but I can't help but wonder why they still have Elon Musk do the entire presentation himself. Sure, he's their superstar, but he comes off as a very underprepared public speaker. I wish they had him do an introduction, and then have a spokesperson do the bulk of the talking. Instead, he's showing off these new and amazing products with nearly no charisma and enthusiasm.
I use a standing desk at work every day (a Varidesk pro plus). For me, having monitor stand is just as important as the standing aspect. Using a laptop on a standing desk causes me to hunch over and slouch, which leaves me with worse neck and back pain than sitting.
My notepad of choice is the Rhodia dot pad. They're bound on the top of the page so they're good at laying flat, and I've never had an ink bleed through the paper. As far as pens I use a Pilot Metropolitan with Noodler's black ink. However, I'm really lazy with refilling it so I tend to default to the PaperMate InkJoy pens that my office gets.
I'm in the United States. To my knowledge online gambling is not strictly illegal, but it's illegal for online casinos to send or receive money to or from any banking or crediting organization, therefore preventing users from transferring money into casino accounts. Bitcoin is still in a weird realm where it's considered property rather than a currency, which I imagine would make it similar to gambling with gold. (My knowledge is outdated by a couple years, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
There's a John Cage piece called "Organ^2/As Slow As Possible" that is currently being performed on a specially-made pipe organ in Germany. Note changes happen every few years and the piece will finish in 2640.
I've been there a couple times. The pizza is really good enough to deserve this sort of attention. The biggest warning I could give would be that the wait times are typically really long, the place is really cramped, and there are only three folding tables for seating. The wait time for a single pizza could easily be over 2 hours, and there isn't anything to do in the area while you wait. That being said, it's certainly worth it for one of the best pizzas I've ever had. Just make a day out of it.
I think $100 would be a reasonable price to pay for a keyboard that you use for many hours every day over several decades. The Textblade seems like something that I'd use in short intervals here or there for a year or two.
I don't think Disney cares about what you eat or drink outside of the park. They care about how you and others behave when you're spending money on their property. I don't think it's any creepier than when a store tracks your buying habits, which many stores do these days.
Of course status products work. The author does a horrible job of showing why a status product works. A year of gas heat for a home is not a status product.
The author makes decent points, but uses a very flawed method of arguing to get to those points. First of all, she is arguing against a faceless hyperbole. Who is the person that actually said the words, "Nobody will pay $10,000 for an Apple Watch"? Does she really believe that the person was insisting that absolutely zero people were going to buy this product? It is an exaggerated and unsourced claim.
The bigger mistake in the author's argument is that she uses examples of previous success as a harbinger of the Apple Watch's future success. Yes, some people will spend money on Ferraris, a company that has been making cars for over 50 years. Some people will buy a Birkin bag from Hermes, a company that has been making handbags for about 150 years. These examples in no way indicate the success of the Apple Watch, the first watch made by a computer company.
What the author is describing is conspicuous consumption, a purchasing pattern identified by Thorstein Veblen. The Apple Watch is a Veblen good: it is a status item that people will buy solely because it's expensive and trendy. The high price is a selling point because it's a luxury good. Will people buy the $10,000 Apple Watch? Yes. But not because of the success of other Apple products, not because of plane ticket prices, and especially not because people heat their homes. These are straw man arguments.
This reminds me of Litographs, a company that puts full text of books in poster form. While the concept works fine for prose it doesn't translate well for code.