donmcronald

They’ve been using some kind of dynamic pricing for a while. Last summer we decided to order McDonalds and I noticed it.

I have a nephew in high school. There’s a McDonalds that’s a close walk. A lot of kids hang out there and, in aggregate, they spend a ton of money. My nephew would often order through the app and his friends would give him cash. He’d end up with a bunch of rewards.

So, from McDonalds perspective he’s a customer buying tons of crap. Do you know what the true reward was? Price gouging, that’s what. In the app, everything was more expensive for him than it was for me.

So, since winning the lotto by having a McDonalds beside a high school isn’t enough, they’re ripping off their regulars. I hope they go broke. My family doesn’t spend money there anymore. We’re not price sensitive, but we’re definitely “getting ripped off” sensitive.

Screw McDonalds.

If you end up with a roof that doesn’t last 5 years, isn’t that the kind of thing you’re buying insurance for in the first place? It’s an unexpected risk that a lot of people would have trouble predicting.

Siri “summarized” a two line text message for me yesterday. It’s using compute for that which affects battery life. Pure trash.

I don’t think so. I haven’t tried it personally, but claims online say it’s part of Windows 11. There are hacks to get rid of it, but supposedly Microsoft is really aggressive about having it running.

The laptop was for a younger person that’s fairly tech-savvy, so it’ll work out. I’d never buy one for my parents now that I know what to watch out for.

The problem with CoPilot+ is that it was negative value on a PC because of the way Microsoft entrenched the related (system) services into Windows. I got a mid range laptop (Core Ultra 7, 16GB RAM, integrate Arc GPU) that I would consider ideal in terms of build quality, specs, etc..

That is until Microsoft’s bloatware starts using a ton of RAM and CPU. Something like 10% CPU use doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s massive on a laptop because it destroys the battery life. And all it’s doing is running things I don’t want that consume RAM. I’m talking 16GB of RAM 50% used up by Microsoft bloatware.

Microsoft doesn’t think, or care, about PC users anymore. Everything they’re doing with Windows makes your PC consume more resources with the goal of trapping you into another pay forever service.

They didn’t even make the CoPilot+ stuff “not suck” before abandoning it. Now it’s just another crappy Windows service gunking up your PC. Vendors should have never agreed to it and IMO the degradation it causes is enough that most of the PCs with it fall into the range of false advertising. I can’t imagine anyone’s battery claims are taking the CoPilot+ trash in Windows into account.

Yeah. A lot of Gnome feels like an edgy teenager going against the grain just to be different. No dock. No window controls. No system tray.

Gnome’s own research said the average person uses something like 5-8 apps IIRC. I don’t need some convoluted workspace system for something I can fit on a dock that spans 1/3 of the screen.

If the vertical space is so valuable, maybe they should stop supporting 1920x1080 as a resolution since 1920x1200 is better. Lol.

I’d be willing to take some of the “not real” money.

If the chain broke from twisting it up and letting it go, it was in disrepair before the kids started using it. Maybe the city admin should be charged with negligence for letting the infrastructure crumble.

I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.

> Had CXMT hit a normal functioning market, they would be a much harder sell-- existing vendors could spread FUD about performance and quality to hold them back for a few years.

I agree with this. Off-brand NVMe and SSDs are really in your face right now and as people buy them out of desperation they’re learning they work just fine. Western manufacturers have done massive damage to their long term brands for some short term profits.

I think it would be useful for backup testing. Lots of VM backup software will boot a restored VM and screenshot the login screen. That’s useless IMO because you could be screenshotting an outdated restore without realizing.

I think you could boot a network disconnected VM and communicate over vsock to assess the guest health. You’d need an agent in the VM, but I think it'd be worth it.

As a regular consumer I've pretty much decided I'll buy China's tech if they start competing in the western market. There's a lot of talk about China dumping into western markets and warnings that we'll be left with nothing at some point, but I'm sitting here right now with... nothing.

I'll buy RAM from the devil if it's the difference between running local AI vs becoming dependent on a cloud provider.

Here's an example of someone genuinely making that argument in another hacker news post. I'm having a laugh about how spot on I was.

> Changes to the life-cycles of domains is a question meant to ask if this seeks to modify the life cycle policy, which is a separate type of change from termination of the service as a whole. I.e. this does not seek to change the life cycle policy, it seeks to terminate the service offering completely - making the life cycle policy irrelevant.

I'd rather trust myself.

If you walk around all day with your wallet in your pocket, it might fall out and you'll lose it. Would you like me to hold onto it for you to make sure that doesn't happen?

You're closer than you think. Big companies and institutions just change the definition of words they don't like. In this case, they could argue that a domain's lifecycle is registration, renewal (optional), deletion. Deletion is part of the expected lifecycle, so this doesn't change it.

The ambiguity is a feature so they can do whatever they want. We all know it's bullshit, but it gives the parties involved the ability to disenfranchise one group to benefit another while claiming they're following the rules.

> ICANN is a California non profit

I wonder how long that'll last. If the regulators in Califonrnia keep forcing them to act in the public's interest, won't they just move to a more favorable jurisdiction?

I think part of the problem is a lack of explanation and education. 10% of kids are being exploited and no one can tell us how it's happening, but everyone has a plan to fix it?

Is there money to invest in resources for kids that need help? Nope. Is there money to implement a global surveillance system that tracks and logs everything for AI analysis while attributing it to verified identities? You betcha!

When I was a kid deleting your account and creating a new one was a good solution if someone started harassing you. That's been taken away and, even worse, normalizing verified IDs is eliminating the last tiny bit of privacy everyone has, including kids. The bad actors are going to be able to follow people around forever IMO.

> It mentions stats about child exploitation but doesn't show how that's related to gtlds.

Yeah, I wondered about that too. Any young people I know can barely tell you what a domain is. They're not directly visiting websites AFAIK and I don't think any of the platforms require a domain to participate.

> 9% experience online sexual extortion before the age of 18

That's an astronomical number and I'd assume it has to be an overall total. I hate those kinds of statistics because they're not telling you what you really need to know to make an informed decision. What's the percentage that involved a gTLD?

To me, this smells a bit like another effort at usurping control of the flow of information. Domains are an incredible tool for independence and the fact they've been co-opted by bad actors provides a great opportunity for a select few to seize control over what we're allowed to do with them :-(

They've made no effort to give normal participants an edge over the scammers and jump straight to censorship / control.

For example, consider that person on here with 'web.one' the other day. Why doesn't their expensive, premium domain include an increased level of trust and reputation?

If they want to do KYC, I think that's fine, but it should be an opt in system like the old EV certificates used to be. I don't need KYC and a bunch of controls to self-host things that no one else uses.

The problem with EV certificates is they became a money printing scam for the CAs. Plus, and this is an opinion, I think the platforms like Google and Facebook went out of their way to kill EV because damaging a trust indicator for domains benefits them when there are scams everywhere (as we're seeing now) and people need the platforms to "protect them" rather than having a fundamental understanding of how to evaluate risks on their own.

I can't read the whole article, but beyond verified clicks in email I worry that tech like Passkeys is going to get used against us. As soon as you take away the friction of entering passwords, and let passkeys authenticate automatically, why not have authentication / authorization for every action?

I get prompted to add Passkeys constantly. It makes me wonder if vendors will start doing it automatically "for your own good", like DoH in browser.

I saw an application once about 25 years ago that was built on SMTP for communication. I think it was an inter library loan system, but can't remember for sure. I was a pretty smart way of not having to worry much about redundancy in the communications.

> Personally, I'm really interested to see if we're headed towards a spot where the model is entirely distinct from the knowledge store.

This is what I've been trying to focus on with local AI for now. I've been trying to build all new documentation so it's more AI friendly. It's been pretty interesting. Qwen-35BA3B with a small prompt does a good job of surfacing what I'd consider institutional knowledge.

I've been trying to silo the docs I write from the model with a prompt that tells it not to use general knowledge unless asked to. From the anecdotal testing I did, Qwen-35BA3B is great for it. It does a really good job of following the prompt and calling tools, so I've been able to play around a lot to see what seems to work best.

Ultimately, I think one of the most effective uses of AI will be having a distinct knowledge store combined with an opinionated agent (and sub-agent) setup along with different models for each task.

Who owns the knowledge store is going to be the big caveat. Right now I think the big online models are trying for generic, persistent memory and I'd be very hesitant to let that happen. Think of having someone with a perfect memory following you around forever, but someone else has the ability to make them disappear. That's not a good situation.

X is the perfect named because it describes the core interaction after trying to view something on the site. Lmao.

I started using Reddit after the Digg 4 fiasco. I mostly lurk. I like things like the localllama subreddit. If I log in to contribute it’s a high effort post with good information.

Reddit can go ahead and extract as much value as possible by turning their site into a slop factory. I won’t be around to see it. I haven’t visited for a week after near daily use for 15 years.

Reddit 4 isn’t for me.

> how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?

Tie all machine scaling to human time. Want to spy on me for a day? Some human has to spend an hour of their life to permit it.

> Pharmacists though? Yeah replace them with face-ID prescription vending machines…

What? Pharmacists are a pretty important failsafe IMO. I trust the pharmacist as much as the doctor, maybe more in some cases.

> zero license headache

Isn’t it a subscription? And super expensive? $3k/year/device was the cheapest thing I saw on their site or $12k/5 years. 25k/year for an MSP. On a 5 year cycle we’d need to manage thousands on devices to make it more attractive than pfsense (cost wise).

I really wanted to try it a few years ago but they seem like just another tech company that only wants millionaire customers.

Passkeys really feel like a scheme to get us limited to a few blessed identity providers.

There have been a few incidents that make me think Snapchat private chats are monitored. The one with the guy joking to his friends about blowing up a plane or something is the first that comes to mind.

Tell me how private messaging gets you taken off a plane otherwise. It’s not private. Big tech has put a camera and microphone in everyone’s pocket and they’re monitoring everything.

The government and big (American) tech are very likely lying to us IMO. How will anyone protest when mass surveillance becomes the law if it’s already in place and you can be labeled a bad actor that gets your life ruined if you dissent?

> It can get a lot worse than that too. I have an app on my phone that will log me out and force me into a 2FA cycle if it hits a network timeout.

I use some fairly popular (in the MSP space) backup software that thinks the network is infallible. The worst case I’ve seen is when it fails on a network request, doesn’t retry adequately, and incorrectly logs the error as data corruption.

You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything.

All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed.

No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry collapse and go back to pen and paper.