Jeorgia?

Thank you for your service.

like sifting through resumes.

Then we need to call it what it is: This exchange is an HR screen.

That’s a good call. I kinda/sorta figured that the fire department would see it sooner or later, but that’s clearly not the case.

It might be a matter of just being under a rock for the last 10-20 years. Retail PoS systems have changed quite a bit in that time, but how you interface with gas pumps and dining, hasn’t changed at all.

Also: a lot of folks navigate digital systems by rote memorization and don’t read or think all that much. If you throw a new interface in front of them, just sit back and watch the bewilderment. Gotta give people like that time to learn it all.

This is the core problem, right here. At a minimum, people need training to learn what information to ignore so you can navigate the whole thing. Even if you know the store’s layout, you still need to have the will to ignore advertising and disregard extraneous information. Being a fast reader that can do fast mental math, also helps tremendously.

Traffic flow is another problem. Wegmans is the chief offender here, IMO, by putting impulse items in massive crates that crowd the store entrance+exit combo. It amazes me that it’s not a fire hazard, because it makes entering the store a nightmare. But most grocery stores have awful choke points in produce, dairy, meat, and other high-traffic areas. And of course those are the stores that have no small carts or hand-baskets, obligating customers to gum up the works with big metal baskets that are 70% empty.

A better idea is a store that doesn’t flood your eye sockets with information you don’t absolutely need. Get rid of the special displays, end-cap bullshit, and vendor promotional stuff. Then, normalize all the price tags and include unit cost per lb/oz/L/whatever to make bargain hunting a snap. Then, measure the fucking carts and make sure that two can get by everywhere in the store. Finally, pick a store layout and stick to it. </rant>

I want to say that Aldi is already doing all of the right things, but I could be wrong.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

In my greater friend-group, we call them “shamans”, and rotate responsibilities when people go on trips. Like a designated driver or lifeguard, it’s a position of elevated and celebrated importance, even though the traveler may not ever leave their couch.

and most importantly be human

Now that I think about it, it’s key to be the most human possible. People do irritating and annoying stuff when they toss sobriety out the window, and sometimes it takes a lot of compassion and empathy to manage.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

While I’ve never seen it illustrated until now, I thought it was kind of obvious that this is our reality from outside our solar system. Is it not?

Eh, I give it a 4/10 right now. There’s still some cool stuff to do and plenty of great people around, but generally, can’t recommend it if you don’t have to.

I know a handful of oddball pharma trivia facts, but that’s a new one on me. It’s just wild that a drug could even do that.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

It also helps that we’re talking about rather dense nuclei too. So it’s not just a neutron absorbing blanket, but a rather high-performing one at that. Which you need to convert fusion outputs to heat and power anyway. And gold is soluble in mercury anyway, so extraction is already a known (albeit incredibly dangerous) process. Win-win.

yielding several tonnes of gold per plant-year

Mother of god that’s a lot to magic-up outta nowhere. At first I thought this would disrupt the market, but it looks like yearly global gold production is around 3000 tons a year. So it would take a lot of reactors to impact the gold market, so… yeah. Reactors really could start paying for themselves.

For her sake, I hope she applied for QA.

I blame the poor UI design and attention-grabbing tendencies of phone-compatible social media. Namely: Facebook and Instagram. It all goes on one endless vertical ribbon to compete for user eyeballs, and the winner consumes the maximum amount of screen real-estate possible when their turn is up. The software could provide decent margins for text-only posts to compete with images and video, or even clickable links and/or attribution for source material, but doesn’t. Because screw the open web, this is our walled garden. Anyway, that’s probably the reason for the massive margins: because it works better in content-hostile enviroment. </rant>

A burn so severe, so long-lasting, that he no longer has to pay to heat his home.

I use a system prompt that forces it to ask a question if there are options or if it has to make assumptions

I’m kind of amazed that even works. I’ll have to try that. Then again, I’ve asked ChatGPT to “respond to all prompts like a Magic 8-ball” and it knocked it out of the park.

so I start a new chat frequently.

I do this as well, and totally forgot to mention it. Yes, I keep the context small and fresh so that prior conversations (and hallucinations) can’t poison new dialogues.

I also will do the same prompts on two models from different providers at the same time and cross reference the idiots to see if they are lying to me.

Oooh… straight to my toolbox with that one. Cheers.

That’s been my biggest problem with the current state of affairs. It’s now easier to research newer tech through an LLM than it is to play search-result-wack-a-mole, on the off chance that what you need is on a forum that’s not Discord. At least an AI can mostly make sense of vendor docs and extrapolate a bit from there. That said, I don’t like it.