The lead generation was automated ten years ago ("Hello?"), but the actual scam conversation was not. Until recently, you still had to pay somebody in South Asia better than the prevailing wage of ~$1/hr to have these conversations, as well as set them up in an office with computers and managers, and bribe local police (call it $5/hr of fully burdened work product). If your success rate is ~1% and the average human portion of the scam lasts 12 minutes, you're getting 0.05 successes per hour, and you better be netting an average of $100 per successful scam (accounting for financial clearing issues / reversals!) or you're losing money on every hour worked.
Anyone wanna do a quick offline MVP on a general vision assistant for the blind? We've had things like Google Lens for a while, but it's a bit vision and touchscreen-centric.
Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.
Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.
Data quality on Scoville is unfortunately garbage; Testing is expensive and both individual plants and individual growers/fields are highly variable, so nearly everyone is playing 'telephone' making subjective claims in relation to "known" standard varieties which are also usually subjective claims.
"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.
I've learned in the course of making this site, that pretty much all information about peppers is garbage. That's half the reason I wanted to start this.
How expensive is testing now? It looks like the standard method is HPLC analysis of capsaicinoids. I found old forum posts from about 10 years ago indicating $50-$65 per test from providers including SBL, which doesn't sound bad, but I don't know if prices have gone up recently.
Part of the issue is that there's a massive variety between peppers, and genetic diversity is incredibly wide, making it nearly impossible to determine the exact type of pepper you have. There are a few different universities and governments that "certify" peppers, but they aren't connected in any way.
That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking about testing a particular pepper you have for chemical content, but genetic testing and mapping results to pepper type names does sound more complicated/expensive.
This explains why I can't get a decent Honeycrisp anymore. They used to be seasonal but the ones we get in Washington are not good anymore. Usually you get 3 or 4 varieties of which one is Honeycrisp, one is Cosmic Crisp, and one is Granny Smith. Recently the Cosmic Crisps have been good, but you have to look for a skin that is as red as a Red Delicious and a flame that is yellow or white but never green.
Yeah, consumers and growers are silly in their own ways which lead to this.
Consumers want the same fruit all year round even though growing fruit(or any plant/vegetable) is very region & season specific.
Growers are big cargo cultists when they see a particular crop getting attention they all rush in. The past 5 years has seen record planting of avocado crops in Australia that now the growers either rip them out or have to sell the farm.
Just enjoy a delicious tasty snack in the appropriate season, and if it’s not on the shelf when you go to the shop then find another in season delicious tasty snack.
Meh. Boom and bust cycles are common in most agricultural industries. Avocados are no different. In fact the industry in Australia seems to have already rebounded
I think it's region dependent and how they travel. A store near me has "organic" ones that are huge and can be 1+ lbs and are very sweet, crisp, and juicy. Then I've seen big box stores selling them by the bag and they're hit or miss but sometimes terrible.
I don't think those factors are left to chance with an apple like Honeycrisp that had a 20-year rollout plan. (or whichever the new hotness is, Cosmic Crisp? I'm partial to Pink Lady.)
Rather, think about all the apples picked that don't meet grocery-store grading. One little bird peck and you're applesauce... ok maybe not exactly.
But the biggest (most vapid) apples go to the store aisle and the little ones (for whatever reason) go to Snack Bags. By the time you see 'em, apples have been graded and picked over to maximize sticker price.
Oddly, for a small grower, the fruits which don't make the cash-crop fresh-eatin' apple cut, might become higher-margin products like cider, jam, pie filling.
It's REALLY hard as an amateur to grow a grocery-store-perfect apple. (I made a lot of applesauce and canned pie filling.)
These things aren't "Internet Access", they're an easy way to get service that is bandwidth-equivalent to SMS, MMS, IRC or walkie talkie, over complex and distant terrain, without any central coordinating authority. Potentially even acting as last-mile to repeater nodes that pass through the actual Internet. This is a terrifically useful idea of a network in certain conditions, though in other conditions it's probably just going to be last-mile for your personal Gmail account.
I didn't assume "internet access", even for machine 2 machine applications, it was a disappointingly low bandwidth.
I don't deny a niche of applications, I tried to understand its popularity, and back then I came to the conclusion it was probably illicit use of the technology, not conformant use.
The people I know playing around with it are interested in something that offers very basic SMS style broadcast without any centralized authority or infrastructure.
For example here on the west coast we have a non trivial probability of earthquakes big enough that a lot of infrastructure may be down for weeks.
Another motivation is political. We've already seen efforts to restrict people's ability to warn others about ICE's activity. So I know some people that while not going full revolutionary or anything, are interested to learn about some peer 2 peer alternatives as a sort of hedge against things getting worse.
And some people just play with it because the tech is neat, it's fun to see how far your messages can get, etc.
Long skirts (or other loose clothing) around big, spinning mechanical load transmission elements are an easy way for the rest of your life to become a cautionary Youtube video on workplace safety.
While this seems like the perfect synergy with a company that has too many branches and not enough business, those branches are also tiny. I'd bet employees are not enthusiastic about becoming UPS.
Becoming Radio Shack / Microcenter, as far as 3D Printing and DIY electronics, seems like it intersects with their target audience more, but they're also probably pretty short on space for that.
Employee enthusiasm isn’t really much of a factor. For better or worse, in the event of significant change of the brick & mortar day to day operations then employee continuity & institutional knowledge is even less of an actual strategic asset than the minimal treatment it already gets in consideration.
- SPAC IPOs that dodge standard disclosure requirements and worsen information asymmetry. See WeWork.
- Board positions filled with CEO loyalists instead of independent directors. See OpenAI firing Altman before Microsoft reinstated him.
- Management taking seemingly arbitrary decisions that turn out to be directly linked to their own compensation. SpaceX ordering a bunch of Teslas, or merging with a distressed asset (xAI). See above point on loyalist boards.
- The very concept of leveraged buyouts where financiers borrow money to buy a company, then put the burden on repayment on the company AND pay themselves hefty management fees. This inevitably leads to layoffs and a rapid decline in product/service quality while the company is scrapped for parts.
Slumlord owners of the network effect monopolies innovating ever lower investment in innovation and upkeep with ever higher increases in rent extraction, with a few nipple tassles slapped on the side to entice retail investor hype cycles.
On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.
Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.
Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).
This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.
It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".
retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.
This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.
Genome analysis is also a lossy process that chops the data up into tiny bits, like a newspaper sent through a shredder. We then piece together matching sequences in a sort of puzzle. It's often a relatively inaccurate solution. Then we try to do that again with a different copy of the newspaper sent through a different shredder. And again. A genome might be comprised of 10x reads, 30x reads, 100x reads, with more replications representing higher confidence.
There might be ten million people who have quoted Harry Potter at some point in their blogs or forum posts. There are only so many words in the books.
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