If we’re being honest, every country should want to preserve high paying jobs for its citizens. Citizens that get paid well have more spending money, which drives domestic economic growth, which creates more jobs…you get the idea.
Outsourcing and exploitative visas are a negative feedback loop that shrinks the actual economy vis a vis stagnant or decreasing wages and higher employment precarity. To have a healthy domestic economy, domestic employment must be prioritized.
I'm sure all of the major retailers have found a way to make someone else eat the cost of returns, likely their suppliers (manufacturers). With the suppliers still not wanting to leave the platforms because that is where most of the customers are. It's the only way I can explain the abjectly terrible job places will do packing things, how little they care about what went wrong, and how readily they will keep on refunding/resending.
I found Gemini 2.5 Pro highly useful for text summaries, and even reasoning in long conversations... UP TO the last 2 weeks or month. Recently, it seems to totally forget what I'm talking about after 4-5 messages of a paragraph of text each. We're not talking huge amounts of context, but conversational braindeadness. Between ChatGPT's sycophancy, Gemini's forgetfulness and poor attention, I'm just sticking with whatever local model du jour fits my needs and whatever crap my company is paying for today. It's super annoying, hopefully Gemini gets its memory back!
I believe it's intentionally nerfed if you use it through the app. Once you use Gemini for a long time you realize they have a number of dark patterns to deter heavy users but maintain the experience for light users. These dark patterns are:
- "Something went wrong error" after too many prompts in a day. This was an undocumented rate limit because it never occurs earlier in the day and will immediately disappear if you subscribe for and use a new paid account, but it won't disappear if you make a new free account, and the error going away is strictly tied to how long you wait. Users complained about this for over a year. Of course they lied about the real reasons for this error, and it was never fixed until a few days ago when they rug pulled paying users by introducing actual documented tight rate limits.
- "You've been signed out" error if the model has exceeded its output token budget (or runtime duration) for a single inference, so you can't do things like what Anthropic recommends where you coax the model to think longer.
- I have less definitive evidence for this but I would not be surprised if they programmatically nerf the reasoning effort parameter for multiturn conversations. I have no other explanation for why the chain of thought fails to generate for small context multiturn chats but will consistently generate for ultra long context singleturn chats.
I noticed that same behavior across older Gemini models. I build a chatbot at work around 1.5 Flash, and one day suddenly it was behaving like that. it was perfect before, but after it always saluted the user like it was their first chat, despite me sending the history. And i didn't found any changelog regarding that at the time.
After that i moved to OpenAI, Gemini models just seem unreliable on that regard.
This might be because Gemini silently updates checkpoints (1.5 001 -> 1.5 002, 2.5 0325 -> 2.5 0506 -> 2.5 0605) while OpenAI doesn't update them without ensuring that they're uniformly better and typically emails customers when they are updated.
Games are more expensive, but the market of gamers is larger. We can do this back and forth all day! The clear fact is that when consumers are getting squeezed, there will be backlash against price raises like this. I have never missed a Nintendo console since the Wii. I won’t be buying a switch 2.
Super Mario Kart for the SNES cost $55 in 1992 ($128 in today's money). If it was worth it then, then surely a much bigger game for 60% of the price is an even better deal.
The complaints don't really seem based in reality.
The complaints are likely coming from heavy gamers who are more exposed to game prices because they buy more games and are also way more vocal online. Nintendo sold 151 million switches but only 1,391 million games [1], meaning on average a Nintendo switch user bought less than ten games. I doubt spending maybe an extra $20 a year would be considered unacceptable by the average Nintendo customer especially considering these games are never cheap to begin with.
>If it was worth it then, then surely a much bigger game for 60% of the price is an even better deal.
Whether a game is worth it is different for different people. When you expand your audience beyond enthusiasts then people will not be willing to pay as much money for a game. Saying that enthusiasts will see it as a good deal when most of the audience are notenthusiasts. does not mean too much.
The pricing of games aren’t based in reality. The marginal cost of producing additional copies is almost nothing, especially for digital distribution. Looking at pricing changes due to inflation doesn’t make sense for digital goods.
> Games are more expensive, but the market of gamers is larger.
Actually there's been studio bankruptcy after studio bankruptcy, due to a massive contraction post-COVID, and the rise of mobile gaming eating away at casual gamers. Even Ubisoft earlier this year was having some people giving 30% odds of bankruptcy.
As stated elsewhere, games have literally never been cheaper. Even at the launch of the Nintendo Switch, a $60 game in 2017 is the equivalent of $77 today. The launch price of Mario Kart World, in real purchasing power, is completely identical to what Mario Kart 8 launched at. The complaints, therefore, scream entitlement over logic - games must always be bigger, larger, better, and unaffected by 3 decades of inflation. Or it's anti-consumer, as though Nintendo put a gun to their head forcing a purchase alongside toilet paper. (In my opinion, a luxury good not in any way necessary for a good life by definition cannot be anti-consumer, or otherwise Gucci would be the king of anti-consumer practices.)
There's really not much backlash. At the most, just some impotent complaints online toward random companies, and nothing at all toward the federal reserve. If people really cared, we would have seen a lot more politicians like Ron Paul.
This is just a story, but when the switch two pricing was released weeks (months?) ago it was a topic of conversation at my local cafe. None of the people there are gamers, but some of them do own switches. Everyone agreed they would not be paying inflated prices, and were fine sitting this out. It seemed like $65 was the maximum they’d expect to pay for a game.
I think more legal clarifications are needed here. If someone comes into your property to mount a trail cam or spy device, I believe you're allowed to remove it (even in a destructive manner). Not sure why the FAA insists a spy device that happens to hover a couple feet above is entitled to more protections...
Because projectiles don't stop at any particular distance and can reach vehicles with humans which are flying over other humans, all of which were innocent of any spying, and most people are complete shit at judging size and distance when looking at objects in the air. (lots of great examples of this with the mystery drones in nj a while back)
I would like to shoot them down too but then I became 12 and a half years old instead of just 12.
As a policy that has to just apply across the board by default, of course the rule has to simply be be that you can not shoot at things in the air. I have no idea how bird hunting is handled but I bet it simply fails a logic test and shouldn't be allowed for the exact same reasons.
Now a tazer or a net or harpoon, all with physically limited tethers... Well there can be no safety argument about whacking something with a baseball bat, and anything with a tether that isn't rocket powered with 1000 feet of range is basically as safe for legit aircraft as a kid with a bat. IE it doesn't matter how inept the yahoo is, their capacity for harm to others is limited to a few people physically very near them, which is the same danger evrryone is to everyone else all the time.
>I have no idea how bird hunting is handled but I bet it simply fails a logic test and shouldn't be allowed for the exact same reasons.
Bird hunting is handled with #8+ bird shot, which at 45+ degree angle it is essentially at terminal velocity by the time it comes down, considering they are basically BBs it is mildly unsafe coming down (as in you'd have to be incredibly unlucky) anywhere within maybe a couple hundred yards at worst and essentially completely safe beyond that.
> This project is not just code — it's a response. Amid political pressure, some universities like Harvard, MIT, and CMU stood up for international students.
> I’m just an ordinary undergraduate with no resources or background. This is my way of responding — not by petition, but through code. Vanta may be small, but it’s real, and it’s mine.
This comes off as super ChatGPT-y to me. "X is not y — it's Z! Preamble, passionate statement. Sycophantic encouraging statement — list, of, a, few, things, but also this. Summarize statement, but this other thing, and saying the same thing again but in a slightly different way."
I've given up on ChatGPT because of this style of writing.
Totally fair! I really appreciate the honesty.
English isn't my native language, and most of the expressions I know come from TED talks, open source READMEs, and honestly... the kind of news clips our teachers play in class
So yeah, that probably shaped the way I wrote this.
You’re right though — reading it again, it does sound kinda overly polished.
I’ll try to keep future writing more personal and grounded.
Still learning — and thanks for reading it at all. That already means a lot!
Friendly reminder that em and en dashes were part of English well before ChatGPT was launched. Anecdotally, I’ve been using them forever and English isn’t even my native language.
except that the entry barrier to hooking your fan up to home automation is even harder than keeping a remote findable and in batteries, and if you're non-technical your only option is probably some internet-of-shit stuff that has to go through a remote server in order to function at all.
Well the main barrier is that getting a radio that transmits on 304MHz is a huge PITA so you end up having to go full SDR to get that frequency and it's way more effort than the off-the-shelf 433Mhz boards that control other small electronics.
Uh oh!
> give them Green Cards instead of precarity
Oh, right, yes! :D You had me for a minute.
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