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They do have well designed clean bathrooms and buying a couple of cups of coffee you can work all day on a laptop. Much cheaper than an office without commitment although many distractions.

Is it me or does Starbucks coffee taste burnt? I prefer 711 on taste every time. They need to fix that


Which Starbucks have you been to? All the ones I go to have gross bathrooms topped with whatever heavy chemical smell they use to etch the sins off the bathroom floor with.

I totally hear you on the taste, it comes off as smoky to me. The blond roast espresso is more mild on that.


The Palo Alto Starbucks bathrooms are pretty nice

If you stop tipping they'll spit in your food or rate you down on Uber. Once I didn't tip at a semi upscale restaurant and the waiter followed our group down the street and asked me why not quite upset. I explained the food took three hours to be served and was terrible but he already knew that, the point was embarrassment.

You have to tip. It's not really a request. That said, a custom gifting a few dollars to those working brutal menial jobs isn't such a tragedy. What we need is a mechanism where servers can be tipped directly bypassing management. Could be just a QR code badge linked to stripe fast checkout.

I imagine a waiter living off Costco hotdogs and soda standing eight hours a day holding a jug of ice water and a game face with the heat of the kitchen to his back wondering if he can make both rent and the car payments. Watching groups of businessmen and beautiful women eat $300 meals leaving half of the food uneaten. It's emasculating, cruel. There needs to be something like the tipping custom. That kind if experience can build real resentment


If you have to tip, it's not a tip anymore. As a european I never understood tip system. The restaurant is already paying the waiver, isn't it? If not, the problem lays there, not on the tips. I'm not tipped when I do a good job at maintaining a IT system providing few dozens millions € of revenues, it's my job and I'm paid for that.

You choose the amount in relation to how you want them to think of you. It’s a social tax.

Go ahead and tip 0 if the consequences are acceptable to you.

In any tipping situation, the price is the base price, not the final price.


> What we need is a mechanism where servers can be tipped directly bypassing management.

You should know, such a mechanism was invented thousands of years ago...


I would say we need wages to not rely on tips to supplement a wage to a liveable income.

Basically, the issue of wages is not my problem, so this whole discussion becomes absurd. Do I want to leave compensation for the worker? Does he deserve an extra out of my pocket? Did he do something for me that exceeds his job functions and I can appreciate? If he brings me a plate of food for which I'm going to be charged, it is unlikely to fall under these conditions.

It is your problem - that's your meal he's spitting in. Justified or not

Nobody is going to spit in your food, but staff will think you’re an asshole (and sometimes confront you).

It doesn't matter, Windows is insufferable. Like a giant advertisement pretending to be an operating system. They need to start again from scratch or just simply give up and ship Ubuntu

It has really gotten bad… hoping tradition holds and Windows 12 is better because there is potential here.

Windows, since 7, appears to suffer from a "law of conservation of awesomeness": any improvement in one area must be counterbalanced with at least a commensurate drawback in some other area.

Just get on a plane and visit their corporate office in San Francisco and ask to speak to someone.

Does that actually work?

Yes. GPT summary;

"Vinod Khosla shared a story about his persistence in closing a deal with a competitor company called Computervision. He flew overnight to meet the CEO, waited in the lobby all day, and eventually convinced the CEO to negotiate with him the next day in Chicago[1]. By 5 AM the following morning, Khosla had secured a handwritten contract after refusing to let the CEO leave until an agreement was reached[1]."

https://youtu.be/MLtw31CGTHc?feature=shared


Why didn't I think of this?

feeble-minded indeed. what are they criminalizing beach pebbles for? lot of that in the UK. I wonder if the cause is cultural, genetic or environmental. They just don't seem to be playing with a full deck over there. One non sequitur after the next. I would suggest widespread brain damage from covid, but this has been going on for decades. There's something seriously wrong in the common reasoning and logic.

Article mentions people were raiding beaches for free building materials like sand and stone for concrete, which would be a problem at a large volume. Enforcing the same rules on individual souvenir collectors seems excessive.

Excessive, but potentially necessary, since otherwise you need to draw an arbitrary line between an amount being taken away that is still acceptavle and one that is not, and how many times that can happen in what period of time and so on. From that point of view it can make sense to simply categorically forbid people to take things away from the beach.

Laws are full of arbitrary drawn lines, it is hard to avoid them. If you don’t have an arbitrary line in the law then there will be arbitrary/selective enforcement which can be even worse.

Yup and that's where it gets silly.

It's trivial to say "all you can carry" and be done with it. Nobody can carry away a beach in their hands.


I think you underestimate the ingenuity of people who love to use free resources.

So is this paid for or not? The author seems to be struggling to say he got a free unit, worth money, meaning paid.

"few weeks after I posted my review of the K7 Max, Keychron reached out to ask if I wanted to try out the K11 Max, a compact Alice layout keyboard–and I ended up saying yes."

try out...

"Note: Keychron sent me an early review unit of the Keychron K11 Max and a travel pouch, and this piece follows my review policy"

sent me... there's a policy...

"I don’t do paid reviews (i.e., no money changes hands, there is no sponsorship, etc.)."

but...

"Keychron K11 Max Supplied by Keychron"

supplied?

So I have to conclude he was bribed with a free unit that he didn't return. So this is an ad not a review.


try out reads as a temporary thing to me

First job for all day AR glasses is to kill off this nonsense. Superimpose the rounded up price and blur the advertising out. Also add the markup so the customer knows that $2 Arizona iced tea was bought for 35c.

Actual first job for all day AR glasses will be to spam you with ads everywhere.


That's not just a flippant reply. The fundamental purpose of invention in our society is no longer about benefitting our lives.

If they invented consumer travel to Mars tomorrow I'd have no interest. In 2024 it would be stupid to believe the customer experience would take the form of anything better than the Star Wars hotel.


The “fundamental purpose of invention in our society” has been for military advantage more often than not.

You can call it marketing if you're really cynical. What client has more money than the government, and the budget to spend in the trillions?

I had always daydreamed of the inverse. A world where we get rid of road signs because the cars HUDs fill them in for us.

But there’s some grotesque likelihood to the idea that the world ends up positively littered and we use technology to filter it out.


Actually until recently I thought the voice actor for "her" was Rashida Jones

I definitely thought "Sky" was Rashida Jones. I still do.

This is bizarre. Someone hands you a contract as you're leaving a company and if you refuse to agree to whatever they dreamt up and sign the company takes back the equity you earned? That can't be legal


Hard to evaluate this without access to the documents. But in CA, agreements cannot be conditioned on the payment of previously earned wages.

Equity adds a wrinkle here, but I suspect if the effect of canceling equity is to cause a forfeiture of earned wages, then ultimately whatever contract is signed under that threat is void.


It’s not even equity. OpenAI is a nonprofit.

They’re profit participation units and probably come with a few gotchas like these.


Well some rich ex-openAI person should test this theory. Only way to find out. I’m sure some of them are rich.


The argument would be that it's coercive. And it might be, and they might be sued over it and lose. Basically the incentives all run strongly in OpenAI's favor. They're not a public company, vested options aren't stock and can't be liquidated except with "permission", which means that an exiting employee is probably not going to take the risk and will just sign the contract.


It might be that they agree to it initially when hired, so it doesn't matter if they sign something when they leave.


Agreements with surprise terms that only get detailed later tend not to be very legal.


Doesn't even have to be a surprise. Pretty much startup employment agreement in existence gives the company ("at the board's sole discretion") the right to repurchase your shares upon termination of employment. OpenAI's PPUs are worth $0 until they become profitable. Guess which right they'll choose to exercise if you don't sign the NDA?


I don't think rght to repurchase is routine. It was a scandal a few years ago when it turned out that Skype did that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/01/10/startup...


Who would accept shares as valuable if the contract said they can be repurchased from you at a price of 0$? This can't be it.


You are thinking of going up against an entity worth billions of dollars and somehow winning? That doesn't happen outside of movies. You'll accept whatever they decide, or end up like those Boeing whistleblowers if you make yourself enough of a nuisance.


It can. There are many ways to make the number go to zero.


How do you know there isn't a very clear term in the employment agreement stating that upon termination you'll be asked to sign an NDA on these terms?


Unless the terms of the NDA are provided upfront, that sounds sketch AF.

"I agree to follow unspecified terms in perpetuity, or return the pay I already earned" doesn't vibe with labor laws.

And if those NDA terms were already in the contract, there would be no need to sign them upon exit.


> And if those NDA terms were already in the contract, there would be no need to sign them upon exit.

If the NDA terms were agreed in an employment contract they would no longer be valid upon termination of that contract.


Plenty of contracts have survivorship clauses. In particular, non-disclosure clauses and IP rights are the ones to most commonly survive termination.


One particularly sus term in my employment agreement is that I adhere to all corporate policies. Guess how many of those there are, how often they're updated, and if I've ever read them!


Why not just get it signed then? Your signing to agree to sign later?


The solution to this is simple; erase your devices before you cross an international border and carry no data storage. If the reset device was taken from you then it's been bugged go buy a replacement. Otherwise just log back in to the cloud on the other side.


What about all the banking apps etc. It's will be still painful replacing them.


Eh, how was it bugged?


Depends on the device. When they take it out of sight they'll plug it into an automated unit that just hoovers up the data and sends it to intel. They want to build a detailed profile on every traveller. Now if you wipe the device and are logged out of your accounts, they're stuck. So they leave a rootkit that relays the login info when you type it in at home later. If they take your device out of sight or plug it into any of their hardware, then it's a write off. Straight to Craigslist


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