I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.
Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.
I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.
When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.
That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”
Can we start calling Amazon “AliExpress with American characteristics” now?
I can’t see how this won’t further undermine the value proposition of Prime, as yet more of their inventory is ineligible for “free 2-day shipping.”
Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?
ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.
They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.
If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.
That does seem like something that would violate some rules-of-war convention.
Booby-trapping something that might be mistaken by civilians as a legitimate humanitarian aid drop risks non-combatant casualties and makes it harder for actual aid operations to operate.
Wasn’t that why he loves fast food? It’s easier to target the White House supply chain for a precision poisoning than to try to hit every McDonald’s in a 50km radius and hope to get lucky.
I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.
The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.
A month or so ago; I had a 32G card, and bought a 128G card.
My objections:
Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.
Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box
I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.
Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P
Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?
The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.
Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.
There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”
Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.
Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.
The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.
We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.
On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.
Needs a sheet of rub-on tattoos with vaguely “I didn’t serve in the military but really want to imply I did” to “outright white supremacist” themes.
My favourite is that “Three Percenter” design that effectively coopts the design of one of America’s least-successful coins. I sort of want to talk one of their ears off about numismatics and watch their brain smoulder.
It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.
Wow. You get to remove code? I’d assume you just default it to 0 so the API contract doesn’t change and break 20-year-old code.
As a reptile keeper who knows full well they don’t know when to stop eating, I find this story charming. I want to feed her a basket of eyes (pre-frozen to kill parasites)
One hour from new classic myth to kawaii. I think that’s near Rule 34 turnaround speed.