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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

    But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

    So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.


  • This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

    It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

    Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?


  • IIRC, there is a setting to just make it open an Explorer window every time and skip all the crap. I’m on my phone, so I don’t want to look for it rn, but it’s only a few clicks.

    (It might just skip the OneDrive step; I don’t have documents this way often, so I can’t recall off the top of my head.)

    Ironically, I just passed Explorer to save to a OneDrive folder, but it’s faster and easier to get to the right spot with a classic Explorer “save as” window.





  • I typically have 50-200 browser tabs open, but I also usually have 5+ browser windows running. So, like, when I’m building something, I’ll have the thing I’m building and all its parts spread across two windows, and a third window with all my reference materials. Then I can cleanly kill them all when I’m done.

    I don’t really know what I’d keep from those when that workflow is done. The thing is built, so I don’t need any of it anymore.


  • Maybe it’s just my ADHD, but I can’t even imagine managing that many tabs.

    In my workflow, I start a project, then keep opening new tabs as I need to look things up, frequently moving tabs between multiple browsers spanning my 32" monitor. So long as I’m working on that problem, I just keep opening new tabs.

    Then, when I’ve finally squared away the section of the project I was working on, I usually just close the browser entirely and start fresh.

    Needing to manually sift through the 80+ tabs I chaotically opened in the last hour or so to figure out what’s worth keeping? Hell no. That’s what browser history is for. It’s Etch-a-Sketch time! Shake it clean and start fresh.


  • In Canada, it’s required by Know Your Customer (KYC) legislation. It’s anti-money laundering and anti-crime legislation.

    There aren’t many legitimate reasons why people need like $10K in literal cash. Usually, that much money should be sent with a money order (bank draft). That is, unless you’re running something like a major retail store, in which case you’ll have arrangements to get lots of small bills and coins regularly.

    Banks also just don’t have that much physical cash on hand. They don’t want to risk worry about them running out of cash since that can trigger a run on the bank. They can get you as much cash as you need for any reasonable purpose, with notice, but not every branch is going to have $100K+ sitting around already sorted and ready to go so every rando in town can get tonnes of cash out on the same day. If you’re running a comic con and need $50K in coins and $5s for making change, the can get that for you no problem next week, but ain’t nobody going to help you today.

    We also don’t want to make it easy for criminals, like human traffickers, to make large cash withdrawals and deposits.


  • LLMs can be great for explaining things that have concrete solutions, like physics and math problems, when they have a separate “computations” AI bolted onto it, like ChatGPT does. Usually, you can check the answer in the back of the book anyway, so it’s very easy to catch fact hallucinations.

    I wouldn’t worry about source hallucinations with this either. I don’t think it would even come up?


  • I wouldn’t recommend it, tbh, but I’m liking Windows 10 Ameliorated. It’s a hassle to set up drivers for every single device, and sometimes you need to do some tinkering to fix things. It also doesn’t get Windows updates (but has a much smaller attack surface due to so many things being disabled).

    So, for your typical “I just want it to work and I don’t disable malware ads” user, I wouldn’t recommend it. But, for power users, it’s nice having a Windows machine that’s essentially de-Microsofted. It also made my shitty old laptop a lot more responsive.





  • Not parent poster, but I’m going to see if I can come up with some.

    0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

    0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

    0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.

    1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut… On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that’s maintaining their 30% cut.

    2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

    3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

    4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

    5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

    6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

    7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

    (Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

    I think I did pretty well! It’s hard to find things to fault. It’s a pretty great platform.


  • I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

    Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)

    If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.

    Right now, it’s easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it’s usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you’re a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).


  • Yeah, Terraria is a great example of a game where the grind is integral to the game. Needing to get 20 drops from a particular creature encourages you to explore the specific zone deeply enough to really enjoy it. There’s no story to progress through, it’s just exploration and grinding to get different materials.

    Similarly for Minecraft. Is it “grinding” to mine diamonds at z-level 11, or is that the game?

    JRPGs and MMOs are the ones who generally don’t respect your time with their XP grind systems.