wjrii

I’ve had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn’t seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don’t force the issue, and the printer doesn’t care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it’s just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.

That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.

I’m sure it’s also completely coincidental that burnt coffee tastes mostly same no matter where and when the beans came from. :-)

I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.

I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)

If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).

So it’s not a lawsuit (yet), it’s a complaint to the state attorney general of Washington accusing Starbucks of unfriendly consumer practices related to their gift cards, in part because they can recognize unspent gift cards as revenue, and also because it’s instant cashflow for them even if the accounting revenue lags behind. The need to come up with a calculation for how much deferred revenue to recognize can be abused by execs to nudge the revenue higher (and with no additional costs associated with it, profit as well) and thereby improve stock price and trigger bonuses and whatnot.

The actual complaint reads as a bit of pearl-clutching (“involuntary subscription” because customers don’t want to leave a balance OR talk to a real human at their local Starbucks!) , but on a the “death by a thousand cuts” model, yeah, I suppose Starbucks is being kinda dickish. The app doesn’t give you as many rewards if you pay with CC, buries the other payment options a couple of layers deep in a menu, doesn’t let you reload gift cards in increments equal to a purchase, doesn’t let you split payment methods, and sets a high default reload so (on iOS at least) it isn’t immediately visible that you even could scroll up to reload in smaller amounts.

It’s sort of garden variety asshole app design meant to soft-lock customers in, but it’s not really fraud in any meaningful way if someone is motivated. You add money, you get bitter overpriced coffee that your partner really likes for some reason. I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL. Still, maybe worth a public scolding or some fines to get them to modify it so people can save a few bucks without diving into the finer nuances of their coffee app.

Maybe I’m a little pollyannaish, but I tend to think that the generations growing up with this stuff will grow around it and configure their social expectations and will settle into rhythms that work as well for them as older generations’ environments did for them. It will look weird to olds, but I always wonder if we’re looking back at the “good ol’ days,” and projecting our own reactions to the changes onto the generations that will take them in stride and make sarcastic wanking gestures at us when we complain.

Pamphlets/Newpapers/Films/Radio/TV/Video Games/Internet/Social Media will all rot your brain and subject you to misinformation and leave you depressed at how you must interact with the world, depending on when you were born and when you are speaking. Not to say there are not unique challenges to each in turn, or that some periods don’t end up worse than others, but I just don’t think our kids are going to treat the world and each other THAT much worse than all their ancestors have, and if they do I’m not sure it is uniquely social media’s fault. There are many things worth knowing about the social impact of new tech, and perspectives that the experienced can offer, especially in transitional eras while it’s new. I just don’t think think doomer handwringing or trying to put genies back into bottles is a good use of anyone’s collective time.

Having read some software developers’ attempts at writing, or, god help me, contract drafting, I agree completely.

Doctors are the worst about this though, and everybody WebMD’ing themselves before coming in is simply collective karma.

Jesus. The details are damning. This is not white Gen-Z’ers thinking they’re post-racial so they can repeat the stuff they hear from black content creators (and of course, they’re not and they shouldn’t). This is pretty much old-school racism.

Also apparently not the first issue, or the second.

What (or who?) could create a corporate culture where racists would feel empowered to say anything they want without fear of repercussion?

If you’re in the US, Ryobi has changed chemistries once or twice, but they haven’t changed the voltage or physical format of their batteries for 20+ years.

It’s intentional in the sense that they all involve intangible works of the mind and are only “property” in the legal system due to developments much, much later than the “I’ll bash you with a club if take my food” or the “I’ll stab you with a spear if occupy my farm” social contracts of personal and real property. It was very useful for those learning the law.

You’re right that they do very different things in society though, and it’s not particularly helpful outside the legal profession to bundle them so tightly together. Trademarks in particular should only protect branding and identity and when not abused provide a pretty valuable direct service for consumers in that you know who you’re dealing with.

The other two protect creators and therefore indirectly promise to “encourage innovation” that should benefit everyone, but they’re literally nothing more than legalized, if limited, monopolies. As Disney has shown though, you can smear the edges of copyright and trademark until they start to blend together.

Yes, mostly.

X.com was Musk’s site after he worked at Scotiabank. They merged with another site that had a product called Paypal that was getting some traction. Musk tried to tie the other services X.com was offering at the hip with Paypal, and if you’re old enough you probably remember a “Paypal by X.com” (or similar) branding back when you needed to buy a used 56k modem from eBay.

Musk wanted to rebrand everything to x.com, was a huge baby about it, and got pushed out as an executive and replaced by Peter Thiel. A few years ago, Musk purchased the X.com domain name from Paypal like it was a treasured childhood sled, and he’s finally found something (very stupid) to do with it.

It’s better. He specifically went out and PAID to buy the domain back from Paypal because he was so sure he’d need it again.

AND at the exact moment in time where your market dominance is under serious threat, with history and continuity as important differentiators.

First, he was an aerospace guy and several things he’s said make me think he was sort of chauvinistic about deep sea exploration in general, stuff like “It’s perfectly fine. Having all these certifications for airplanes is one thing, but the carbon fiber was perfectly sound.”

Second, his business model, taking four people down with him in something other than Cameronesque claustrophia, and doing so without the cost of owning a proper launch vessel, instead renting any ship that could hold and then monitor his launch sled, meant it was critical he make something big and light, by deep sea submersible standards, that was at least nominally expected to handle the load. Shit, I guess in some sense, he did, since it went down and back two or three times or whatever. At the absolute best, though, he’d invented a disposable sub, and he clearly didn’t worry about that limitation any more than the rest.

It’s roughly equivalent to using Outlook versus Thunderbird for your email. Same protocol, same ability to interact, but different codebase, slightly different interface, and possibly a few tweaks around the edges where the protocol itself doesn’t demand a certain way of doing things.

So, for instance, a “!” link in Lemmy doesn’t work in kbin, but remove the exclamation point and it will be fine. A Lemmy community is identical to a Kbin magazine. Properly configured and federated, a Lemmy and a Kbin instance are completely interoperable with each other. Kbin has the “microblog” tab that integrates it better with Mastodon, but I haven’t seen a lot of discussion around that part of things, since link aggregation is driving the current increase in users.

One of the interesting things as a newbie is seeing how the relatively small existing population of the Fediverse reacts to the influx of new faces. The article sort of outlines an example of, as far as I understand it, exactly how the federated sites are supposed to work, but actually being faced with it is causing a little bit of trepidation and rethinking of old behaviors. Not really good or bad, just interesting.

Lol. GNU’s not Unix.

But isn’t the point of the manual transmission to be closer to the machine and integrate yourself into the actual driving experience, as well as perform better in edge use cases where a traditional automatic has little or no advantage over a skilled driver? This is literally the opposite of that, adding an imaginary layer of control and artificial sensory feedback that works against the drivetrain. Driving a manual is an exercise in market inertia and value engineering in Europe, and it’s barely more than an enthusiast hobby in the US. I don’t see either group wanting to “play pretend” for long.