cassetti @ cassetti @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

And there will be loads of companies who insist on using AI in the future..... but not all will - because they'll learn that like everything, there are limits to it's capabilities.

There are a few plants that would help with your savage garden desires.

Check out pitcher plants for example. These plants use a pitcher of nectar water to attract bugs who get stuck and slowly dissolved in the water - any captured flies act as fertilizer for the plants.

Alternatively look up "sundew" plants - They are essentially leaves with sticky "dew" that catches bugs which land on the surface of the leaves (and slowly absorbed the fly - some varieties will even curl up around the bug to digest it faster)

Both of these plants grow best in a "bog planter" (imagine a mini swamp on your desk) - with a tray of water constantly full to keep the soil "damp" at all times. I ended up 3D printing my own bog planters for my pitcher plants. My Sundew died, but I need to buy another one - I enjoyed growing them.

Remember when big corporations thought they could outsource 100% of customer service to india many years ago? Remember how well that went?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasdichter/2019/03/30/call-centers-return-to-the-u-s-more-companies-get-the-link-between-customer-service-and-profit/

That partially already happened at the start of the war. There was a massive "brain drain" among the higher educated part of society, which did include a bunch of hackers. Why live inside russia these days when you can move elsewhere and get paid better?

I was a Netflix DVD subscriber before they released a Wii streaming disc then started streaming Netflix back when it was glorious with all your favorite shows. Eventually I downgraded to the cheap $8 plan for a single user at 1080p resolution which was fine - my old television is still 1080p native resolution.

Then they quietly raised the price.... and dropped the resolution to 720p without telling me. Finally I had enough - after more than a decade I finally cancelled my Netflix account last year and haven't looked back.

I don't miss their "netflix originals" which only last for one or two seasons before getting canned because netflix needs more viewership to justify the investments.

Truth be told, I don't watch must television (or even youtube) in general - I have better things to do with my time than vegetating on a couch watching a tv screen.

True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn't possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of...... aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90's but it's still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.

Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.

Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.

Damn I'm getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn't online. The internet had it's trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.

Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It's crazy to know they're still in existence and still pretty active.

Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you'd have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Philips Hue smart lights can sync with Spotify. You program where each color light is located in the room (location and elevation) and then it will dance the lights to the music, with light color scheme determined by album art colors (which is really handy for things like Christmas music where most of it is red/white/green anyway lol).

I use my spare hue lights in my garage gym so they dance to the music in my earbuds. I honestly love it - it gets me more "in the zone" when working out.

Otherwise to answer your question I use ProjectM on my android phone

Oh no, I totally know it - there's a reason why I'm starting a micro-homestead to raise my own meat and fruits/vegetables - because I want to heat good healthy food, not all that other junk.

I was just so shocked at the difference in taste between the two pizzas which is not something I regularly eat anyway

Many people seem to forget credit scores didn't exist before 1989. Decades ago a wife would have to get permission from the husband to open a line of credit with a department store.

Credit scores were built to help the banks, not the average person.

How are you checking your credit score? Frequent hard-pulls of your actual credit score would show up on your credit report and actually lower your credit score on it's own.

I'll bet you're using a service like credit karma which pinky-promises it is properly calculating your credit score. But is it really?

Nah their scoring model weighs different things differently. And over the past decade, I get a sense that they put more value on your open lines of credit themselves over closed credit in order to encourage people to open more credit cards (which is good business for banks, but not the customer).

https://www.cnbc.com/select/credit-karma-vs-fico-credit-scores/

Don't put too much faith in those services to give you an accurate credit score, and personally I wouldn't allow them access to my personal information - that's just another avenue of attack by a hacker if they compromise the CreditKarma mainframes and steal your info.

About ten years ago while visiting the Canadian side of Niagra Falls, my other half wanted a pizza and to stay in at our beautiful room overlooking the falls. So we got a fancy pizza with pretzel crust from Little Caesars and holy hell it was good - soon as we got back to America I tried to order the exact same pizza a week later and it was completely different. Different crust, cheese, etc - I was so disappointed lol

Go to a supermarket, look around at how many candies and sodas now use artificial sweetener instead of plain sugar. It's certainly on the increase over the past 20 years if you look back historically at it's usage, and it seems to be increasing annually.

Look at how Pepsi phased out Sierra Mist in favor of the new "Starry" soda which is made with more artificial sweetener. This lets them advertise lower calories on the label, while selling a sweeter beverage people will buy.

I used to love buying malted beverages and energy drinks occasionally because I enjoy trying new flavors. However over the past five+ years, I've noticed a lot more brands sneaking in artificial sweeteners. Look at Mountain Dew - they recently started a line of alcohol-infused beverages which interested me. But go figure they were absolutely terrible - they tasted nothing like classic mountain dew with al that fake sugar. I threw them out lol.

Meanwhile, sugar has increased in just about everything else we eat.

I think you mean FAKE sugar. Holy hell is it everywhere. And it's so damn sweet.

I actually enjoy having a sodastream just so I can still buy the occasional energy drink or soda, and add some extra carbonated water to tone down the sweetness.

You know how much I'd love to see a coca-cola with "low cane sugar" as an option? Just give me cane sugar....... but less of it!!

I really wish instead of switching from real sugar to artificial sweetener, companies would simply use less sugar. But no, artificial sweetener is CHEAPER than real sugar, and makes the item taste sweeter, so it's a win-win, right?

EVERY media outlet skews their content left, right, center, etc. Remember - someone is paying for that news to be generated, so they're going to want to have at least some sort of say in what does or doesn't get mentioned.

The secret is to not rely on any one single news outlet. RSS technology for example allows you to subscribe and monitor literally countless news sites and other content all sorted by folder or collections (for example I have current events, politics, general technology, 3D printing, space, etc - and each has dozens of feeds from big and small blogs, and news sites). When I view ALL news feeds, I get all content sorted by timestamp. No algorithm is sorting the data for me, just raw feeds of data.

Whenever a major event happens in the world, I see literally dozens of different spins on the same topic. Usually 90% of the time the headlines are close enough that you can really see the reality. Sometimes it's fun to see "extreme" spins from some extreme left or right sites or what content they choose to ignore. I don't subscribe to just the news sites that align with my views, I like to subscribe to everything so I do get every side of the equation. It also helps prepare me for when my father starts to spew clearly BS from certain media outlets known to embellish the truth with "alternative facts".

Every time I find a website with a well written article that I am currently not monitoring, I'll immediately check to see if there's an RSS feed available for me to add to my collection of curated feeds.

Sometimes I even get to see test posts from the news sites or articles with original headlines before they get rewritten lol.

My advice would be to research RSS feeds and learn how to use them. So you can educate yourself.

Pro tip - you can even use RSS feeds to watch and lurk on the fediverse!

But you are here, so that's a great first step. Twitter is an necessary evil for many people these days. Just like reddit, it'll be hard for people to make the transition. Signing up here is the first step - the more content we create, the more people will stick around

I really only handle chargebacks as a final “nuclear” option

As it should be. I have to deal with customers who literally wait until they see I generate a tracking number and scanned in at the post office before they call their bank later that day and file chargeback because they know half the time small businesses aren't diligent enough to respond within the 14 day window provided by the banks in the chargeback process for refuting a dispute.

I also have a pretty long and fairly steady history witb said CC merchant. So it’s clearly not a pattern or abuse. I’m thinking I’ve maybe filed 3-4 in the last 10 years. And that’s with an average of 200-500 transactions a month on the account.

Yeah, as I've recently discovered, credit unions tend to offer better customer service than banks these days for all things from loans to banking in general.

Lol yeah, my friend works at one of the larger banks and things are very different - she handles chargebacks and oven deals with people who file chargebacks on a $5 hot dog they just bought claiming they got food poisoning 10 minutes later. It's insane what some banks let fly.

Sucks suntrust is such a crummy bank - I would look elsewhere for banking lol.

Well shoot, just sold a bunch of classic gameboy and game-gear games on ebay within the past few months. Some of my oldest games date back to 1989