Sorry, kids.

I imagine that there are ways to game any AI shopping agents that we imagine might be used in the future, same way there are to game human shoppers.

It’s archaic. I can’t really imagine a situation in which we’d use “thou” today for formality reasons. If you say “thou” , you’re pretending to be someone from hundreds of years ago or you’re quoting the King James Bible or something that is hundreds of years old.

I think a more-reasonable division between formality and informality would be whether or not one uses a title like “sir” today.

In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.

It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).

FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, a US President in the early 20th century.

CATO is an organization that pushes for small-government, market-oriented policy. They’d be, economically, on the right side of the US political spectrum, whereas typically, an American using the term “liberal” would be talking about a social liberal, somone who would be, economically, on the left side of the US political spectrum, would favor a larger government.

EDIT: Also, to add to the fun, the US uses “political colors” that are something like the opposite of what is the common convention in Europe.

In the US, historically, there was no association between color and political position. However, in the, I believe 2000 election, a convention became adopted, started off some arbitrary choice by a TV station, where the Democrats (the more-left of the Big Two parties) were the “blue” party, and the Republicans (the more-right of the Big Two parties) were the “red” party.

However, in Europe, the convention is for blue to be associated with center-right parties, and red to be associated with left parties.

EDIT2: Yes, 2000 election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states

By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time and The Washington Post used the opposite scheme.[15][16][17]

In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic’s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, illustrated.[18][original research?]

You’ll tend to notice that in recent years, Democratic presididential candidates will wear a blue tie, Republicans red. Might also be true below that level; I haven’t looked. And, of course, Trump’s MAGA hat branding is red.

Valve willing to sell at a loss

I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.

Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?

Two reasons.

1. They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.

2. They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.

If you’re not from the US, unqualified “liberal” in the US started to refer to “social liberal” back around FDR.

This has been a source of irritation to some; CATO, which I’d call moderate right-libertarian, complains that they should get the title and self-describes as “classic liberal”. Meanwhile, in, say, Germany, an unqualified “liberal” tends to refer to the latter, so you get confusion when people accustomed to the two uses meet.

An unqualified “libertarian” in the US usually refers to right-libertarianism, whereas in some places, it would historically have referred to left-libertarianism; that can also be a source of confusion.

Some parties in Europe on the left side of the spectrum self-describe as “socialist” when they don’t really advocate for socialist policies any more, but rather for things like a larger welfare state. I’d call them “social democratic”; this branding is a legacy of older forms of those parties, when they did advocate for socialist policy.

Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?

What?

The “long tail” refers to niche areas with only a few people who want something in a market. It’s talking about the graph of a distribution of potential consumers for something.

Like, there’s normally a lot of people interested in a few things. You can sell a blockbuster to them. But then there’s this long tail of people interested in small, niche areas. If you can bring more of them together or reduce production costs, it starts to be viable to make things for them as well. The Internet is often described as bringing people with those niche interests together, so that people on that long tail become numerous enough to make something for. Bringing down production costs has the same sort of effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the “long tail”)—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the “head”).

The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy.[7][9] Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]

Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.

Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and LoveFilm (video rental). These purely digital retailers also have almost no marginal cost, which is benefiting the online services, unlike physical retailers that have fixed limits on their products. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations.[31] The internet has opened up larger territories to sell and provide its products without being confined to just the “local Markets” such as physical retailers like Target or even Walmart. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands.[32]

You have to have at least a certain number of potential sales before it becomes worthwhile for a human to address a niche. If the cost falls, then new niches become viable to sell to. So now you can make, say, R&B aimed specifically at teenage female Inuits or something.

The fact that small USB battery banks are typically rated in milliamp-hours and large ones are typically rated in watt-hours is just absurd.

i just had to battle a blister pack for like five minutes for ONE tiny pill

I keep a very tiny folding knife (a Spyderco Bug, though I’m sure that there are more-economical and equally functional keychain knives) on my keychain. I take it off if I’m going to fly somewhere. If one has something like that handy, one always has something with them to cut into a blister pack.

There’s some company that has done some CGI videos making fun of the Boston Dynamics use of a hockey stick for separation, do videos that have humans pretending to be Boston Dynamics people abusing a CGI robot.

kagis

Corridor Digital, as “Bosstown Dynamics”:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="bosstown+dynamics"

e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

If you mean a post, you can only chose one image to be the target of your post, but you can embed more in the text of your post.

If you mean a comment, I’m not sure the source of confusion. You can embed multiple images. The Lemmy Web UI should work, as well as all the clients I’ve used.

You just need to have the text:

![](url-to-image)

…in your comment text.

Most Lemmy home instances will be runnimg a pict-rs instance, and let you upload an image to it with a button near the comment text field and also add the above text to display that image in your comment in one go.

If you’re trying and it’s failing, there can be a maximum byte size placed on the pict-rs upload by your home instance, and it’s possible that maybe your first image is below it and your second is not. There are also some image formats that wouldn’t be recognized, if you’re using something exotic for your second image — that could also cause the upload to fail.

It’d be kind of nice to have something, animal or human, that could speak Minoan, as it’d maybe let us finally decode Linear A.

Flashlights produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone.

Flashlights can definitely put out a lot more light (and store more power) than a cell phone light, but for a lot of close-up stuff, the cell phone is fine.

I’m skeptical that flashlights will go away, as @RegularJoe@lemmy.world is proposing. But I do think that smartphones are a partial replacement.

In urban areas, I don’t need a bright flashlight much, because there’s fixed lighting all over, but in more rural areas, if you’re outside at night and walking around, you do tend to need a flashlight.

I also don’t know how much more change there will be. Like, people already have smartphones pretty much everywhere. I think that most of the replacement that will happen has probably already happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQz4VBablAM

Waymo’s starting to roll out self-driving robotaxis onto the freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area; news coverage from today.

My expectation is that there will be a lot more autonomous cars out there in the future.

Also, I think the less interesting question is where it is today and more where it’s going to be in, say, five years, if you figure that development continues.

And might be possible to explore more long-tail stuff if production costs drop, or even do stuff customized to a single listener. I mean, we can’t economically have humans do that.

I tried it (olio.cafe). It’s usable now, but not as mature as Lemmy yet, and client software support is more limited.

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc

I’m sure you could, if you want.

https://suno.com/

https://udio.com/

They’re either using one of those or a similar service.

I don’t think that it’s gonna be all that rewarding, though.

I mean, do you really want to be trying to get in a yelling match with someone else over politics, each trying to drown the other out?

Note that I submitted a San Francisco Chronicle article about this yesterday. One thing that came up during the discussion is that while there may be a lot of people streaming the song on Spotify, at least according to one source, the Billboard chart that was topped was a small-volume one, so it may not be as significant as it sounds.

https://lemmy.today/post/41573347