Yes, that was the plan all along. Uber intended to be a robotaxi company, but self-driving car technology was not ready. They launched with human drivers to build up market share. The plan was always to funnel profits from ride-shares into self-driving cars and then start replacing human driven cars with robots, where it would be profitable.

It was a boring dud for me, just that I prefer grey ELEGOO filament for my 3D printer.

I don’t buy much on Amazon, but it should be more than just filament. No notes about headphone choice or random one-of items I have bought?

Amazon has no idea about my board game addiction because I don’t typically buy games on Amazon. They have a reputation for selling low quality bootlegs as legit. Besides, I can often find a better price on comparison shopping sites like https://www.boardgameoracle.com/ or https://boardgameprices.com/

It is a grand jury. That is the practice round for a trial. The prosecutor goes over the evidence and explains what argument they are going to make in court without the defendent or their lawyer present to argue against it. The role of a grand jury is to pump the prosecutor up and say “You got this. I would totally believe you if I was on a real jury.”

The fact that in this case, the grand jury said “That is stupid. You have no argument. Just let the guy walk,” means that either the prosecutor is an incompetent idiot who did not understand what evidence he was presenting or the jury thought that no crime had been committed.

That is why they should not quit on the spot. Start applying for job postings and quit once they have a new offer in hand.

Pokemon Legends Arceus. I rage quit after playing more than 200 hours.

On paper, it is the best Pokemon game for me. I can complete the in-game collection without having to trade with other versions of the same game. The end-game is moderately grindy and gives a fun sense of progress (catch 15 of this pokemon, defeat 20 of that one with ice attacks).

Unfortunately, the spawn rates are very very broken. When you first enter an area of a map, it is swarming with creatures, but as you catch or defeat them, they do not respawn. It takes some combination of distance and in-game time to get a map to repopulate so I have to travel away for several minutes, travel back, and then find that the map only partially refilled. Plus, there seems to be some sort of back-off that reduces the spawn rate of rare Pokemon the more often I clear a zone in quick succession which only resets when I teleport back to the hub area and teleport back. It is all very painful when certain Pokemon seem to have a 5 or 10% chance of spawning and the game asks me to catch 15 of them and then defeat 20 more.

And don’t get me started on Space-Time Distortions, random events where a small part of the map gets unique creatures for a short while. The game does not explain how often they are supposed to occur, that certain player actions (like battling) pause the timer, and that in-game weather events can reset it. A player can wait hours for a distortion to appear before looking up the formula online and being told that the best strategy is too load into a map, put down the game for exactly 5 minutes, and if a distortion is not starting, teleport out of the map and back in, wasting a minute looking at loading screens.

Overall, it is so frustrating that I cannot imagine it is all intentional, but that it is caused by bugs that the developers never patched. I have heard that it is fixed in the new Pokemon Legends.

Remember, only shop on Bandcamp Fridays, when all the money goes to the artists. The corporate owners are not playing nice with the employee union.

It is rated as water resistant, capable of withstanding a jet of water.

Repairability depends on what breaks. If water getting into the phone fries the CPU, it does not seem fixable. Glancing at the site, I could not find a part on sale, probably because the cost of a replacement part would cost almost as much as replacing the phone.

In the US, libel requires you to prove that the writer knew that what they were writing is not true and that they did it to hurt you. Doing lazy research and trusting an AI is not going to meet that standard.

I would hope, but I would want to check reviews to be sure.

I have, but decided against it. I am clumsy and my hands are big enough to barely use my phone one handed (but not hold it securely when I do).

I will have to consider Fairphone when I am looking for my next phone. Looking at their site, my only hesitation is about water resistance. I understand that repairability comes at the cost of making everything glued and sealed shut, but I drop my phone in water once every couple of years. If that risks killing it, it is not going to be a phone that will last long in my hands.

The issue with that phone (and seemingly everything coming from HMD) is that it only gets 2 major OS upgrades. Also, it launches a major version behind, so it is actually only a single upgrade.

I am quite upset about it. I had a Nokia 6 (made by HMD) and loved the well made, durable hardware and very clean no-bloat software. I have been saddened to see that while most phone brands have been extending their OS support window, HMD has been shortening it.

https://libbyapp.com/

Assuming you have a card from a participating library.

They left entirely? Not just tuned out the group until the topic of conversation moved on?

The article argues that extremist views and echo chambers are inherent in public social networks where everyone is trying to talk to everyone else. That includes Fediverse networks like Lemmy and Mastodon.

They argue for smaller, more intimate networks like group chats among friends. I agree with the notion, but I am not sure how someone can build these sorts of environments without just inviting a group of friends and making an echo chamber.

If you read the article, the argument they are making is that you cannot fix social media by simply tweaking the algorithm. We need a new form of social media that is not just everyone screaming into the void for attention, which includes Lemmy, Mastodon, and other Fediverse platforms.

I don’t want to sync my bookmarks. The sites I want bookmarked on my desktop are not the same as the sites I want bookmarked on my phone nor the sites I want bookmarked on my work laptop.

As an occasional user, I am sad to see it go. Are there any other sites out there to maintain a list of links that I may find useful in the future? With a web UI and not self hosted?

1. I assumed that the code was running on a machine that Lu controlled.
2. Most companies I have worked at had code reviews, but it was on the honor system. I am supposed to get reviews for all the code I push to main, but there is nothing stopping me from checking in code that was not reviewed (or getting code reviewed and making a change before pushing it). My coworkers trust me to follow the process and allow me to break the rules in an emergency.