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numberfour002

@numberfour002@lemmy.world

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numberfour002 ,

In a way, I'm glad people are slowing starting to come around and pay attention to this. For years, any time I would publicly complain about Amazon customer service online, it was very common for people to be completely dismissive or even blame me. I'd hear statements like "sure Amazon sucks, but they have great customer service" and I'd think to myself, just wait until it's your time to find out that the customer service isn't what you think it is.

Long story short, the item came with a broken part. Should have been quick and easy to rectify (send a replacement part, send a replacement unit, or refund the purchase). The seller was completely unhelpful. Amazon customer service would not intervene and insisted that I continue fruitlessly corresponding with the vendor, even though they had an "A-to-Z" money back guarantee if something goes wrong. It literally took months of back and forth between me, the vendor, and Amazon customer service before things were finally refunded in full.

So, basically I gave them another chance and they showed that things hadn't improved a bit.

numberfour002 ,

Technically, there were no rails to begin with. So, if the conversation was never on the the non-existent rails, it certainly could not have gone off them.

numberfour002 ,

I've found that one of the more reliable ways to activate the local pedant population in any given situation is to quote lyrics from the 1996 Alanis Morissette song "Ironic". It's like rain, on your wedding day!

numberfour002 ,

Maybe relevant:

You wake up.

You're still a lizard sunning on a red rock.

It was all a dream.

The concept of selling "Feet pics" to pay back "Student loans" is already losing its meaning as you open and lick your own eyeballs to moisten them.

Time to eat a bug.

numberfour002 ,

So, video/mp4, video/mpeg, video/webm, video/webp, or one of the other mimes?

numberfour002 ,

I've known some of "these people". Couple of pointers.

First, resist the urge to hold you breath too much. Sounds counter productive, but this is not a situation where you want to lower the amount of oxygen reaching your brain. But also, the more you breathe it in, the sooner you start to become nose blind to the worst elements of the aroma.

Second, try not to laugh when you inevitably have to ask "where should I move this stuff in the seat?" even though you already know the answer is going to be "just throw it on the floor".

numberfour002 ,

Biggest question I have is do you have to leave Mothman a tip for that? And I guess if so how much?

numberfour002 ,

I won't speak for all "white dudes" but I know why I do it.

First, my thermostat is just different from average. If it's 70F/21C, there's a very high chance I'm going to be sweating, especially if I'm indoors and there's limited air movement or I'm outdoors and there's any bit of direct sunlight. Shorts make that a bit more bearable.

Second, given my warm nature, the climate where I live and my lifestyle make wearing shorts practical for much of the year. In the "colder" months of the year, it's usually a case where it's cold in the morning but warms up to a reasonable extent during the day. Guess what? I have an indoor, office job. I don't give a flip about how cold it is during the early parts of the day because I'm going to be indoors where the temperature is pretty much guaranteed to be above the 70F/21C limit I mentioned in my first point. By the time I'm off work and out of the office in the evening, it's warmed up to the point where shorts are totally appropriate and comfy (for me). Sure, I could waste time and energy doing multiple wardrobe changes throughout the day, but that's just bullshit and quite frankly, stupid, if I don't have to do it.

Third, who gives a fuck? Apparently a lot of people -- as it's very common to get questions or comments when I wear shorts during colder weather that lesser humans can't tolerate in shorts. I don't go around acting as the fashion police for your stupid crocs or question your multiple changes of clothes per day like you're Beyoncé doing a concert. So leave my cargo shorts in the middle of winter alone.

numberfour002 ,

This bird, guys.

numberfour002 ,

I don't think moldy even applies here, this cat was a thing on the internet back before we even knew it was all powered by tubes. At this point it would be more appropriate to call it fossilized.

numberfour002 ,

My kids got me one of them Netflix accounts for the year as a Christmas gift that site is so full of smuts I cannot believe but we did watch a movie on there we both like back in Febraurary it was the one with that blonde woman from the show we used to watch back 20 years ago and she was solving a crime but couldn't do it on her own so this baby child help her see visions with a donkey and they end up figuring out it was that Barry guy. Anyway we much prefer Disney but don't tell the kids.

numberfour002 ,

DISCUSSTING but I do like their food. Harold and I are on a fixed income so we don't eat at the Olive Garden anymore but there's an Italian place over in Monroe that has some really good parmeseans and for half the price so when the kids come to visit we have been known to eat there.

numberfour002 ,

Are the chocolate covered ones creme filled or jelly? My dearest Harold is allergic to the cream filling but me personally I prefer it. Second best is raspberry. Worst is anything mint or citrus. A plain donut will do in a pinch but I'm honestly not that desperate.

numberfour002 ,

There's nothing stopping me from writing a $480 million USD check either. Cashing it, on the other hand, that's a you problem.

numberfour002 ,

What’s more likely, someone at reddit fucked up an analysis, or these ads are 14x better than Google or 31x better than FB?

What's most likely is that you misread or misinterpreted what was stated. It says the new format outperforms other types of ads by 28%, not that they get 28% CTR.

numberfour002 ,

Ya'll listen up up here's the story about a little guy that lives in the blue world.

numberfour002 ,

Not me. I'm reading this Lemmy post in browser.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    numberfour002 ,

    My very first PC was a Compaq. It was not the cheapest low-end piece of shit available in those days, yet it was still an absolute low-end piece of shit. USB ports broke with minimal use. CD-ROM drive broke despite minimal use. The case started falling apart after a year or so. RAM went bad. I could go on, but you get the point. PIECE OF LITERAL FECES.

    And then they got bought by HP, which was already on my list of PIECE OF LITERAL FECES companies.

    So, that's when I knew I'd never buy anything HP branded. That was 20+ years ago.

    And literally (I'm using literally in the literal sense), every single person I know who has bought something (anything) HP branded after I advised them not to has regretted their decision. It's honestly baffling how they are still in business on the consumer end. Their stuff is crap. PIECES OF LITERAL FECES.

    numberfour002 ,

    Anecdotally speaking, I've been suspecting this was happening already with code related AI as I've been noticing a pretty steep decline in code quality of the code suggestions various AI tools have been providing.

    Some of these tools, like GitHub's AI product, are trained on their own code repositories. As more and more developers use AI to help generate code and especially as more novice level developers rely on AI to help learn new technologies, more of that AI generated code is getting added to the repos (in theory) that are used to train the AI. Not that all AI code is garbage, but there's enough that is garbage in my experience, that I suspect it's going to be a garbage in, garbage out affair sans human correction/oversight. Currently, as far as I can tell, these tools aren't really using much in the way of good metrics to rate whether the code they are training on is quality or not, nor whether it actually even works or not.

    More and more often I'm getting ungrounded output (the new term for hallucinations) when it comes to code, rather than the actual helpful and relevant stuff that had me so excited when I first started using these products. And I worry that it's going to get worse. I hope not, of course, but it is a little concerning when the AI tools are more consistently providing useless / broken suggestions.

    numberfour002 ,

    It's a linear extrapolation that doesn't take into account the not completely unreasonable chance that commercially viable banana varieties could go [functionally] extinct or that climate change will make it dramatically more expensive to grow them in sufficient quantities such that the price can stay on trend.

    numberfour002 ,

    I feel like this is on brand for Jersey Mike's, though. I'm pretty sure the only way to get fired from Jersey Mike's to show up sober for your shift.

    numberfour002 ,

    Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's bad or that it's worse than the competitors.

    But, it's one of the chains where I've experienced employees that very clearly smelled strongly of weed (like they have just freshly smoked up or had some in their pocket) while making my food or serving it to me. At least in my region where weed isn't legalized, it kind of has a reputation of being one of the cooler "stoner friendly" chain restaurants in terms of employment opportunities and the few people I've known who worked there at some point are or were heavy, frequent users.

    I'm not hating on people who use drugs, but I don't think it's all that far fetched to believe that working under the influence is going to increase the odds/frequency of silly screw ups similar to the BLT-less BOLT in the photo and given the reputation of that company (in my circle, region, etc), it doesn't seem at all like a weird joke to make. Really, it applies to a lot of restaurants in general.

    numberfour002 ,

    I don't believe that kind of time travel is possible. But, if it were possible, the odds of finding that exact individual (who probably didn't actually exist) at that exact time are so minuscule that for all practical purposes, it may as well be impossible. But, if that were also possible, it did happen, and that was the only thing that happened differently, then I'm thinking the most likely outcome is that evolution would pretty much continue on the same course, probably even with humans eventually evolving.

    It's common to think of the evolutionary process in a more or less linear fashion that could theoretically be traced back to a figurative Adam and Eve, but the reality is, it's so much more messy and convoluted than that. Evolution is a culmination of many factors such as the environmental conditions and populations that exist during a given time frame. So even if there was one specific common ancestral individual who happened to live at the exact time the dinosaurs were alive, which that individual is not a thing that existed, there would almost certainly still be a population of others of the same species living in the same conditions -- so theoretically would still ultimately lead to the same evolutionary outcomes in most instances.

    So, I think it's very possible people would still exist. But, it wouldn't be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.

    On the other hand, who is to say that the common ancestor hadn't already produced the offspring that specifically lead to you and I being born before it was eaten? Who's to say that individual getting scared and eaten wouldn't have happened anyway, regardless of whether you were there or not? Who's to say that wasn't actually the defining moment that ultimately resulted in the evolution of people (and you and I specifically)?

    I dunno, this is all getting a little too timey-wimey for me.

    numberfour002 ,

    Well, I don't think time travel backwards in this manner is possible, but if it is, it would have to operate under the laws of thermodynamics which means the energy (and maybe even some of the atoms) that was "transported back in time" would represent a paradox.

    The energy and/or some of the atoms in you and the time machine were already somewhere in the past when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Which presents a paradox (and this is probably not even the only paradox), so how does the universe conserve energy in that situation?

    Somehow the "original" atoms and energy that became you and the machine would need to be reconciled with the duplicates that suddenly turned up.

    So maybe there's a mysterious process that obliterates energy? What would it be and how would it work? Would that be equivalent to the false vacuum that could fundamentally destroy the universe as we currently know it?

    Or maybe there's nothing to actually stop duplication of energy and atoms and it's entirely feasible to go back in time. You take the time machine back, see some dinos from space, and you managed to otherwise not change a thing. That means in some dozens of million years, you and that machine will be sent back to exactly the same time and location again because nothing has changed. Bam, now you and that time machine are in triplicate. But, with nothing really changing, the same process will occur again and again. Does it reach a point where there's so much duplicated energy / matter that something fundamentally different has to happen? Would all those duplicate yous and time machines coalesce into a giant cosmic object that comes crashing down to the Earth like a giant asteroid, thus killing off most dinosaurs and paving the way for human evolution? Hmmm.

    numberfour002 ,

    While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don’t think it would result in exactly the same people.

    This implies that you think I was saying it would be the same people, but I actually said the exact same thing as you, just in different words: "it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now."

    With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too

    For sure, but from the timescale we're discussing, the whole of human history is literally just a tiny fraction, a blip, at the very end. And until very recently, you could even argue the vast majority of human history was almost entirely inconsequential.

    numberfour002 ,

    Personally, I don't think the technology is a failure. It's the implementation that's the pain point.

    I'm no fan of Walmart, but the local store has the lenient self checkout machines that don't make you place and leave your items in the bagging area. And there's a hand scanner for each machine. The hand scanner is pretty close to instant, so I can literally scan an entire cart full of items in under a minute (with caveats) and you don't even have to take things out of the cart to scan them (with caveats). Sometimes there are hiccups and obviously some items are sold by weight, so that'll slow things down.

    But even with all that, the implementation is the pain point because they'll only have 1 person running the machines, so if they have to run off to help a customer or multiple people need help at the same time, you just have to wait. Also, the particular store I go to shuts down half the machines ridiculously early in the evening. When the machines break, they stay broken for weeks or months. And they have some kind of ridiculous system where some of the machines are cash-only, some are card-only, but the majority will accept either -- this adds to a lot of inefficiency because a lot of customers don't know which machines are which and if you mess up and pick the wrong one then things get tied up while you wait for a cashier to come and transfer you over to a different one so you can pay.

    The other big factor is that customers were trained on the old shitty style self checkouts where you had to scan each item one at a time, place it in the bagging area, leave it there until you pay, and if so much as a speck of dust landed in the bagging area or a piece of onion skin fell off, it would freeze up. So even with the new lenient hand scanners, people still do it the old and slow way.

    numberfour002 ,

    In the USA at least, any time you buy alcohol, tobacco, or any number of other random things that the retailer decides to flag as requiring ID, then you'll need assistance from a cashier. Random things include razor blades, compressed air, some herbal supplements, spray paint, butane torches, or any of dozens of other items. Any time you accidentally scan something twice, you'll need a cashier's assistance. Any time something rings up the wrong price or any time the UPC doesn't scan, you'll need a cashier's assistance. Also, if you're buying gift cards, you may need a cashier's assistance.

    Also, different stores have different machines and different machines work better than others. Many places have ridiculously sensitive machines that freeze up if so much as a fruit fly farts on it. Some places use "AI cameras" to detect theft, which basically the algorithm for that seems to be "If (customer scanned something OR customer didn't scan something) then (theft, so freeze and call cashier for assistance)".

    So, the frequency is highly variable. For some stores, I can usually manage to get by with almost never needing assistance. For others, it's practically every visit.

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