Rhaedas

We already knew this before, I think we were just hoping that it would bounce back some or we’d stop doing what we do. A fool’s hope.

There is a LLaVA model, as well as a version fine tuned with LLaMA3, Mistral, or phi3. Go to Ollama.com and search for “llava” under models.

I don’t like extra dots simply because pattern matching might get weird down the road. Keep dots for extension type and use Pascal to make it easier to read multiple words. Flatcase only if it’s short or I’m lazy for a temp file.

The rain one is a subtle “Look, it could be worse. Stay positive. You aren’t dead yet.”

Living paycheck to paycheck.

Kiosks of any sort can vary, from fast food to grocery to other types. There are some that work well and make self service far faster and easier, and others that routinely have issues. I’ve never used McD’s, but I have used Sheetz a lot before and it flows very well both in displaying the options as well as suggestive selling that isn’t in your face and disruptive. As for groceries, Publix has always been perfect for me, while some others not as much. Walmart’s is 50/50 on if it will work okay or have some issue.

I wonder if there’s a list of what manufacturer supplies what kiosks and a correlation can be made.

Outside of the ordering, McDs has never been the best, but as they’ve dropped in quality to drive profits and still meet the demand that persists regardless, so have others. My favorite used to be Burger King in the 90s, but I will go to McD instead of stepping foot in a BK at this point, that’s how bad they are.

And the stupid thing is, none of them are doing anything much different. The quality doesn’t have to be this low in food and service. I can only assume the bottom line is greater if they sacrifice everything needed to keep standards up and maintain just enough to keep a minimum demand flowing.

Yes, there is a low unemployment number. As with the rest, you haven’t validated that it’s a good measure of the current state of things. It’s arguably never been.

Yes, definitely increased some. Where’s the rest of the data, such as part time or unemployed, or even population growth? Like I said, a single number means not so much without context. But it’s an impressive graph.

Curious what shift there has been in full time/part time numbers. Full time wages going up is great for those who are experiencing it, but if there are less actual full timers, is that an improvement?

The art of a good statistician is to make sure what their numbers are saying is an actual reflection of reality. I’m not saying this graph is falsified, I don’t know. But numbers can be made to say anything. I learned this years ago in arguments about what “unemployment” meant. It’s much more complex than a single number, but a single number is used in the media because it’s easier to paint the picture wanted.

The issue isn’t the prices. It’s that the prices go up but income doesn’t. Get out the pitchforks, but let’s go after the real villains.

A wizard should know better.

Jump all over Boeing when it makes sense, but this sounds like a single aircraft or crew issue if it was noted that lots of the same type of plane had been taking off correctly.

Wages not keeping in step with inflation is exactly why everything seems so expensive. $30k of today’s money is the equivalent of less than $10k in the 80’s, and cars were more than $10K then except for a few that ended up being examples of “you get what you pay for”.

I should probably state that as “wage increases being suppressed”.

The caveat of finding “better” methods is that it excuses continuing or expanding the things we do that are the core problems of rapid growth, consumption, and a throwaway society. And like you said, they have their own issues that might become problematic with growth in that process. Not to say that we shouldn’t try to improve what we can, just a point that being better than the worst way to do things isn’t all that great either.

The word “sustainable” in the title is one of those greenwashing terms to sell a product and keep the status quo of business as usual. As the report shows.

The next versions will have the ability to adjust to not only context of the requests and results, but the human’s reactions and change the little nuances accordingly. That it sounds like a highly cheerful woman in real time to the prompts and much less of a robot is a big step. Add to that the latest visuals we’ve seen of real time generation of video faces that are extremely close. There may not be AGI there and the LLMs may get a lot of stuff wrong, but the presentation is going to fool more and more people at this rate.

And if we stumble upon AGI with all that in place, Asimov help us.

Guess no one at Microsoft realized people use computers differently and more options is always better than one. Or they intended to have the option and either forgot to include it or it was buggy. Either way it was #2 on my “how do you disable this” list, and I had to deal with it for a while. I get how grouping can be good for some things, but when you want to be able to bounce between various windows and some happen to use the same app, it was a pain.

Even the small things. When work upgraded to Win11 overnight and I logged into the Start being in the middle, I almost lost it. Yes, I could fix it, and a few other things, but I had a moment.

Emphasis on “plastic is often not”. Only PET (#1 on the symbol) can truly be recycled into new material, and usually it’s tossed in with other materials and contaminated enough to make that not possible. There is the reusable path, where plastics are remolded into other purposes, but that’s not “really” recycling and likely ends there for that form to eventually degrade and be trashed.

So just make more things with PET and recycle better, right? I’m guessing there’s limitations on what PET can be used for given its characteristics vs. other plastics, and it is still cheaper to just get new material for new PET rather than recycle. So of course companies are going to go that route.

The interesting thing that I learned not so long ago from the YT channel Climate Town is that people see the triangle symbol with the plastic type number inside and assume it’s recyclable, since that’s the recycle symbol. But it’s not that symbol, it’s just designed similar to give that impression.