Amen, can’t fix everything or one.

Wouldn’t it be the plot twist of the Millenium if the supreme court actually considers Trump disqualified under the 14th amendment? The chaos that would ensue is just unimaginable.

As a sales guy myself by training and tech sales by profession that sounds very much like there are some very fucked incentive structures at play that need to be addressed. If they’re only monitored on number of deals closed then you get shit like that trying to meet targets and get the bonus that is extremely standard in the sales profession and account for a large share of the yearly salary. If they’re measured on profitability then you wouldn’t see that, they’d drop stingy clients themselves for wasting their time. Another solution I’ve seen is having a larger bonus for customer satisfaction and renewals / growing the contract but that only really works out if your sales also doubles as account managers.

Yeah my take away there is if that’s the tech level of your sales guys you need to have a tech sales role and a strict ban on the pure sales people even attempting talking tech. Sales should be talking business and business needs that the solution can adress.

Yeah exactly, if they have decent APIs or you can scissor out the content via iframes or something. Not really a web developer so I probably ain’t makin’ sense.

Doesn’t sound like it’s own “product” to be honest. I’d probably look at an alternative presentation layer that can present what’s in Jellyfin and also supports being the presentation layer for the top solutions for books, comics etc. If nothing like that exists I think there are people that would be interested in a unified media presenter. It doesn’t even need to actually play the media, just link to it.

Valid point. Unlike other billionaires with public companies connected to them Taylor Swift’s net worth is her value up until this point, what she has generated. There is no pricing in of future potential like what made the Tesla and Nvidia stock absolutely explode (and by that their respective stakeholders net worth). I hadn’t thought of that.

Sure, if we’re talking work as in compensation per hour. But we aren’t here. She’s a product (as in Taylor Swift the artist is, not Taylor Swift the person naturally) and thus can be sold in quantities only limited by the amount of people on our planet that can afford to buy her music/merch/tickets etc. For me as a consultant to make a billion just isn’t possible, but if I start a company selling something which isn’t limited like the amount of hours in a day then… Yeah no, I don’t have it in me to become a billionaire. But you get the picture I hope.

To hammer it home, she’s globally recognizeable as I’d say the most famous active musician right now. And she has been in the top 10 for a long while. That kind of fame begets net worth faster than just about any CEO gig ever will.

The only surprising thing here really is that Swift isn’t worth substantially more. She’s been the top pop music act for a decade now and has been uncommonly business savvy so I was really expecting that figure to be at least the double.

“pervasive, useful and inspirational”

Please provide some examples because I’ve obviously missed a lot of actually good Voice / Audio based UIs. All I’ve seen are incessant attempts to market something as the future that in reality at best is mildly helpful, normally annoying and forces you to resort to other interfaces, like your phone, and at worst are glaring privacy and security issues.

Every friend I have that buy into stuff like the Google “smart” speakers, Amazon Alexa etc are initially wowed and then it’s relegated to playing music and some small task, nothing like they revolution they envisioned and in general just plain worse than a normal GUI.

What’s even worse is that I feel it’s regressing. Google Assistant in particular is worse now than 2 years ago, I blame this on too many features being added and they make it hard for the assistant to make a good guess of which tool/feature to use. I guess that is why they cleaned some out recently.

And if you think I’m just some one shitting on stuff that I personally don’t enjoy then please know I’ve tinkered with this stuff extensively. I built my own personal voice based assistant that I integrated with Home Assistant to control lights, lock the door and check the humidity in the lizard terrarium. It’s a tricky problem and in the end I came to the realization that even if I got it “perfect” for me it still wouldn’t ever be all that useful. One thing I did that very few do is build a more conversational usage model. Typical interaction:

Me: Snips? Snips: Yes? Me: Can you turn the lights to 50% Snips: Absolutely, all lights or just one room? Me: Just the livingroom Snips: Done, anything else?

Thing is that it will always work poorly in a situation with multiple people around talking. It will always be a bit awkward talking to something incorporeal. And it will always be a computer there in the other end. Conversation and the medium of voice was built and designed for human interaction and a computer can’t provide that. A conversation is so extremely based on context and it becomes hard and forced to always be mindful to provide the full context. And while you can add tech to help, like say presence sensors to note that you are in the living room and thus ask “just in the living room, all lights or some other room?” Or just assume, its still not going to give us a speaking partner like Jarvis for a very, very long time. And even then I wonder what the point would be? By the time we have AI at that level, being able to do proper inference to deduce context and intent, we’re going to have neural interfaces and that is VASTLY more efficient and interesting. To have access to information directly in your thoughts and to control and interact with your environment in a completely seemless manner. I just don’t see Voice UI as more than a stepping stone with very little intrinsic value outside academia and challenging conventions in the UI space.

Excuse me but ‘voice UI’ is a hell of a lot more retro futuristic than XR. That shit has been around in sci-fi for 60+ years easy and in real life for decades at this point and is still absolutely horrible to use for just about anything more complex than setting a timer and adding things to a list.

NFC for security related things relies on certificates that belong to Google. GrapheneOS / LineageOS etc could make their own and put forward to the banks/credit card companies/car companies etc but the likelihood that they’d get them signed and approved is basically nil.

Pretty much the same core issue that means you can’t run streaming services at 4K outside mainstream devices like Chromecast or Nvidia Shield etc. You can’t make it work on a HTPC or a cheap Android TV stick from AliExpress, because it lacks the certificates to authenticate to Netflix etc. As well as HDCP and other DRM which is needed.

Hmm. Superman and Spiderman do have a catalog of stories in which they’ve got relationships. Unsure about Batman though.

I agree that the uncle should be giving cash, the parents and grandparents absolutely shouldn’t.

As for your other example I assume you know he likes that “Sword & Sandals” esthetic and hard cash as opposed to a Venmo and a card (which is more convenient but even less personal). Basically you took an impresonal gift of cash and made it caring by adapting it to the recipient. Which proves my point.

I don’t think we really disagree here, we’re just talking past each other a little bit.

Sure, but gift giving is supposed to be about showing that you care and cash generally is a poor vehicle for that. Buying a plushie of their favorite YouTuber that they can’t shut up about proves that you do listen even though you often say “that’s great honey but can you please put on your shoes so we can get to school on time today?” while they’re mid sentence.

The waste really comes from the gifts that target the age group (and gender and other demographic attributes) but not the individual. My son got an electric race track that he’ll use max two times more before it will end up in storage and forgotten, because the uncle that gave it knows his age and that he’s a boy and little outside of that because he’s not engaged and part of his life. He just happened to visit on Christmas this year.

Well thats just not true. His approval rating is very low for sure, but Trump has got him beat in that metric, he had substantially worse ratings. Still Biden might end with worse approval average if he continues downward in approval ratings, and that’s kinda impressive since Biden hasn’t been doing egregiously corrupt and stupid shit basically daily like Trump did. Golfing at his own resort. Putting his kids into government positions. Firing staff on grounds of “loyalty” like some mob boss. Etc etc. Biden hasn’t even been impeached, let alone twice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating

… Have we seen them in the same room?

I feel like a tween with embarrassing parents when it comes to the human race. “I’m not with them!!!” Is what I’ll scream when the aliens come…

I haven’t seen that in stores or online but also haven’t looked. Should be possible to make i feel with the evolution of bioplastics.

An alternative is paper lanterns. I’ve seen versions that at least claim they’re safe in that they can’t start a forest fire. With the Chinese New Year coming up they should be easy to find.

Sounds like the average lemming! One of us!