TIL my natural writing style has distinctly feminine traits.

You can see some case study examples on their consulting website.

Cubicles are terrible until your office gets converted into an open concept, and then they seem amazing. Home office is best though.

It doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. We can attack the problem from multiple sides, since there’s isn’t a silver bullet. New housing absolutely has to be part of it, but obviously it’s not super helpful if the new stock isn’t affordable or practical for average people.

Counterproductive regulations (restrictive zoning, vetocracy setups) have prevented environmentally sensible and affordable housing from being added in sufficient quantities in most of the US for a long time. We have more people living in smaller households than we used to; it just doesn’t math without adding new stock.

Loblaw’s and their subsidiaries. The brand is literally called No Name (Sans Nom). It always gave me a chuckle when I lived in Canada.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

And he never shut up about how embarrassing Biden apparently was.

If one of my friends showed me a collection of hats with their name on it, I would pull them aside and ask if they have considered getting professional help.

I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.

The Nauru article linked also points out that the large amount of mining has done away with most of what little arable land there was, making traditional garden culture impractical at scale. So, they sort of have to be dependent on foreign food imports, largely the kind you mention.

An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.

It seems as depressing as you’d think.

Yep.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

There is a reason that as long as Hellfire Citadel has existed, the first Google auto complete suggestion is “Hellfire Citadel entrance.”

What is interesting is how non-vocal many of these “concerned citizens” are when the criminal justice system does the same thing to normal people. It is why I have a difficult time believing the concern is really about justice and due process in many cases.

Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character… and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won’t negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it’s attracting a bad crowd, and there’s too many people around now.

There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.

It also speeds up the games a bit. I simply do not have the time as a full adult to sink 10+ hours into a single game. I have actually finished every game of Civ 7 I’ve played so far, which has never happened with any prior Civ installments at my current playtime.

He is from the Cincinnati area, which borders Kentucky, and he spent some of his youth in Kentucky. Not a proper southerner, but from the gradient where North becomes South.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.