I don’t think you understand how determined the buyers are once they’ve been convinced by the scammer. I used to work for a major retailer that had signs at the register AND messages that the customer had to accept on the signature pad confirming they didn’t believe they were being scammed before going through with the purchase.

Additionally, my team was instructed to call me over any time they had a customer who they felt was being scammed to try to talk to them. Sometimes, I was successful, but other times I wasn’t. There is still one guy who goes in weekly to buy $500 of various gift cards for his overseas “girlfriend” on WhatsApp. I tried talking to him multiple times and he became increasingly angry at the conversation. I just had to accept I couldn’t help him.

Thanks for looking it up. It was a few years ago, so maybe I messed up the details along the way or the local branch manager was just being a dick to prevent a lost membership.

About time. Retro Fitness gym wanted a notarized letter from someone I know explaining why they no longer wanted the membership. Absolute insanity.

It will never be $30,000 or less. He did the same thing with the Model 3.

You really just can’t believe anything this guy says regarding his products.

Safari. Use DDG in browser, but primarily use Perplexity for searches via its app.

I’m surprised more brands aren’t simply defaulting to Threads. You still see links to their Xitter profile instead of Threads.

I prefer Mastodon, myself, but I get why major brands would prefer a centralized network.

Nicholas Cage is about to have access to that Travolta fortune.

I mean is this stuff even really AI? It has no awareness of what it’s saying. It’s simply calculating the most probable next word in a typical sentence and spewing it out. I’m not sure this is the tech that will decide humanity is unnecessary.

It’s just rebranded machine learning, IMO.

That’s odd. Were you using Pro? I find pro to be less reliable, oddly enough. I always check the citations which is why I like their approach.

Read this a week or so ago and it’s a fantastic summarization of the core problem. I almost never use Google search anymore. I go between DuckDuckGo and Perplexity.

I have experience on the reseller side of the electronics business. I will tell you that most big resellers (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc) will do more in situations like this than the actual companies themselves. I’ve seen it a lot. Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but I’ve also read a ton of complaints over the years on Reddit of similar situations.

These first party manufacturers are manufacturers first and retail shops second (or third) so they put less effort on that side.

Never, and I repeat NEVER, buy directly from most manufacturers. For whatever reason, their customer service on the consumer purchase side always seems to suck. Buy from authorized resellers who care more about the relationship with their customers.

We called this the “swoop and poop” in a previous job of mine. Definitely not something encouraged or enjoyed.

Everyone’s experience and usage is different, but I have a base M2 MacBook Air with 8gb of RAM and besides web browsing, streaming/air playing some videos, and typing some documents, I don’t do much else. I never feel the need for more RAM.

You can also use it to start a load while you’re at work when you didn’t want your clothes sitting after washing all day. True, there’s old school delay functions but this gives a little more control.

Not saying it’s worth it, but a feature I haven’t seen anyone else mention.

AdGuard works well.

For Best Buy "Fiscal ‘24’ is February 2023 to January 2024

Fiscal '25 is February 2024 to January 2025.

It’s dumb, I know.

The irony of their efforts is that it only proved to show that they could easily begin influencing users which is the key argument being used against them.

I’m still not sure what my feelings on the subject are. I don’t use the app myself, but besides its connection to a company in China and, therefore, the Chinese government, it seems to do the same exact tracking and algorithm manipulating that every other social network does.

That is an absurdly large QR code. I recently switched to MacOS (I know Linux exists and it’s not for me) so I’m glad I’m away from this kind of nonsense.

Exact same thought I had lol